Transcript

Ani
Hi there, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hi, Brian. Hello, Ani.

Brian
How are you doing today? I’m doing great. Love the color of your shirt today.

Ani
Thank you. Feeling a little festive like an evergreen. All right.

Brian
Nice. It’s podcast day.

Ani
It’s podcast day. It’s much fun.

Brian
Here we are on our number three, part three of our four-part series on Top Questions. I think that was a different theme music than he used last week. I’m trying out different stuff. Okay, so who’s our top question candidate this week? Today, these are the top 10 questions that women’s health and empowerment coaches have about somatic coaching.

Ani
Somatic coaching is such a powerful addition to anybody who’s working in the women’s empowerment space. We do know a lot of people who are, so I’m really excited about this topic before I launch into some soapbox, because I certainly could. Let’s Let’s get to the first question.

Brian
Let’s get to that first question. Just jump in. Okay, so how can somatic coaching enhance my current work in empowering women and building self-worth?

Ani
Oh, my God. It’s so important. I mean, just from the standpoint of when we work with somatic stuff, we’re working with the nervous system. I think one of the things that not every single person knows about that I think every single person should know about is when we’re talking about creating change and empowerment, and we’re talking about creating better self-worth and confidence. We’re talking about helping you to build your nervous system function. We’re talking about helping to become regulated in your nervous system. Know what that even is, Brian. I think that’s a conversation that in the women’s empowerment space would be incredibly empowering to be having with every single person. Let’s talk about nervous system regulation, what that is, and what it feels like. And I think that’s the entry into this conversation, the entry into the land of somatics when it comes to women’s empowerment. But as we go through the trajectory, one of the next biggest things that comes to me is the real, true embodied experience of choice. Because that’s one of the things that we do and we bake into all of the things that we do within the Somatic Coaching Academy curriculum, we start to really hone in on it in the level 2 program, choice and the way to give a client true empowered choice.

Ani
And we have people tell us all the time, that’s the first time that I really had somebody help me to understand that I actually had a choice. I don’t think that we can really get to a place of true empowerment in our lives until we’ve had that experience of making true empowered choices where I can say yes or I can say no. Either one, I am safe in my body to know that I can make empowered choices. I have one more. I’m on a roll. Give me a second. Go for it. The other thing that occurs to me is the importance of understanding core wounding, Brian, and how if we’re going to create true empowerment, we can’t really do that and come from a place of our true authenticity, our true self-expression, until we understand and can unravel and talk about the ways that core wounding is created in our system and how that’s a part of how we as humans may show up and to see the contrast of that to be able to move forward in true empowerment.

Brian
Yeah, 100%. Just picking up on that and how core wounding is wired into our physiology, wired into our soma, somatic, right? Wired in. Oftentimes, working in empowerment, and I don’t specifically work a lot in women’s empowerment. I work more globally, so I’m going to lean on you a lot more in terms of the women’s specific experience, because I don’t know the experience specifically of women because I don’t identify that way. But what I can say in terms of empowerment and self-esteem and self-worth, one of the things that happens is really our negative self-talk, really the cruel and negative ways that we talk to ourselves. It can feel like an endless battle of battling shadows that you can’t ever win against because we’re just being bombarded with all that negative talk. And yet I think a lot of times that’s where we try to engage is on the level of trying to battle with my negative self-talk, where the somatic coaching goes into the core work. As we change nervous system regulation, empowerment internally, we start to change patterns within our physiology, the negative self-talk starts taking care of itself because the negative self-talk is really simply a projection of what’s going on in the physiology and the nervous system itself.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
Yeah, well said. It seems paradoxical that in order to deal with the self-talk, we would go into the sensations. Correct. But from a standpoint of how our physiology works and how the creation of our reality works, just like you said, we can go into the sensations, do sensation work, and then the thoughts tend to take care of themselves. Can we just stop for a second and talk a little bit about core wounds? Because I think that context is going to help probably the rest of the conversation and the questions that are coming about. Let’s just get on the topic of core wounds. Does everybody have them? How does that develop? What are we talking about?

