Body-Centered Approach
– Marion Woodman
What is a body-centered approach to therapy?
Somatic therapy is a field that recognizes the connection between your body and your psyche. The body is where our earliest emotional patterns were formed at a time when we couldn’t speak. The body is also where we hold trauma and abuse.
By working directly with your body in psychotherapy, connecting sensations and symptoms to psychic processes, we work towards changing and resetting your nervous system to support re-inhabiting yourself at a cellular level.
Embodiment: Imagination and the Body
Mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the imaginative life as following your bliss. In other words, when “the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living,” including one’s life work.
Embodiment involves working with the imagination while also maintaining awareness of the body’s signals, such as sensations, feelings, aches, pains, and/or symptoms. Holding both simeltaneously allows a connection to occur allowing for an embodied metaphor to be known. To understand embodied metaphor, one must look to the body’s dreaming process. By working with your body’s metaphors and storytelling, your path and patterns reveal your authentic life.