Transcript
Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hey, Brian, you’re looking pretty good for 40.
Brian
I am looking good for 40.
Ani
Happy 40th episode birthday.
Brian
Exactly, yeah. We’ve hit middle age.
Ani
We have. Thanks for sticking with us through 40. Middle age is treating me pretty good so far. It’s good to see you. You, too. How are you? Good. Excellent. Welcome to episode 40. Hey, just a shout out, since we’re talking about 40 episodes, for everybody who has rated and reviewed and sent us messages and said, “Thank you”. We have people who I know are listening every week and waking up on Thursday morning is going, “It’s podcast day. How exciting.” And that’s super exciting for us. It is great. So thank you so much for being a part of the Somatic Coaching Academy community and listening along and sharing your thoughts, insights, and wisdom with us. It’s been super fun so far. So what are we talking about today, Brian?
Brian
We’re talking about today, a question I get a little bit, and I’m sure you get a little bit more from folks. How exactly do I talk to my family and friends about somatic coaching?
Ani
We actually did a bunch of that this week. We had a family gathering, and there was a lot of extended family in town, and everybody wants to know what we’re up to, and not everybody understands what we’re up to. So there was some of that. Yeah.
Brian
They’re like, What do you do? And how do you do that? Every question went to a deeper question. I know a lot of people who study with us or want to study with us ask that question. They’re like, Well, how do I talk about this? How do I, I’m going to put air quotes here around, Convince people, and we’re like, No, we don’t convince people. That’s not what we’re trying to do. But I think the natural inclination is that people who enter into learning processes around somatic coaching are really excited about it. They’re like, Oh, my God, I found it. I finally found something that really is helpful and amazing. I’m excited about it, and we just want to just share about it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and then other people haven’t learned about it yet. They feel overwhelming, disorganized, the way we’re talking about it because we’re so excited about it.
Ani
Yeah. It also can bring up all of our stuff, right? About how we’re being perceived and what people are going to think of us. It can give us just the right stuff to work through using our somatic coaching tool set.
Brian
Just give me an idea for another podcast. Oh, good.
Ani
That’s great. Go ahead and write that one down. I think you really hit on something. The thing is that I hear this all the time with somatic work, whether it’s people who have studied with us or whether it’s people who have done other somatic kinds of work. Out there, somatic work is so profound in that it helps people to create the rapid and sustainable changes that they’re really looking for. It helps them to transform long-standing issues that have been so challenging, and it isn’t until they find the somatic work that something actually helps them to transform in a sustainable way. And so that is so profoundly awesome for the individual that we do want to share. I remember for myself, the very first time back, way before we were 40, way, way, way a long time ago, I found out about energy medicine before there was a thing called somatic coaching, actually. One of the roots of the somatic coaching tree is energy medicine. When I found out about energy medicine and it worked for me and I had my own personal transformation, I did actually say that to myself. This was so profound that I have to share it with other people.
Ani
It felt like a calling. It felt like a purpose. It felt like a mission. And then what can happen is that we had this inner, beautiful, awesome. What a great word, actually, for somatic transformation. Somatic transformation. And then we go to say something out loud to people, and we just go (vomit)
Brian
Because it’s Even going through a process like that, you’re still like, What just happened? It’s ineffable. It’s ineffable. Yeah, there’s not a great way to actually explain it. No.
Ani
And that’s cool, because it is ineffable. When we talk about somatic transformation, we are transforming things from before we were verbal also. So I think we have to remember that because we’re transforming things from before we were verbal. We’re transforming things that have been lineage patterns that didn’t even start with us that we might not even be able to explain, really. Just that fact, I think, invites a pause to be like, whoa, what happened in here might not actually translate out to there in a really easy to understand way. I actually just got an email today from somebody who was asking… One of our students is creating a landing page for their website, and they were asking me to look it over and see what I thought. And they were saying in there like, Am I explaining this right? And then I said the thing that we say to our students, which is really talk to people about what they’re experiencing and what results they want to see in their life rather than trying to explain things to people, really actually use some of those coaching skills to ask great questions and partner with somebody rather than feeling like we have to explain ourselves.