Brian
Well, does everybody… I don’t know. I try not to think about things in black and white, so it’s like an everything and nothing thing. I can’t really answer that question, but I can say that they’re exceedingly common for basically everybody I’ve met, and I’ve met everyone, so I don’t know that for sure. But what is a core wound? Well, this is a big conversation, by the way, too. We’re just opening the door to it right here. As we open this door, if you have questions about it or if what we’re talking about creates confusion, just reach out to us. We’ll have a deeper conversation. We’ll let you know we can get more information about it because we only do so much in this framework in the context of a podcast. A core wound essentially comes from the idea that we’re born, I’m going to walk that back a second. But sometimes we actually can start to develop core wounds in utero, by the way.

Ani
That actually used to be something people speculated, but now it’s pretty good.

Brian
Yeah, now we know that. We’re conceived whole. Let’s say, put it that way. We’re conceived whole. If we have a pretty healthy incubation period in the mother’s womb and we’re born and we’re born fairly healthy, let’s just set it up that way for a second. Then we have all the self-esteem in the world, we advocate for ourselves. Babies advocate for themselves all the time. They let you know when they’re cold, sleepy, tired, hungry, that you know by crying, and then we attend to them. Babies are just one with everything. They’re full of love. They’re just inherently one with all. But what babies aren’t is safe. Babies depend on their security, depend on their caregivers. As babies turn into toddlers, turn into young people, and those kinds of things, what can happen is belief systems, the belief systems of the parents, grandparents, community, family members, whatever they are, the belief systems are going to try to pass themselves down into the offspring. It’s funny. I think about beliefs as viruses in a lot of ways. A virus, its whole job is to survive. It just goes from host to host to host to host to host and just keep surviving.

Brian
Beliefs are just like that, too. Even if you’ve lost someone, in your past and you describe them. If I sit here and describe my great grandfather, who I remember died when I think was in my early 20s. I knew him for a couple of decades. If I describe him, as I’m describing him, what I’m actually describing are characteristics of the belief systems that he held. That’s really what lasts beyond the person are the characteristics of their belief systems. When we’re remembering somebody, what we’re really remembering is the belief that gets passed down. What we’re adopting from them are the beliefs. When someone says, You’re just like your grandfather, you’re just like your mother, what they’re really saying is, You are actually their belief systems. What exists beyond any one of us are beliefs. They just keep passing themselves down. They have an inherent, I guess, need to survive. The way that belief systems get passed down through generations is through things like manipulation and punishment, primarily. That manipulation and punishment that’s associated with transferring the belief system results in a wound for a child. That wound, if it happens before the ages of… Actually before 14, really.

Brian
I mean, our brain develops differently between ages of 7 and 14 and then beyond. But usually, beneath the age of 14 is the critical period for someone. If the belief transference happens in profound ways in that amount of time, it can create a wound or a core pattern, if you will, a core pattern in the person’s, in the child’s physiology. And that core wound could be associated with lack of self-worth, essentially. And so basically, that not-whole- self, not-whole-worth, becomes a lack of it, that’s a wound. A wound is something that’s not whole, if you will. Is that helpful in having that conversation?

Ani
It’s really helpful, and I’m glad that we had the conversation, because one of the things I think as women’s empowerment, the experts and coaches that we need to keep in mind is not only are we helping these individual women to repattern and reprogram themselves, but through the process of repatterning and reprogramming each individual woman, we are repattern and reprogramming the collective of what it means to be a woman. Those things have been passed down, like you told us about, so that they’re held within each of us. It’s not held in this way that is just the thoughts that are swimming around in our head, it lives through our physiology. I’m just passionate about how important the somatic work is, no matter how much of it you want to do. You want to do just a little bit of it or you want to become a full-blown expert in it. But how important it is in women’s empowerment work for us to be able to detangle these collective patterns that, by the way, don’t just affect women, of course. They affect all of us with how we treat women, how we think about women, how we are with women, how we are with ourselves and in relationships.

