Working with the mind involves examining thought and behavior patterns, family histories and stories, and how we construct narratives (about who we are as a person or what the future will hold for us, for instance). This is the work of unearthing the negative core beliefs that underpin our thoughts about ourselves or others so that they can be healed. Learning to be mindful of thoughts and how we choose what stories to feed is the work of the mind.

This is where most therapies start and end but there is more at play than just the mind. Read on to learn about working with the body and soul.

Somatic Psychotherapy has risen in popularity over the past decade or so because it is proven to work.

This type of therapy involves discovering how and where feelings and memories are lodged in the body. It is learning to identify and decode the sensations that our body is continually communicating to us about what is happening in any given moment.

Getting to know these signals and learning how to listen to the felt sense helps us to be in the present in a very profound and affective way. It also helps us to find meaning for mood/symptoms/struggles, and helps develop self compassion, self-knowing, and self-love.

Polyvagal theory is foundational. If trauma happened before the brain was fully developed, the mind can't fully explain it, so developing "somatic awareness" is key.

Developing somatic awareness is akin to learning to tune a radio: like static blasting away, our sensations can be calling our attention but the noise is so overwhelming and confusing that it is hard to distinguish what is happening. Somatic awareness is like tuning the dial directly to the signal and developing the skills to regulate your mood and psychosomatic reactions.

Since we are not taught to tune into this part of our experience, it is powerful what is found and cleared when we bring a little attention here.

Soul can mean a lot of different things to everybody, we understand it can be a complicated word and a word people can sometimes have an allergic reaction to. We get that; it’s been used and misused in different ways that have been harmful in the past, and we will try to explain our use of the word here, it is really less about the word than what it represents.

We use it as a way of saying, “that which connects;” that which connects us each other, to our ancestry, that which connects us to the collective suffering in the world right now, and that which connects us to our own bodies on a subtle level.

Albert Einstein spoke to this with the observable phenomenon of quantum entanglement: any matter that has been once connected physically will never be disconnected energetically. How else might we be able to explain how we can feel empathy or collective pain?

Prevailing schools of psychology focus primarily on the self, but when we expand our frame further out, to examine how the self is affected by not just the immediate environment, relationships and personal history, but by our deep time ancestry and the unprocessed collective grief out there, we find there is more to the story.

Tranpersonal therapy encompasses some of this approach. Carl Jung offered us a way to understand working with the soul.

Awareness (or lack thereof) of all “that which connects” has a major impact on our well-being. This is what what to hold space for when we say working with soul. There is poetic language here but it is not just poetry. This approach is grounded in specific tools we use that are accessible, easy to learn, and offers our clients consistent results, which points to the evidence of something we believe science will catch up to.

More about soul:

Soul grounds us into the multiplicity of all things. There is a connection of our physical body to our “energy body,” also called the “subtle body” as it is subtlest connection we have to our experience. It ties in our connection to our past, present and future; it connects us to today’s collective experience, our ancestry, and the planet. While sometimes short hand for “spirit” we see the distinction here as soul brings us down into our experiences, it is heavier, it is the gravity of life’s interconnectivity, whereas spirit lifts us up, lightens us up into oneness of experience. There is plenty of room for that in the work as well.

It is important to acknowledge how the words "soul" and “spirit” are used in many different ways and can have many different meaning: we support and nurture whatever your definition of this word is. This is not a faith-based approach and all faiths are welcome.