Why a mindbody approach?
Your intellectual knowing is always two (2) degrees removed from reality because intellectual knowing is always based on sensory knowing.
Every thought you think, carries sensory data with it.
Before an experience became cognition (a thought) it was first perceived, seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled.
This is especially true for early childhood and preverbal experiences and memories.
In MindBody Coaching we work with the sensory data to get the full truth of a lived experience so that it can actually be transformed. If we work with only the intellectual knowing—the left brain/thinking brain we are only getting part of the story-and when we only access part of the story-the other parts remain in the shadows, unconsciously driving your behaviors, beliefs, actions, relations.
MindBody Coaching Cycle of Change- 5 Steps to an Embodied YOU
STEP 1
Somatic Awareness: Somatic awareness helps you get to know how energy is moving through you, from your thinking self to your feeling self. It helps you build language and capacity for sensing and naming what you feel from the inside out. Sensations are a different kind of intelligence that offers fresh perspectives, deeper understanding, and new meaning to emerge. Sensations show up as temperatures, textures, qualities of contraction or expansion, aliveness or less aliveness. They are the unbiased substrate for emotions and mood.
STEP 2
Somatic Practices: You are what you practice. Any purposeful action that is aligned with what you care about and that you repeat over time will show up in your life as new choice or embodied skill. 300 repetitions gives you a muscle memory, 3000 repetitions gives you implicit (think riding a bike or tying your shoe) memory. If you practiced something for 5 minutes a day for everyday in a year you would have reached 1825 repetitions. Even if you are doing the same thing but with different awareness it generates a new experience that lives differently in your body.
STEP 3
Somatic Openings/Sensing and Feeling: In order to create new patterns, old pattern must be transformed. The more deeply rooted the pattern, the more automatic your reaction when under pressure. Any place we notice a lot of tension or numbness we know we are working with a world view, conditioned tendency, adaption, or belief system. Due to social conditioning there can be a lot of shame and judgement around these habitual responses where one feels they must manage, control, or get rid of them completely. In mindbody coaching we believe that in order for these automatic defense or survival strategies to be transformed they must first be supported in the direction they want to go. Once you provide support to your old patterns a natural shift occurs where the emotions and stories embedded deep within will begin to run out of your body.
Step 4
Insight/Meaning Making: One of the key elements of MindBody coaching is insight and meaning making. It is important to take whatever came up for you and consider what it might mean for you and your life. This deep understanding and distillation of what just happened is part of the change process. Once you have an “aha” moment where the unknown becomes known it unlocks the living forward energy that was bound in the pattern (survival strategy, conditioning) or belief of the past.
STEP 5
Embodied Action: Insights alone do not move people towards change. Insights take people to a threshold, but do not move people through the threshold. Your insights may make you more aware, more intelligent, more smart about your actions where you can talk about them and the origins of your actions. But insights do not necessarily move you towards a new way of being. Embodied action is the final step in embodying you.