Brian
Yeah, absolutely. Some of the questions that we’ve gotten, too, will actually keep coming back to some of these points, by the way. It’s going to feel like we may be coming back here a bunch because they all work together this way. Our next question we have is, how can somatic coaching support women struggling with self-esteem and self-acceptance?

Ani
I think we started to talk about some of those things. One of the things that comes to me with that question is, like I was just saying, even if you do a little bit… Even if you are doing somatic practices with women, you’re doing… At the Somatic Coaching Academy in our Somatic Practice Essentials program, we teach a few different ones. We teach some breathwork, gentle movement practices, self-massage and meditation. Just doing some of those things is like going to the gym every day to work your muscles. It’s like going every day to the gym and working the resiliency in your nervous system, the ability to be present and centered and grounded and calm and relaxed and those kinds of things, which through time, they feel good and they’re really important. If you want to keep going to create that lasting change and that lasting transformation, you’re going to want to continue to collect tools that can really help people to develop even deeper and more profound transformations, even if we’re helping people and women to really bolster their nervous system with somatic practices, that is just awesome.

Brian
Yeah. And just to circle back around again, I think we’re probably going to circle past here a few times in this podcast, is that the self-esteem issues and the self-acceptance issues don’t just live in a person’s head. They’re actually wired into a person’s physiology. And that, again, comes from this core experience that you have. So if you don’t like using the word core wound, or if you do, you can also think about it as a core pattern. You can also think about it as a formative experience. You think about something that happened early enough in a person’s life where not only did their mental concepts get formed, but also their DNA got formed that way. The way their DNA expresses themselves got formed that way, and their physiology got formed that way. It’s a whole pattern that’s happening in the person’s body. And part of that pattern is being projected into our thoughts. And so, again, the way I think about it, if you’re going to a movie, and let’s say you’re in a movie theater where they used to have projectors. Remember, these would be a projector in the back. And so imagine you don’t like what’s happening on the movie screen.

Brian
No, now I feel like, I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. Some other new way now. It used to be a projector. And what if you’re in the movie theater and you don’t like what’s going on on the screen and you run up to the screen? And on the screen, you’re trying to like, “Don’t do that”, and you’re trying to stop it on the screen, and it doesn’t change. You got to go back to the projector to actually turn off the projector, and then the movie turns off. So often when we’re doing coaching work, we’re again, trying to get people to yell at the screen and think that we’re going to get an effect. We’re working with the projection, not the core stuff that’s underneath it. The core stuff is in a physiological pattern. When you’re doing somatic practices and somatic coaching, we’re working with the physiological patterns themselves. It allows you to put a different reel on the movie projector and then play a different movie.

Ani
How about this? That projector, by the way, is projecting through your physiology every 10th of a second or so. Every 10th of a second. So how about that?

Brian
How about that? Here we go. Okay, so next question. How can somatic coaching help women who have challenges with weight?

Ani
I got to be honest, for my own personal experience with weight and somatic work, it’s never actually a weight problem. Every client I have had who tells me they want to work on weight, they know exactly what habits can help to create healthy weight with exercise, getting good sleep, diet. People understand that. It’s no mystery. Every single time with the weight stuff, there’s something deeper going on. You’re talking about and getting to the projections. A lot of times, those projections are really wrapped up with emotional stuff. I’m trying to think every single… I’m going to say most because I can’t think of everybody in my head right now. But most of the people, most of the women who I’ve worked with who’ve had weight issues, I really want to say all, have already been to therapy, Brian. They’ve already been to therapy. They’ve already worked for years, lifetimes worth of therapy. Out there in the world, we hear that coaches aren’t supposed to or don’t necessarily work with emotions, that that’s a therapist lane. The reality is that’s not necessarily true. Coaches work with emotions all the time. They may or may not be well-equipped to do it.

