I stared through the zoom screen at her and recognized that I was hyperfocused on her body posture and everything that her body was telling me. I was listening to her words but my awareness kept drifting to her body and her body was telling a wildly different story than her words. Her words were focused on empowerment and expansion yet her body was telling a story of disempowerment and protection. Her torso was rotated away from me. Her right hand was gently holding her neck and her eyes darted from one place to another. When she paused from telling me about her situation I gently brought her awareness to her body posture and how protective it was. She immediately dropped her hand from her neck, faced forward and opened her eyes wide before I could even finish pointing it out.
I had her re-enter the body posture that she was in and to bring her own awareness there. We began to explore what her body was doing and why it was doing it. As she allowed her body to do what it wanted to do, which was protection, she began to access her emotions and told me that she actually felt really unsafe in the situation that she had been describing. We gently moved into emotions and then body sensations and simply by bringing her awareness and attention through these different channels she had a huge release of stuck energy.
As she found safety inside of herself and her nervous system came back into a regulated state she looked up softly and then asked, “what just happened”.
We went on to talk about somatic work and why it is so impactful for releasing stuck energy. I explained that she had been stuck in her mind and when I brought her awareness to her body posture and she allowed her body to express itself that it allowed her to move the energy from mind to body where she was able to release it. She had been stuck in a loop in mind and the shift in awareness allowed the energy to move and be released naturally.
A couple of days later, she text me to tell me that the release of energy had changed everything. The old story, that she didn’t even realize that she was telling herself, had been holding her back in countless ways.The release of that story had allowed her access into a deeper place inside of herself and that she had observed her behavior changing, the way that she was speaking to herself, the way that she was walking across the room, the way that she was holding herself when she met someone new, the food choices that she had been making, her ability to set and hold a boundary, everything changed. I read her text multiple times and smiled because I had had a similar experience with somatic work myself and knew just how much freedom she was sitting in.