Brian
Yeah. And that is the challenging thing right now, because in order to explain and talk about somatic coaching, exactly as you pointed out, it’s so important to understand the context and the framework of the person we’re talking to, what they already know about, what is already familiar to them, and then understanding how to mesh the idea of somatic practices, coaching, work. However, maybe we need to do a whole podcast on that, too, by the way. It’s like a whole just glossary podcast.
Ani
Oh, that sounds like you would really love that.
Brian
It’s like, well, what’s the difference in this and this? Why that and that? It’s just a… Because that’s where things also can get lost, too. What’s the difference in this and this one? What’s the difference in this and this one? What’s that? Yeah, the semantics. But if you understand where someone else is coming from, you can more easily map the somatic practices we’re coaching onto what they already understand.
Ani
Can we talk about the neuroscience around that for a quick second? Because this is how people think. We were talking about this a few episodes about comparison and what our brains do, actually, when we’re listening to information, our brains are taking in all of the information and putting it into… I like to think of like a filing cabinet. So we’re putting the information that we’re receiving into files in our filing cabinet. And if it doesn’t match a file in our filing cabinet, we’re not going to be like, Oh, let’s start a new file. That’s not how our nervous system works. It’s going to find the file we think is closest to it. Now, I don’t see this happening all that often anymore. But 10, 15 years ago, the file that many people would find in their In the nervous system, as soon as people would talk about anything related to somatic coaching, energy, medicine, or whatever, many people would find the woo-woo weird things I don’t want to talk about file. Listen, I don’t find that happening very often anymore. Most of the time, people are finding some kind of file in their nervous system filing cabinet around holistic something or other because it’s so popular.
Brian
Yeah. So we’re getting closer, right? We’re getting closer because now someone might lump it in the yoga file. And whereas that still isn’t accurate, completely accurate, it’s closer. It’s totally closer. It’s getting closer. It doesn’t end up in some miscellaneous file somewhere that becomes irrelevant or noncontextual things.
Ani
And I really don’t find people are putting it in the weird file very much at all, whereas that really did used to happen 15, 20 years ago or so.
Brian
Yeah, even in companies, right? Even in companies are embracing more now, even morning breath practices in to what they’re doing, stretching breaks, mindfulness. Wellness. Yeah, wellness stuff that they’re inviting more of those things in where 10, 15 years ago, that was a really hard sell in organizations. And now organizations are seeing the grand importance of all of it from the massive burnout rates we’re experiencing still post-pandemic that are happening. The whole new world that we’re really living in around how we think about work, how we perceive work, our capacities for work, our capacities to be pulled in so many different directions because of technology, all those sorts of things. So it’s really a cool thing to see companies more broadly embracing just, there’s another file, wellness file practices into their companies.
Ani
And how we think about ourselves and human beings and being a human being. Like the conversation about having a heart versus not just being brain-focused is a conversation that almost everybody’s having nowadays. And so, oh, we’re talking about maybe following the heart. I’ve heard about that. I see that on Instagram posts. So that right there is meeting people where they’re at so they can start to put the conversation into a filing cabinet. First of all, I’m not even concerned so much about putting it in a filing cabinet that’s relevant because they’ll start to file it around as you have a conversation. But how do you meet somebody as you’re starting the conversation so that they’re not slamming the filing cabinets shut so that they want to continue the conversation.
Brian
Exactly. And it really happens well through questions, really asking about the person, Wow, so well, have you heard of this? Or does this make sense to you?
Ani
Have you ever experienced this or that thing?
Brian
Have you ever experienced something? Yeah, that’s one of my favorite ones. The other thing about somatic coaching, or let’s just use the word somatic or somatics in a broad sense for a second. It’s interesting when someone says, Oh, I do somatics. It’s I do surgery. Very broad category. Then your next question is on what? What time? Are you a brain surgeon or are you a toenail surgeon? I mean, there’s two different… All surgeons, highly trained, heavily respected but there’s differences between what you’re having done, thing, right? Yeah. And so it’s a big category. So we have to understand that even within somatic coaching, there are levels of work within somatic coaching that start to get more complex, which is why it’s sometimes difficult to talk about these things.