Ani
When we start to work with the body components, even when people have had years and years worth of therapy, we start to work with the body components. What we find is there’s things to unravel within the body that help a person to then blossom. And honestly, I got to tell you, they don’t even care about the weight so much. They really care about being healthy. They care about the relationships that they’re able to have when they feel like they have a healthier weight and things like that. But there’s always deeper issues. One of the most powerful things that can happen within the context of a safe and trusting coaching relationship is a person can get in touch in the present moment with their body in a way that they can confront the sensations that are scary and have a witness and another person safely trauma-informed there with them to sit with uncomfortable sensations that are actually preventing them from moving forward in their weight loss journey.

Brian
Great. Great answer. I love it. Great answer. All right, next question. What trauma sensitive practices are included to ensure safety when addressing sensitive topics.

Ani
Want to talk about that? Yeah, sure.

Brian
Whenever we’re working with people, just a segue from where you were just talking about weight, chronic weight challenges as being an issue, and a lot of it being fostered or entangled with emotional issues. And a lot of those emotional issues can come from, obviously, past history of trauma. You’ve got a lot of that puts itself- snowballs into a result of having weight challenges for somebody. So a lot of times you get all those types of things wrap themselves together. So when we’re working with people in empowerment or with weight challenges, with women empowerment, I think you’ve already spoke pretty eloquently in some degree to the unique challenges that women endure in our life around trauma and traumatic past, generationally, ancestrally, currently, all kinds of things. There’s things that women experience that men just certainly just cannot understand. You need to be a woman. A lot of times, those challenges are rooted in trauma. I’m just going to bring it back to understanding that the likelihood if you’re doing work in women’s empowerment, that the challenges that your clients are dealing with are rooted in trauma are quite high.

Ani
Can I say something about that real quick? I don’t work specifically in my own private practice, nor have I ever, specifically, with people who have diagnosis or abuse histories. I have never put that on my business card. I have always worked in optimization for the past 12 years, specifically in business growth. Brian, most of the clients that I serve have some trauma history that is standing in the way of them being able to be the people they want to be, have the things that they want to do, have the things they want to have, and do the things that they want to do in the world. And they’re not coming to me specifically because of that, but because of the trauma sensitivity that I have in my methods, I’m able to be that safe place for the unraveling of the patterns within the system. I’m not doing therapy. We’re not talking about the past memories, but I’m unraveling the subconscious programming and rewiring their nervous system for true empowerment. Yeah.

Brian
In the course of that rewiring, it’s like if someone is doing some structural work on the side of a building. Say on the side of a brick building, someone has the brick needs to be redone. What do you see? You see scaffolding go up. Scaffolding goes up to support the work on the building. You don’t just go up there and start whacking away on the bricks. Because if you don’t put scaffolding up and you put other security measures in place by taking out parts of the brick, the building could fall down.

Ani
That’s a really good example.

Brian
You have to support the building while you’re doing the work to create a new building. That’s what we use with safety anchors. Whenever we’re doing work, even if we even suspect at all, and again, we just laid out what Ani said. She doesn’t put on her billboard that she works with people who have experienced diagnosis for trauma, but she’s working with people for empowerment, performance optimization. At the same time, the things that are standing in the way of the folks are trauma histories. For Ani to know that ahead of time, she might think, God, okay, so if I’m going to start dismantling an old pattern, it’s like taking the bricks down on the side of the building. I need to have scaffolding in place to protect a person’s building from not falling all down. And so scaffolding are these anchors that we use. We create stabilization anchors, stabilization points for a person to be able to keep coming back to as those transformations are occurring because they don’t just happen all at once. They happen over a course of a week, months as you’re doing a program with people, correct? Yeah. Because now you just don’t one day get up there and change off the side of a building and it’s all done.

