Role of the Body
In my view, the body’s perceptive capacities through our five senses - hearing, seeing, smell, touch, and taste - and our proprioceptive sense of where we are in space are fundamental to knowing where we are and what we need.
Becoming alert to our postural patterns and the sensory flows in allows us to become aware of how we are either present in our lives or compromised in being here.
Have you had the experience of feeling spaced out? Floaty? Ungrounded? Or the experience of being wound up and bracing against life?
As infants, our body is the first line of inquiry into exploring our world through suckling, touching, reaching, pulling, pushing, rolling, falling, rising. It is also the first arena of developing defenses against pain. Our earliest instinct to limit our perception of external influences is to tense, brace, and posturally close off against them. Even the fetus in the womb can be observed to brace against a loud noise.
As highly sensitive beings, our bodies record or encode memories of events within tension that’s meant to protect us against harsh and threatening experiences. By learning to listen to what the body is saying, we can delve beneath adaptive patterns, tend to the original pain, and resolve it.
The body never lies. It doesn’t know how to.
Through my special training in Sensori-Motor Psychotherapy, together we become mindful of the body’s patterns, rhythms and sensory flows. This new awareness is essential to helping my clients shift away from unconscious defensive adaptations and become capable of new choices for action.
