Favorite somatic experiencing threads

Hi everyone,

Last night we had a terrific show for the podcast. I'll be posting the audio tomorrow, but let me just say that it was wonderful to be able to connect with everyone. Herbie returned after being away for a month or so, and it was so great to have him back.

Herbie reported that he has been feeling his emotions in his body recently and has found it to be tremendously helpful. I promised that I would share links to three terrific threads that related to Somatic Experiencing with him.

If anyone just wants a quick introduction to this, Alan Gordon has an excellent brief introduction to the ideas in the "Feel Your Feelings" section of his recovery program.

For anyone who wants more in depth personal experiences, I here are the threads I mentioned to Herbie:

Perhaps the best thread is the the following one, where Chickenbone started describing what she does for somatic experiencing:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/thread...essing-childhood-issues.451/page-2#post-10682
When I was responding to you about how you've been doing somatic experiencing recently, I think that I was, more or less, just recounting what Chickenbone wrote. I learned a lot from her. I linked to the first post where she writes about, it others ask her questions and the discussion that follows is great.

The next thread was started by unknownstuntman. It's about a technique called "Focusing," which was discovered by Eugene Gendlin. Wikipedia has the following to say about Focusing: "Focusing emerged from Gendlin's collaboration with psychologist Carl Rogers. Gendlin developed a way of measuring the extent to which an individual refers to a felt sense; and he found in a series of studies that therapy clients who have positive outcomes do much more of this. He then developed a way to teach people to refer to their felt sense, so clients could do better in therapy. This training is called 'Focusing'. Further research showed that Focusing can be used outside of therapy to address a variety of issues. It is described in Gendlin's book, Focusing, which has sold over 400,000 copies and is printed in twelve languages. In recognition of this work, Gendlin was the first person to receive the "Distinguished Professional Psychologist of the Year" award from the Clinical Division of the American Psychological Association."

In my view, in focusing the point is to listen to your body to find out what you are feeling. Your body is very tightly linked to your unconscious mind via your autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the HPA axis (basically adrenalin), so sometimes we can listen in to our emotions via paying attention to our bodies. Here's the link:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/the-right-way-of-focusing-on-bodily-sensations.2183/

The third thread expands on this emotion-body connection to help people learn how to monitor their emotions by monitoring their body. It's important in TMS healing to be aware of what stresses you out, since stress really stokes the fires of TMS. By listening to your body, you can soothe that tension and better master your TMS:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/self-monitoring.2123/
Later on in the thread, Quert provides some very detailed information about how the emotion-body connection works, based on a part of the brain called the insula.

Finally, a classic approach to feeling one's feelings in the body is given in an approach called Somatic Experiencing, invented by Peter Levine. Dr. Evans, one of Dr. Sarno's 4 core psychologists, contributed the following to the wiki:
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Waking_the_Tiger
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Somatic_Experiencing

The above threads are definitely long, but as far as I'm concerned, they are required reading for anyone interested in feeling their feelings in their body. For that matter, I'd recommend them to any TMSer who is interested in being able to feel their feelings better.

Sorry for such a long post!!

Forest