Brian
It takes time to work through that and figure it out. Listen, Brian, as you’re talking, I’m realizing one of the things that we need to understand when we watch women not changing is their subconscious mind is not going to let them fall apart when they have kids to take care of, when they have a job to take care of, when they have elderly parents to take care of, and all of these things that women hold.

Ani
And their system is not actually going to allow them to fall apart. So if they’re not changing, one of the very smart things that their system may be putting in place is they know very well there’s not enough scaffolding in that program, and their psyche is not going to let them change.

Brian
Yes, very well put.

Ani
And that’s not the fault of the woman.

Brian
Correct.

Ani
That does not mean that she is broken. But you know what a lot of women are going to do? They’re going to go through a program and they’re not going to get a result. And at the end of it, they’re not going to say anything about the program or whatever. And they certainly aren’t going to know about the things that Brian is talking about like scaffolding. At the end of the program, a woman who doesn’t succeed says, “I’m broken”. We can do better for women.

Brian
Yeah, absolutely. Part of the way we can do that is by having these trauma-sensitive skills, create that scaffolding, create those safe places, educate women on the trajectory of this, the investment that they’re making in terms of time and energy and the importance of it, and helping to hold them safe throughout the program. That’s all those trauma-sensitive practices.

Ani
So important.

Brian
Yeah, great conversation. Great conversation. Okay, let’s keep cooking along. What role does somatic coaching play in promoting a positive relationship with the body?

Ani
I think one of the things that comes up in terms of our methodology is we teach according to the natural laws of the universe, which say that nothing is inherently good, bad, right, or wrong. We start to actually unravel what that even means to… All I caught was you said positive or good.

Brian
Yeah, positive relationship with the body.

Ani
Yeah, right. We start to even unravel even what good means and bad means and positive means and negative means. We start to just take all of that very judgmental energy and look at it in a totally different way. Because when we look at having a relationship with other people and with the world and with ourselves through the lens of the natural laws, we actually come into a real relationship, a whole relationship, an empowered relationship, rather than trying to have a positive relationship. We see a ton of toxic positivity out there, too. It could be really damaging, I think, especially in the women’s empowerment space. To really be able to create change, women have to be empowered in their know and in their emotions and in whatever comes up. And we have so much judgment about ourselves, about what’s positive and negative and good and bad and right and wrong. So using the natural laws is a really powerful way to help people to step into true alignment that’s not polarized.

Brian
Yeah. I would continue on that idea as well, Ani, with the idea of pattern deconstruction and reconstruction, too. Oftentimes, our negative relationships with our bodies are baked into a pattern, and you could call this a core pattern, core wound, just going back. But every physiological pattern is four parts: sensations, thoughts, words, and actions. And internally, you can’t see somebody else’s sensations and thoughts, but you can hear their words and see their actions. The words and the actions are like, if we’re looking at that iceberg thing, that’s above the water, and the thoughts and sensations are below the water. In other words, I can’t see them when you’re experiencing them. But all four parts of them form a pattern. Oftentimes, again, those negative relationships we want to tackle the thought part or the action part, potentially, or the words we use. But not many people are diving into that sensation area to deconstruct it and then reconstruct a more positive formulation. I really love the idea of the pattern deconstruction, reconstruction to help people have more positive relationships with their bodies.

Ani
Absolutely. One of the things we’ve been finding this year, specifically, as we’ve been working with women in one of our group programs, is how likely we are actually to have undesired sensations around things that, quote, unquote, should feel good and how we have patterns of self-punishment in place that prevent us from having the things that we really want to have and feeling good and actually feeling better in our bodies. And what you’re saying about deconstructing patterns, one of the biggest patterns this year, specifically, that I’ve been noticing with our clients and students is rewiring those patterns of self-punishment so that people can actually accept feeling better in their bodies and raise their set point for everything, wealth, abundance, health, and everything. Yeah, great.

