Mind/Body/Spirit

Can you remember a time when someone said, “Can I tell you a secret?” Were you intrigued? Did you feel a slight stirring inside? What sort of revelation did you prepare yourself to receive? Isn’t it funny how images and connotations, interpretations and expectations can make the body respond in certain ways? What do you experience in your own nervous system when you expect a client is about to reveal some secret traumatic event? How does your body physically react? With impulses, shivers, goose bumps? Perhaps a sense of dread and queasiness in the belly, a catch of your breath . . .? While such disclosures are often necessary and vital to treatment, there are also other secrets that can bring healing to soma and soul. Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, simply and profoundly captures the point when he writes, “The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.” This wise truth was delightfully demonstrated recently in a session with Neko, a twenty-two-year-old client with mild developmental delays, whose strength and soul wisdom had been hidden in the unlikely location of a traumatic past.

Have you experienced the pleasure of getting so close to your goal that you can almost taste success? Have you tasted the coppery flavor of fear or characterized an unpleasant experience as distasteful? Disappointment can be bitter; revenge can be sweet and babies’ feet are delicious. Getting something you want at the expense of something else can be bittersweet, and romance can add spice to your life. If capturing events and emotions in olfactory and gustatory terms heightens the felt sense of the feelings, why not make the yummiest emotions burst with metaphoric flavor? Take happiness for example. You most likely don’t need a formal definition of happiness since it can be argued that you know it when you feel it. But because happiness can occasionally slip by unrecognized, it’s worth knowing what the Dalai Llama says about this state of pleasure. "I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness." His Holiness explains.

Is mind/body/spirit unity scientific or is it just a fairy tale? In a therapeutic setting, somatically embodied intention, deeply sensed, can feel like conjuring clinical magic.

Imagine a somatic solution to the hazards of stress. Whether it’s a slow car in the fast lane, a fast truck in the slow lane, the sudden realization that your phone is missing, or worrying about next year’s storm, how quickly and vividly will your mind and body deliver a high velocity jolt of stress?

I was exploring the psychic dimension of mind as a channel for reducing stress, receiving intuitive information and promoting healing. While I’d forgotten most of what I learned about statistics, attunement to the intuitive power of the inner being remains my passionate interest and a core intention of my clinical work. My deep belief in the body/mind/spirit/heart connection as a source of knowledge, and the use of hypnosis for accessing its available wisdom, has led to some fascinating therapy sessions.

While cognitive, behavioral, and parts-work modalities have validity, reliability and effectiveness, somatic and soul-centered approaches may contain a different type of potency when you clients' complain of feeling stuck.

When you are faced with high intensity stress, where do you turn for help? While processing problems with external support may provide a plethora of possibilities, an intelligent source within can also offer intuitive guidance. The innate wisdom of your soul often revealed through somatic experiences or what my colleague calls the “feelings of your feelings” can be your way out, or this case, in.

According to Joan Borysenko, "the body is the way in,” when it comes to spirituality, sexuality and healing. “Life force energy," she says, "shows up as a spectrum of emotions. To work with life force energy you have to be in the moment. This seems to be the way to work with trauma and resilience. It’s less top down intellect, and more bottom up body-to-mind, how changes in the body show up in the mind, in our thought processes. Working with clients for years, I frequently see people who are traumatized have a moment of transcendence—they leave their body in trauma and enter a different reality, akin to a mystical experience. The spiritual realm is beyond religion. No matter what door you go through, if you talk to a mystic from any religion—Jew, Christian, Muslim—something larger than the individual mind occurs. They are all talking about the same thing: this immediate sense of recognition.”

We all have the potential for wisdom to emerge through the intuitive channels of mind/body and Soul. This intelligence presents a powerful vehicle for accessing information that can keep us healthy, keep us in touch with our true Selves, and help us cope with life.

What does it mean to provide a somatically attuned and integrated style of psychotherapy? How can attunement to the innate organic wisdom of the body help us guide our clients to discover and use the healing resources within? Questions like these often guide the essential aspects of our clinical work. We leave our graduate programs, our modality trainings, our seminars and workshops and then consider, how do I bring it all in? Bette Freedson, LCSW, offers her first monthly blog: Soul Wisdom to discuss intuition, Self-wholeness and holistic integration of body, mind, soul in psychotherapy.