Ani
We need to also address the fact that, just like you were saying about somatics, the coaching file in the filing cabinet. People have had all kinds of experience with that word. And so there are some people who are going to be like, Oh, coaching. I know what that is. That’s really helped me or my friend or this or that. You’re also going to have the people who are like, Oh, coaching. Yeah, I’ve heard of that. Everybody and their brothers is a coach, and they think it’s less than profession. There are those people who are going to think that coaching isn’t a real profession. So as soon as you start using the word somatic, like you said, that’s a thing. As soon as you use the word coaching, that’s a whole thing. And there are just like you were talking about with somatics, what a huge range in terms of coaching. Yeah.
Brian
The term somatics, actually, if you can just do a real quick plug here, was first coined by Thomas Hannah, who was a surgeon, a doctor in the ’80s who wrote a book called Somatics, about a body-mind connections and how our physiology, especially our neuromuscular physiology, is affected by our attitudes, our perceptions, our beliefs. It’s a really fantastic book. It’s a bit antiquated now because it’s a long time since then, but it’s still like a classic staple read around the whole idea of that word somatics. There’s been a lot of branching off since then to somatic coaching, different somatic therapeutic things, different somatic ideas, techniques, all kinds of stuff.
Ani
It’s profound how much things have grown since. When you said the ’80s, I was like, That’s not that long ago, Brian. But it actually- Could have been the late ’70s.
Brian
It’s somewhere I actually can go look. If you want to wait, I can go look in my office and grab the book and tell you exactly.
Ani
I don’t really mind that much. Or you might need to put an- put something -end note for the listeners who are dying to know. Great book, though. But there’s so much that the whole world of somatics has just broken open in the past, whatever many years that is.
Brian
Can I share a basic framework of the levels I like to describe or talk about with somatic coaching in particular? Sure. I like to use the car analogy, not because as humans, we’re machines at all. I don’t think actually the analogy that humans (and machines) are cars is actually a good analogy, but it puts us on a map someplace. If it gives us closer to understanding, then we’ll go ahead and use it.
Ani
It’s a great metaphor.
Brian
Yeah, it’s a great metaphor, but not wholly accurate for my taste. But anyway, I just want to let you know that. Okay. All right. The first level, when we think about if you start up your car, start up your car in the morning, and imagine if you got to start up your car and the engine is just like, the RPMs are revving. Let’s say you your car and resting RPMs are 1,200 or something. I really don’t know. I’m not a car guy, so I’m just going to put the number out there. But let’s say you get in and you turn on, it’s 5,000 RPMs revving in your car. Now, that would get your attention, right? You’d probably think “Something’s not right here. Should I drive this car? Maybe if I have an important enough thing to go to, I think I’ll probably drive it. But is it going to break down? Is it going to explode? What’s going to happen?” Now, the other thing you do is get into your car and it could barely start, and you go with your RPMs, and they’re like, five, or something like that. That’s a problem, too.
Brian
When I think about somatic coaching, that’s the first level of working with people is actually helping them to regulate their own nervous system. Like if you get into your car and it’s either revving up really high, it’s probably not going to work very long or very well, or it’s under-revving, that’s not going to work very long. We want to get into our car and turn it on and have it revving at the perfect amount and an optimal window of rev in order for us to go ahead and have a functional or productive day. That’s like a baseline need for that to happen. One of the things that we do with somatic coaching and practices and those types of things is actually help people learn to regulate their nervous system so that on a daily basis, they’re in that optimal zone of RPMs in your metabolism, in your body, because we all know what it feels like to be rev too high, and that usually isn’t productive to have a successful day. We all know what it’s like to feel under-energized, and that also is not productive. I think we can all probably agree that we like and would prefer and feel the best and enjoy the most life when we are in an optimal zone of revving.