Brian
Next question. Next question. Keep moving along here. Will these techniques empower women to manage emotional challenges more independently? I think that that’s an interesting thing at the end, more independently.

Ani
Oh, that’s actually… Yeah, maybe you just caught me with something. Okay, go ahead. What are you thinking?

Brian
Well, I was just thinking the way that that’s phrased is that there’s always this balance of relational dynamics. Is anything ever truly independent. Totally. You could be living on a desert island and you’re still really not independent of the environment that you’re living in. I don’t know if I have an answer for that. No, I think- It’s just the question caught me of, that’s interesting because it’s like, will these techniques empower women to manage emotional challenges?

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Yes. More independently, I just think it’s interesting the way that that question is asked.

Ani
I love it. I love the way you’re answering it. Is that how we want to think about life? I think that that’s one of the things that as we work with women’s empowerment, we get to be in this place where it’s not just experts like us standing up here telling you what is, but that we actually get to be in a co-collaborative environment where we’re asking questions that don’t have answers and we’re coming up with co-collaborative ways and creative solutions to them. I wonder. I love the way that you approach that question.

Brian
As we’re here, I’m still thinking about it a little bit, too, is that I think oftentimes in empowerment and women’s empowerment, that when we think about that idea of independent but also relational with the environment, that sometimes, this isn’t just for women, too, this is all humans, is that when we feel emotionally challenged or threatened, that our instinct is to reflexively try to change the environment because we feel emotionally threatened. I’m not saying, by the way, that that’s always a wrong thing to do. However, it also leaves us in a place, believe it or not, of diminishment or disempowerment. Because then what we’re still feeding into is that the environment is causing me to feel the way I feel. The environment is causing me to feel the way I feel. Now, with saying that, I’m also not saying that the environment doesn’t have something to do with it.

Ani
It’s a both-and.

Brian
It’s a both-and. It’s a both-and. And that when we really work on self-empowerment, when we really build ourselves up from the inside, do that core wound healing work and start to transform ourselves internally for these deeper patterns, then we take actions in the world that naturally change the environment, and our tolerance to be in toxic environments goes way down. What I mean by is we don’t tolerate toxic environments as much anymore. Sure, and we treat them less. Exactly. There’s this back and forth. We have to be careful that if we’re in the world, and we’re always upset with what’s going on in the world, or we’re always trying to change what’s going outside of us, then we’re actually disempowering ourselves in a lot of ways.

Ani
And just to go back to this independent thing, and that changing what’s going on within ourselves is actually best done not alone in our room with the door closed. Correct. It’s better done within the context of safe relationships.

Brian
Safe relationships, safe community, so that you can work in a balance of changing the outside and the inside together. They work hand in hand.

Ani
Watching reflection. Actually, we change better in community because we’re able to accept in more readily through our subconscious mind change when we see that we’re being accepted by the people around us.

Brian
Yeah, great. Good conversation. Yeah. Okay. How can I communicate the value of somatic coaching techniques to clients who may be skeptical? Boy, we get this question a lot, don’t we?

Ani
Apparently. Actually, we talked about this in the last two podcasts. So maybe if this is really a burning question for you, go ahead and check both of those because we answered the question a little bit differently in both of them. Is there anything that you wanted to expound upon?

Brian
I think just the basic answer that I have for people that are skeptical is ask questions about people, find out what their desires are, what their goals are, and then identify the gap between where they want to go and what they’re currently experiencing right now, and then help them experience simple tools to walk just a little bit further in that direction. When you can just give people the tools to walk a little further in that direction and to give them an experience of how profound the somatic techniques can be, oftentimes that reduces the level of skepticism.

