Fall rains have returned. The river behind our home that I wrote about last time has started to fill.
But the sun is nonetheless making its late-October personality known like a teenager: just as bright and beautiful as ever, mostly around but a bit more distant, and cooler. When it disappears behind the wimpiest of clouds, I put on a layer. Puff gone, I take it off.
What's happening here is somatic awareness and a straightforward way to practice it. But it can be complex, and for lots of somatic signals, not always so clear.
To see how nuanced this can get so quickly, let's take what seems like a simple question: how do you know when you're warm? Or, likewise, when puff is between you and your favorite star, how do you know when you're cold?
A question like this, which on the surface seems very easy to answer ("You just know"), gets even more complex when it comes to our senses intermingling with emotions and thoughts. Knowing can be much more subtle than we've been taught to perceive.
What is somatic awareness?
Somatic awareness is using your internal senses to identify a want or need. Researchers call this internal sensing interoception. It's experiencing your body from the inside out, or as the lingo goes, the "bottom up."
Sometimes this awareness is physiological, but it can be embodied emotion: anger in the solar plexus; it can be a trauma response: heart racing after a car backfire; it can be psychosomatic: cue tension headaches.
But if you can't tell what's happening inside, you can't know what you need.
And what's revealing here is just how difficult a question like "how do you know?" can be to answer, and in turn, how hard it is for someone to know what they need. For like, years.
What does somatic awareness look like in therapy?
To illustrate a moment when this learning happens, I'll create a client and a common pattern I see in my office:
Dennis is a twenty-nine-year-old graphic designer who lands himself in therapy—like many Saturn-returnees before him—on the cusp of turning thirty. He looks back at his life with regrets, and looks forward with dismay. He had big life dreams upon entering art school over a decade ago, and none have been realized.
He reports a low mood, stating, "I generally feel like crap." Common recurring thoughts are "Nothing seems to work out for me" and "I feel totally stuck." He admits that when the alarm goes off in the morning he'll lie in bed with the thoughts, "I'm a loser," bleeping in his head.
I ask him what he's feeling in his body as he says those things, and he replies, "Nothing." I ask him where in his body he feels those thoughts and he shrugs and says, "In my head."
I run a little diagnostic on Dennis, asking him to place a hand on his belly to track how deep he inhales.
It is not intuitive for him to get air all the way down there—we discover that Dennis has been shallow chest breathing (so common!), and he has been inadvertently and habitually keeping his body on low alert.
Jason: "Let's inhale big and deep down to the bottom of the lungs. Place a hand on your belly and breathe into it like a balloon."
Dennis: "It's hard to get air that far down. I feel like there's a knot in my solar plexus."
Jason: "Put your other hand over the knot in your solar plexus while you breathe. Hold your hands there like you would give someone a hug."
[Dennis breathes a few times like this then makes a big exhale, as if he's been holding his breath for a very long time. His shoulders relax. I stay silent, letting him feel the downshift of his stress. More on that phenomenon in a bit, because now I see Dennis' mouth tremble.]
Jason: "What would your solar plexus say if it could speak?" (A meaning-making question on my part)
Dennis: "You're not good enough." [He says this with a tear in his eye.]
Jason: "As you breathe, focus on your solar plexus, think of that knot like a fist holding onto that thought, and relax the grip you have on it." (De-coupling the association of a thought with a part of the body—file under things we don't realize we commonly do!)
More on that in a bit too, because Dennis lets out a big cry. He shakes a bit as he cries. (He's releasing somatic tension that's been bound up with a painful and untrue thought. It's been deadlocked in there like a dam holding back a wave of grief, and it's breaking.)
Jason: "We only grieve what we love. Dennis, tell me about what you love."
Awareness is necessary for the learning needed to change. Much of what we need to feel is buried under beliefs that we've been taught about ourselves or the world.
Only when we let go of these can we do something essential that can seem paradoxical—accept who we are and where we are to have the agency to make changes in our lives. This moment is an opening to all of that.
Is it all in my head?
Yes, it is, and it's in your body, too.
Understanding how thoughts, sensations and emotions interact is one of those life skills that just is not gonna be on the SATs. We have to go and seek it out, sometimes all alone.
Many people find themselves in therapy because the pain of this interaction is so intense, so confusing. And to add insult to injury, they can be greatly misunderstood by those around them for "feeling too much."
Mislearning how these three parts of us interact (i.e. "Thoughts can be rational so are therefore more reliable than what my irrational emotions and body is saying") is like looking at the sky and being taught to only focus on the clouds, dismissing the heat and pressure moving the clouds because it's seemingly invisible.
Dennis had fused "not good enough" to the knot in his solar plexus so completely that the thought felt like anatomy. Loosening one loosened the other.
These are always interacting, and so we must learn to use that phenomenon in our favor. If we use it against our favor, we breathe stressed-out breaths, we feel stressed, and our mind finds a reason why we must be stressed.
It's a feedback loop, and it can be extinguished. That's what you saw in Dennis: one long exhale, and the body got the message before the mind did.
What is a simple somatic awareness exercise?
A single breath in three parts, paired with a helpful and true thought. If you would like to try it, here is how.
(Many people find they can relax with this breath practice, but nothing is ever one size fits all. Consult a physician if you are unsure if this is right for you.)
Choose a helpful and true thought. Maybe the thought is context dependent, “I will figure it out no matter what happens at my job.” Or it can be something more general, like, “I am grateful.” “I am learning.” “I choose honesty.”
As you breathe the breath below, think the thought, infuse the breath with this thought so that they are one and the same.
Part 1
Place a hand on the belly over your belly button. Inhale so that the belly inflates like a balloon, watch that the ribcage doesn't move yet, we will get there in part 2.
Your belly should round out like you've eaten a big bowl of pasta (we are taught to suck our stomachs in to look like we have tight abs, you must let go of that here!)
Part 2
Place a hand on the rib cage and feel the ribs expand out as they make way for air to get in the middle of your lungs. (This is how deep people tend to breathe and so you may need some practice to get air further down than this at first.)
Part 3
Place a hand at the base of the throat and feel the top part of your lungs expand as you get that last little bit of air in.
Repeat. Let it all out and start over.
When you've done it a few times, when you've breathed fully in, see if you can get one more sip of air in. When you breathe fully out, see if you can then breathe one last push out to fully empty (we often don't seem to use our full lung capacity until we try this).
I find it helpful to visualize the diaphragm, a muscle shaped like a jellyfish that is sitting below the lungs and helping move down when the lungs need space to inflate, and move up to push on the lungs when they deflate.
If you like, you can start with a five count in and out, and can work towards increasing the length of the exhalation. Longer exhales allow for the body to enter a relaxed state.
You might try to work your way to five count breath in, five count hold breath in, five count breath out, five count hold breath out. Gradually try lengthening the time of exhale.
As you are practicing, or when you are finished, make a note of how your body feels. Maybe you saw this question coming—How do you know?
Want to practice somatic awareness with a therapist?
You don't need me for this. But if you'd like company as you listen to your body and mind and answer that question “how do you know?”, that's what I do.
Shadowlight Center offers somatic and integrative psychotherapy by telehealth in New York and Maine. Reach out to schedule a consultation.