Brian
That’s the basic line, the basic first step that I used to describe.
Ani
That reminds me of a technique we used to use in occupational therapy. When I was doing occupational therapy with kids, there was a program called What’s Your Engine Speed? We would teach kids about nervous system regulation exactly like that so that they could, like a car, see if they were super revved up or if they were too low so that we could help them to regulate a just right engine speed. So it was actually a fantastic… It was such a great program, and kids understood it really easily. Love it. Yeah, it was really good.
Brian
Yeah, it was great. And nowadays, there’s more causes and reasons for nervous system dysregulation than ever before. Ever before. Phones and computers all the time. Our connectedness. Our connectivity, financial stress, and relationship stuff. It just keeps compounding. Life doesn’t seem to be getting simpler from a human perspective. We just keep making it more complicated because everything we had 100 years ago, relationships and work, and those things are still there, and now we’re just keeping more stuff on there. There’s all kinds of reasons to become more naturally dysregulated now. We’re in nature less. Most people are spending less time in nature, which is naturally regulating, by the way. We’re spending a lot of times indoors under artificial light, looking at screens, whacking away on computers. Our downtime happens to be phones, which create more dysregulation.
Ani
We’re sitting too much. We don’t have the eye contact or eye gaze stuff going on that we need to, the sounds that we’re hearing. Exactly. Our senses are bombarded quite a bit. Oh, my gosh. I was at the gas station this morning getting gas amazingly enough. And there was one of those TV screens that comes on. Oh, right on the gas pump. Yeah, right on the gas pump. Yeah. And we just had this a few days off of family and out in nature and the lake and stuff like that. I was like, why is there a television at the gas pump? The stimulation is all over the place. All the crazy.
Brian
So we might wonder, Well, why do we need this now all of a sudden? Well, this is why. We used to have natural periods and natural cycles of auto regulation that we would experience. Now, that’s not really happening anymore. We need to be more conscious of it. So somatic coaches help people on a primary level, help them make sure their engine is idling at the right speed. Yeah.
Ani
So it could be like, somatic coaches help people regulate their nervous systems. Have you ever felt just like your car, like you’re revving too hot or like you just can’t get it started? Have you ever felt?
Brian
Have you ever felt like? So there you go. So that’s how you start to talk about it, too. It’s like, Oh, yeah, I totally get that. Okay, so do you have a problem with that? Oh, my God, I do. Well, I can help you with that. That’s what we do. Now, if people are like, Oh, yeah, I totally have that. I have some tools to help myself be leveled with my nervous system. I’m okay with the idling part. And the The next question would be- Well, hang on just a second before you say that.
Ani
What we’re talking about here is somatic practices, because the somatic practices are one of the key things that help people to regulate their nervous system and get that engine speed, correct? It’s really a foundational aspect.
Brian
Exactly. It’s a core centering practices is what we teach people to help them keep that well-tuned spark plug’s clean, clean gas, all the stuff in their system going along. That’s the core center.
Ani
That’s what we’re doing in our somatic practices program.
Brian
The next level is once someone has an idling engine, at least the way I think about it, is to then learn how to actually shift the car into gear. You have basically reverse and forward. There are different gears and forward, but let’s just say for now, it’s just forward, reverse, or neutral.
Ani
Remember the stick shift?
Brian
Yeah, I love the stick shift.
Ani
I love the stick shift, too. You can actually choose your gear.
Brian
You can actually choose your adventure. Yeah, that was the best. Now they’re hard to come by. They are. Anyway, so you have to consciously learn how to shift your car. A deeper level of somatic coaching teaches people how to consciously shift their physiology. They’re idling, great, you can idle, but can you consciously shift in the forward rather than the environment stimulating that shift? Oftentimes, it’s like the way we get in the forward was like looking at our big stack of things we have to do, or there’s an emergency, or we have to respond to a call. And so now, if we’re responding to the environment in order to shift ourselves in the gear, we’re at big risk for dysregulation.
