I offered her a somatic session when she was telling me that she was having a hard time connecting to her artwork. She had been in a bad accident less than a year before and was still working through all of the physical and emotional impacts that the accident had.

“Sure” she said softly but I could hear a little resistance in her voice. We spoke through the resistance and she landed in a place where she felt very open to having a session. 

Energy work can be subtle and it can feel hard to track the impact of having energy work done. One of the things that I had recently been focused on was tracking outcomes with clients, so that I could understand how effective the sessions were and so could my clients. We spoke through what she was hoping for out of the session. She wanted to paint again and feel connected to her paintings, she didn’t want to feel space between her energy and the energy of the canvas that she was painting. I asked about other things that were happening and she mentioned that since the accident she had struggled with constipation and while she didn’t voice that she wanted to work on the constipation I decided that I would track that also because it had only started after the accident. 

During our somatic session she was able to see that her body was holding onto a fear of dying. This made complete sense to me given the magnitude of her accident. As she released the survival energy that she had been holding in her nervous system from the accident I was able to watch her physical posture shift and move out of protection and into surrender. 

I checked in with her the day after our session and she said that she was back at the easel painting and feeling good. Painting is a core part of WHO she is, it isn’t WHAT she does, it is WHO she is, so feeling disconnected from painting meant that she felt disconnected from herself and hearing that she felt more connected to painting also meant that she felt more connected to herself. I truly love this woman deeply and love getting to observe her in her healing journey, appreciating intensely that she allowed me a front row seat and trusted me to sit there with her.

Almost 2 weeks later, I connected with her again and she told me that she had been able to move her bowels everyday since our session which hadn’t happened since before her accident. 

“Well, shit” I thought to myself, isn’t that awesome!