By Raquel Issenberg
To fully occupy one’s own body is the aspect of yoga that reestablishes the relationship between the mind and the present moment.
It is known that the separation of the mind and body can be caused as a response to our survival mechanisms in order to handle disruptive events or the memory of them.
Unconscious memories –or samskaras, as known in Vedic philosophy– can evoke maladaptive responses that can become chronic reactions in our daily lives.
But science and research have found that the roots of trauma are “in our instinctual physiologies”, and is through the experience of “our bodies, as well as our minds, that we discover the key to its healing” (Levine 1997, p. 34).
As a result, somatic, body-related practices have been transformative in the field of healing trauma over the last two decades, incorporating postural yoga or related practices as a complement.
Savannah’s somatic counselor and body psychotherapist Betsy Powers brings her vision of movement for the integration of the mind and body to this month’s discussion.
The body link
(My yoga practice) provides an experience of moving through discomfort and beginning to trust the body to be able to handle that discomfort, stress, or fear, without the consequences of more shortcut methods of coping.— Betsy Powers
Betsy, who also serves as a yoga teacher in town, offered her time and resources for this interview while sharing about her healing journey with open-hearted nature.
She had a first breakthrough with embodied practices when she attended a workshop about teaching yoga to at-risk youth.
“The teacher was also a somatic therapist and this was the first I’d ever heard of such a thing. I knew it was exactly what I had been looking for”, she remembered.
Powers also describe how “movement” was the missing link in her own experience when coping with trauma: “I had, years before, struggled with severe alcoholism and knew that I wanted to help people if I ever got better. In the recovery world there is a saying that “you can only help people the way you were helped” and I was helped by therapy, support groups, and yoga. Somatic therapy incorporated the two things that felt essential to me to tie together: movement and processing—since support groups currently exist and I doubt I could improve upon the model.”.
To have agency, the sense of being in charge of your life, we must cultivate interception, “our awareness of our subtle sensory, body-based feelings: the greater awareness, the greater our potential to control our lives” (Van Der Kolk, 2014, p.97).
A licensed professional counselor, Powers discovered through her own healing process the powerful combination of nourishing relationships, professional therapy, and yoga, being the third ingredient that provided a feeling of agency.
“In my yoga practice, I face myself in a way that moves from feeling uncomfortable to joyous and back again with the final result being that things in my system felt resolved to some degree. It also provides an experience of moving through discomfort and beginning to trust the body to be able to handle that discomfort, stress, or fear, without the consequences of more shortcut methods of coping, such as shopping, drugs, sex, food, etc.”, she observed.
Yoga practices and related somatic exercises promote a journey toward embodiment. It has become a sensitive topic the acknowledgment that, in order to make progress with stuck patterns, we must relate with ourselves more authentically.
Looking inward into “the felt sense of your body in the here and now and welcoming all your emotions—even the ones you might tend to reject or hide from yourself or others” (Schwartz, 2022, p.87).
The bottom-up approach, which prioritizes body psychotherapy, has enriched the work with trauma and derivatives like addiction, allowing one to navigate somatic memory and somatic connections with patients.
“Trauma lives in the body, nervous system, and subconscious mind, so there is little permanent change through talk therapy besides softening the narrative or layering it with unconditional positive regard. You must approach a problem at the level where it lives —in the body— to change the reactive sequence”, Powers expounded.
The integrated functions of the “sensory and motor systems are so fundamental and so familiar that, like the fish that does not notice the water, we do not notice their ceaseless operation” (Hanna, 2004).
“I love people. I find them wonderful and endlessly fascinating. There is no greater honor than to have someone’s trust and to bear witness to their deepest vulnerabilities. I also love to see them begin to trust themselves and start to feel comfortable in their skin.”
It is commonly observed that traditional psychotherapy helps some patients temporarily or not at all, while in contrast, they can experience long-lasting results with somatic therapy.
“…trauma also requires trust and consent and so even for somatic work to be done, treatment must be long term so that the client can feel safe enough to allow it to arise in session at all”, Powers highlighted.
When teaching in a studio, Betsy offers yoga influenced by somatics since she frames her work in the experiential integration of body and mind. She taps into somatic awareness “woven in small ways into classes and is the basis of workshops on that theme (…) I see yoga as an emotional practice more than a purely physical one, and so this informs the way I cue in every class”.
Yoga with a somatic approach aims to “keep the general tone of the body within a parasympathetic nervous system dominance” while embodying the yogic concept of ananda, or bliss, enhancing self-sensing during or after practice (Criswell, 1989, p. 33).
In counseling, Powers does not use somatic yoga specifically but grounds her body therapy in somatic practices for a clinical setting such as “Focusing, Moving Cycle, Authentic Movement, Polyvagal Theory interventions”, just to name a few.
About her patients, Powers wholeheartedly added that “there is no greater honor than to have someone’s trust and to bear witness to their deepest vulnerabilities. I also love to see them begin to trust themselves and start to feel comfortable in their skin.”
You can practice yoga with Betsy every week at New Yoga Now or read more about her work with somatic therapy on her site.
Embodied practices attained on the mat or from a clinical, or even intuitive standpoint can solidify the metamorphosis that most individuals hope for.
The beauty of all is that the awareness that comes out of experience gives agency to the body to release and process feelings so the mind can heal.
◢ Sources:
• Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk
• Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma Recovery: Applying the Principles of Polyvagal Theory for Self-Discovery, Embodied Healing, and Meaningful Change Paperback by Arielle Schwartz
• Somatics: Reawakening The Mind's Control Of Movement, Flexibility, And Health by Thomas Hanna
• How Yoga Works: An Introduction to Somatic Yoga by Eleanor Criswell