Ani
Well, you’re actually talking about the difference between responding and reacting, right? Because we hear that all the time, respond rather than react. But most people, most of the time, are not. They’re reacting to their external. And so what you’re talking about is that being able to respond idea. Yeah.
Brian
And even go a little further of actually learning how to plan. So in other words, if I’m planning my day, because there’s the thing where we talk about – You only have so many hours in a day. Let’s say you’re awake for what is it, 16 hours a day? If you sleep eight, does that math add up? Something like that? Yeah. Then if you don’t plan what’s going to go into those 16 hours, someone else will plan what goes in those 16 hours. And then you’ll be doing what somebody else wants you to do for 16 hours rather than what you want to do for 16 hours. So I’m actually not only about reacting or responding, which is perfectly accurate what you’re saying, but it’s also about planning. It’s like, I can plan when I’m going to be going to forward. I can plan when I’m going to shift in neutral. I can plan when we’re going into reverse. And I can plan it and actually consciously – shift my physiology shift my own blood pressure, shift my own heart rate, shift my own breath capacity, shift my own digestive function to go forward, neutral, reverse, based on what I have planned, not what other people have planned for me.
Ani
So this isn’t just basically calming down or speeding myself up.
Brian
No. Exactly. So that’s the first step. First step is going back to neutral. It’s a very generalized way that I just have to get my idle working. So once you’re idling, now it’s Can I consciously shift my own physiology? That’s the next, like the deeper, the next step down. Because when you could consciously shift your physiology, now you have so much more command over your life and over the environment around you and over communicating through relationships and those sorts of things.
Ani
Yeah, your emotions, how you act, how you feel, what you think.
Brian
Yeah. That’s the next level. Then the we go deeper. It goes deeper than that. What can somatic coaches can also actually help people learn how to drive the car. It’s not about only shifting into gear. It’s not about shift. Think about your standard transmission again. You’re not only shifting, but you’re also turning the wheel. I’m actually adapting both the energy that’s in my system and with the direction that I want to go. Those are both really, really important. If those aren’t matched up, if I’m heading for a turn, if I’m heading for a curve in the road, then I have to realize the turning of my steering wheel has to match the speed that I’m going. Otherwise, I’m going to have an accident. Now I have to learn how to actually start multitasking within my own system. It’s like if I’m going to go in and have a challenging conversation with somebody, that’s like turning the wheel towards that conversation. I also have to be able to consciously learn how to adapt my nervous system regulation to meet that particular situation, if you will. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. That goes even a layer deeper.
Brian
Every layer we go deeper in there, it requires more refinement and more expertise of working with someone to help get down in there. Because if I had a major problem with my car, my steering or my gas or my shift, I take it to a mechanic because I know nothing about cars. For people who want to be able to be really, really productive in life and really succeed at life, that requires, by the way, their metabolism to be perfectly tuned, requires them to have the capacity to understand how to shift their metabolism up or down based on the demands that they’re experiencing, and also understand where and how to turn their wheel in the direction that they want to go. That requires an expert to help you get under the hood, and that’s a somatic coach.
Ani
Yeah. And we would love to thank that there are mechanics for these things. Everybody wants to take the pill. We really do need to become our own mechanics and have somatic coaches in our… We do, right? Yeah, totally. Even when we’re working with a somatic coach, they’re really helping us to become our own mechanic.
Brian
It’s funny. I’m laughing. We had a couple of cars in our past life that were difficult, challenging, where they were spent… Remember, there was a time where we had two cars, and every other week, one was in the shop. It’s like we were always down a car because there was one in the shop. I swear I would take it in, and I’d be to the mechanic “Can’t you just hit it with a hammer and make it better?” That’s like taking the pill. Make it go away. He’s like, Well, I don’t know. It’s like the sensor is doing this funny thing. We got to put it back on the computer and we have to do this. I’m like, Can’t you just put some tape on it?
Ani
I just need I’m going to disconnect the sensor. I don’t want to see it anymore.
Brian
A lot of people do that. They want to do that with their bodies, too. A really good somatic coach helps you get under the hood in a really effective, hopefully a way that feels really supportive to help you get what you need.