Ani
I have something to add as well in terms of women’s empowerment, specifically. I have helped a lot of women overcome patterns of self-judgment about their own concern for being weird, black sheep, not normal, off, whatever words you want to put. When we really can claim our uniqueness and our authenticity, a lot of times we’re going to have to confront our own fear of the judgment of being weird. Can somatic techniques help you do that? I would say better than any of them. When you do that, it was actually just like we were talking about with that previous question, but when you do that work within yourself, all of a sudden you’ll see that you’re not attracting people who are skeptical. Yes, that’s so true. You’re actually attracting people who are super magnetized to you. Yeah, it’s so true. Because clarity, confidence, and authenticity is super compelling and magnetizing.

Brian
Yeah, that’s so true. And I’m just not specifically a women’s empowerment thing, but my own experience. I remember when I was working inside of the health care system as a PT, and as I was making that transition into more body-mind work, when meditation was still weird at that point in time, 20 years ago. Not that long, actually. As I was making that transition, I had a lot of people that were like, Why are we doing this? What’s going on? It felt a little off and weird. But then as I picked it up more, as I really stepped into it and started to own it for myself, I started doing my own practices and really started to own it. Then actually, I started getting referrals within the clinic from other PTs because their clients started to want that. They’re like, You know what? Brian does that stuff. Go see him. Then I became known as the person who did that. My schedule was so busy, I started my own practice. Because now people are like, “Go see Brian because he actually looks at you holistically, whole body mind.” They didn’t even know what that meant, but they knew that’s what they wanted.

Brian
The more you step into that being, becoming that holistic professional, people will identify you that way. Like you said, people will magnetize towards you.

Ani
Yeah, totally.

Brian
Yeah, great question. Okay, next question. How can I ensure that the techniques I learn are empowering and not retraumatizing for my clients?

Ani
Okay, so we’ve referenced our past podcast on the Four Levels of Trauma Awareness Now, each episode we’ve done here in the past few weeks. And you definitely want to go check that out as well because understanding the trauma spectrum is really important to understanding, well, not only about retraumatization, but where you’re at. Because you’ve got to know, are you trauma-aware? Are you trauma-informed? Are you trauma-sensitive? Are you trauma-sensitive? You’ve got to know where you fall to be able to know how you’re helping clients and where the gaps are so that that doesn’t happen to you.

Brian
Yeah, totally. Just a little thing I’ll say about this is if you are following a trauma-informed framework, which is what we teach here at the Somatic Coaching Academy, that has the five steps of safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. That’s the fifth step. How do we ensure that we’re not we’re traumatizing. Well, we use that framework to do that. If we’re creating safety as the first step, that’s going to reduce the level of retraumatization, trustworthiness, reduce it, choice, reduce it, collaboration, reduce it. Then finally, we’re finishing with empowerment. Really, it’s a matter of, how do you know? Just follow that framework, and it really ensures that it’s going to happen in a powerful way for people. All right, next one. How does somatic coaching help in dealing with stress and anxiety related to body image?

Ani
Okay, so Yeah, that’s a great question. I would like to entertain that the stress and the anxiety are actually superficial. We’ve talked about core wounding and stuff, but let’s talk about this. What’s really underneath of that stress and anxiety is usually deep, deep shame. And people may or may not, and likely may not realize the depth of the shame, actually, that is holding them and their body image in place. One of the beautiful things that the sensation-based work does is it can help somebody to touch in on the depths of the shame, the depths of the… I’ll use a few other emotional qualifiers to talk about this. The depths of the guilt, the depths of the fear, the depths of the grief, humiliation fear, embarrassment, the depths of those kinds of things in a really unassuming way. Because if we hop in there and we talk about somebody’s shame or their deep fear or grief or fear of humiliation or embarrassment, we’re going to defense right up and right back to the scaffolding that you were talking about. Even really solid scaffolding, it’s not going to be enough when somebody gets really defenced.

