~ No one can do it alone and no one can do it for you ~ Peter Levine
Welcome to MbodiedU
Your nervous system has a story to tell. Let's listen. Let's be curious.
Do you want to experience yourself and your life in a different way than you are right now? Do you suffer from any pain, addictions, sleep issues or emotional struggles? Do you feel overwhelmed by the stress in your life? Have you experienced overwhelming events or trauma in your past? Do you feel disconnected from your body and always in your thoughts? Do you want to feel a greater sense of presence to yourself and your life? Do you have problems in your relationships like setting boundaries or expressing your needs? Do you want to learn more about your nervous system and how it effects you in your daily life? Have my workshops inspired you to dive deeper to discover what lies within?
MbodiedU utilizes the potent healing modality Somatic Experiencing developed by Dr. Peter Levine. The practice of Somatic Experiencing addresses the stored accumulated stress and trauma in your nervous system and strengthens your nervous system's ability to modulate future stressful and overwhelming experiences. By working with stored memories of stress and trauma in the form of fight, flight and freeze responses, Somatic Experiencing works to restore the gentle organic interplay of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems to create a more contained, regulated and resilient nervous system, resulting in a greater capacity to take in stress and contain intense emotion, and an experience of renewed vitality, health and presence.
Somatic Experiencing was developed based upon the ethological observation that animals in the wild have an innate organic intelligence within their nervous system that allows them to experience stressful and overwhelming events and then neutralize them, regulating their nervous system, so that it can return to their resting baseline. Humans have this innate capacity as well, but often it is overridden by our neocortex. This override leaves us in a constant state of high arousal and/or shut down caused by overwhelm in the system, resulting in numerous effects including various physical and mental health struggles and an inability to be present in our lives or to experience the life force that lies within all of us.
When will begin our work together our first goal will be to develop some regulation and capacity in your nervous system so that we may create a foundation for deeper work down the road.
How do we do this?
First and foremost, MbodiedU sessions will provide an opportunity for safe relationship. A place where you feel seen and heard. A place where you feel fully met and attuned to; that is, there will be another person whom is fully present to you and able to hold space for whatever may show up.
Furthermore, in sessions, my nervous system will provide a signal of safety to your nervous system. Unaware to most of us, there is a physiological rhythmical resonance that occurs between all mammalian nervous systems at all times. This resonance has existed since our time in the womb and is always operating in our engagement with others. Sometimes we are sending and receiving messages of safety, but often in our stressed and overstimulating world we are receiving and sending messages of threat, and because of these constant signals of threat, it makes it extremely difficult to fully settle into a state of physiological safety. Through resonance with my nervous system, a safe container will be created that will provide the environment to allow your system to settle into a state of safe physiology, possibly for the first time. Your nervous system actually experiencing a sense of safety and you getting familiar with how you experience that felt sense of safety, is the first step in moving towards greater regulation and more resilience in your everyday life.
Lastly, I will provide you with tools of self regulation that you can use in your daily life to help re-engage the organic ability of your nervous system to activate and deactivate in a healthy and adaptive way in response to stressful and overwhelming events. These tools will allow you feel you have influence over your body's responses and confidence that it is you who can make the greatest difference to your own experience.
Once we have built a foundation of regulation and capacity in your nervous system, this new foundation and the signal of safety that my nervous system will provide will create the appropriate conditions for old trauma and stress to resurface physiologically in a contained and safe manner. With my support, as your guide and anchor, you will somatically explore past experiences of your life that initiated a stress response in the nervous system that never completed and is now stuck in time, and is sending inappropriate signals of threat to your body and your mind through the operation of the Autonomic Nervous System. These signals of threat are what is keeping your body in a highly charged physiological state that overtime, often drastically affects your health and well being.By noticing and tracking your body experience through the lens of sensation, and by allowing emotion, you will reconnect to old body memories stored in the physiology of the Autonomic Nervous System and engage the organic intelligence of that system to complete these stuck physiological responses and restore a sense of deeper safety within you. Completing these old stress responses will further build and strengthen the regulation in your nervous system and develop your capacity and resilience overall.
As a result of our work together and the new sense of safety we create in your physiology, many physical and emotional illnesses will shift and change. You will build an awareness of yourself, an intimate relationship with your internal sensations which will provide a constant guide to navigate your life based on what you notice about how your choices and experiences effect your internal landscape. You will have tools that allow you to be in more control of how you respond to stress and through resolving old stuck traumas you will have more room to take in more stress in an adaptive way and experience overwhelm less and less. As a result, you will develop a greater sense of presence to yourself, to others and to your environment. Living fully embodied, you will uncover a life force that will propel you forward to your greatest potential yet.
~ The best way out is always through ~ Robert Frost