Ani
I know it can sound annoying what we’re talking about right now, but this, I think, really is… One way you can conceptualize this is it is like the embodiment of the natural laws of the universe or what some people might like to think of as unconditional love, because there’s more goodness for each of us. There’s more love, there’s more fulfillment, there’s more joy, there’s more peace, there’s more of all of those wonderful things that we want. And And the sensor that’s going off in the body is that unconditional love is that natural law that’s not going to go away to be like, hey, there’s actually more here. And by the way, you can’t put duct tape over the sensor. Whether you want to think about it as God or universe or nature or whatever has so much unconditional love for us that the duct tape can’t go over the sensor. And what’s underneath of that when we do understand somatic coaching skills, is more joy, love, peace, and all of the goodness that we want, not just for ourselves, but for all of us. And so looking at the sensor that’s going off, even though it can feel, believe us, we get it, too, annoying.
Ani
And it really is trying to help us. It really is the neon sign that we’re looking for. And that’s one of the things that I love so much about somatic coaching, in particular, is we can do the work, and we can do the therapy, and we can do all of the things to try to live a better life. The body actually is the neon sign that we’re looking for It’s really that freaking literal. That freaking literal.
Brian
It’s right here. Yeah, it’s right there. And as you’re talking about that, I’m getting this visualization of we all want to just be cruising down the highway and take the top down and just feel that freedom. Feel the wind blow through my hair. Feel the wind blow through my hair. Wind on your scalp. Yeah, it’s across my head. We just want to feel like the top is down, and we just have all that freedom. And I think that’s what most of us deep down inside really want to experience. And for some people, that’s really frightening to have that amount of freedom. Like, Can I take the top down? It’s going to rain, or the bugs are going to get my teeth, or something horrible is going to happen, and all those kinds of things. And so, yes. So let’s figure out, well, Where is that coming from? What car do you want to be? It’s like, how do you want to feel when you’re moving in that direction? That’s what somatic coaches can help you do.
Ani
I guess just to maybe say one more thing here about talking to people about somatic coaching. One of the things that we do all the time is we’ll say to somebody, What do you want to achieve or how do you want to feel in your life? And they’ll tell you, and then you say, You can feel that right now. Because you can. It’s not the thing that we’re looking outside of ourselves for that we really want. It’s not the having or the doing. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of feeling. That’s what we’re really trying to get to when we have those things that we want to accomplish, the things we want to have, the things we want to do in our lives. And the way to get it even faster is to feel that way first. Love it. But just bringing it back to that felt quality right there brings it back to the soma, brings to sit back to somatics. And that’s a conversation that we don’t have to be afraid to have with each other and with ourselves – “how do you want to feel?”
Brian
Yeah. Can I put a punctuation point on that?
Ani
Yes.
Brian
An exclamation. That was an exclamation point on it. It’s so important. I want to just pause right there because that is so critically important, the point you just made, Ani. And a lot of times when we teach workshops and trainings, and we ask people, make a list of the things that you want to experience in life. And they say, great job, great house, great this, great that. I want to donate a lot of money to charities and all that. It’s so much fun to see what people actually want to create in the world. And then we ask them that question, why? And they say, oh, because then I can help a lot of people in the world. I can do this and that. And you go, Well, why? And we just keep asking the why question, the why question, the why question, the why question, the why question, and it gets them to the point of, “Oh, because I want to feel a certain way.” It’s exactly what you said, Because I want to feel a certain way. And so when you’re talking about or explaining somatic coaching, I think that’s just another question to keep asking people.
Brian
What most people don’t realize much as exactly as you pointed out is that they can feel that way first. That’s another thing that somatic coaching can help people do. It’s really powerful. Yeah, that’s great.
Ani
Yeah. Thanks for joining us for 40. It just occurred to me that we’re going to turn 41 really quick. I was getting a little bit nervous all of a sudden about that. Over the hill. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us this week. We’ll see you next week on the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Bye Bye.