Ani
Then they’re going to get intellectually defenced, too. They’re going to think that that’s not an issue. We can’t just hop into those really deep things or throw people in the pool on them. When we use the sensation-based methodology, well, first of all, we actually do soften the body. We soften the body, we soften the resistances, and then we go in in a way where actually the client has their own epiphany. We’re not pushing them in it. The client has their own epiphany. Because we can hold space for sensations that are felt, they’ll say, I’m feeling a sensation, and they’ll describe it. They’ll have their own epiphany, and then they can transform from there. I think that’s one of the most powerful ways that we really can empower people with body image stuff because there’s deeper things going on. The stress and the anxiety, of course, somatic techniques can help with stress and anxiety. Learn the somatic techniques. Let’s deal with the stress and anxiety. It’s very, very important. Also, please know it’s superficial because what’s really going on in there is some deep, deep stuff, and we can absolutely help that, too. And that’s what’s going to powerfully and sustainably transform body image stuff.

Ani
100%.

Brian
It’s back in the projector again. Back in the projector. We’re going right back to the projector. Great. Great answer, Ani. Great answer. Okay, last question. Last question for our women’s empowerment coaches and professionals. How can somatic coaching foster resilience in my clients, especially those working on self-confidence and empowerment?

Ani
That’s a fantastic question. Yeah.

Brian
Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, I’ll catch it first. We have an interesting conversation about resilience here at this Somatic Coaching Academy. The idea is that oftentimes we think about resilience as the ability to overcome challenges. Sometimes I call that macro resilience. I don’t always think that the macro resilience story serves us really well. Hear, hear. Because then we are creating heroes because we have to come through some type of adversity. Absolutely. Then for us to have meaning in our life, we actually have to come through some adversity. I think then subconsciously, if we have value on that, we actually will continue to find adversity in order to overcome. That gets exhausting and tiring and all those kinds of things. We have a different conversation about resilience. Resilience for us is the idea of the window of tolerance. It takes us back to this trauma-sensitive model, that there’s a window in which our nervous system optimally operates. Then you could be outside of that window, either hyperregulated or hypo, not regulated, hypoaroused or hyperaroused outside of that window. That can happen when we have trauma reactivation, all kinds of things. That’s life, though.

Brian
Life knocks people out of their window of tolerance. We can’t have an expectation that you’re always going to be in your window of tolerance. We have an expectation that we’re going to get knocked out. Now, here’s where resilience comes in. Can we get ourselves back in? How effectively can we get ourselves back in to our optimal level of arousal? That’s what I call microresilience. That happens every day for a lot of people, if not every week, if not every month. On a constant basis, we’re getting knocked out of our window, back into the window, out of the window, into the window. With the trauma-sensitive practices that we do, like with our cross-mapping practice, what we’re actually doing is widening the window of tolerance. Number one, so that people have a better level of stability, regardless of what goes on in the world, number one. But number two, they have the skills to get back into the window after they’ve been knocked out of the window. I call that micro-resilience. A lot of the practices that we do specifically hone right into that.

Ani
I’m so glad you brought up that we were asked about resilience because I think it’s one of the many topics in the women’s empowerment space where we need to look at redefining how we talk about things, and that’s a really great example. Hey, we may not have answered the questions that you have about women’s empowerment. So if that’s the case, please email us. We would love to talk to you. info@somaticcoachingacademy.com is how you can reach us. Ask whatever questions that you have. We might point you to a podcast. We might point you to something in the Somatic Coaching Academy public library for sure. And of course, a real human is going to answer your email. So let us know. And thank you so much for joining us for this episode. It was really rich. And I really appreciate, Brian, as a woman, that I can sit here and have these conversations with you, and we can talk about and learn about things that are challenging to have these kinds of conversations out there sometimes.

Brian
So I really appreciate that. Thanks, Ani. And I appreciate that about you too are able to have that conversation with one another. And for our listeners, honor that you’re here. We’re so grateful that you’re using your energy to be here with us. Your time and your resources. We know it takes time and resources. Time is one of the most fleeting resources of all, and your energy is really important. We’re really grateful and honor you being here. Thank you so much. See you next time.