Somatic Awareness: The Key to Positive Change
17 years ago a massage school instructor in my Holistic Health Practitioner program said something that's stuck with me for all these years:
“Awareness makes the change.”
It struck a powerful chord because at the time this was still a new concept for me: The notion that we have the power to take control of our internal response to any external circumstance by intentionally directing our awareness where we want to place it and bringing thoughts and patterns that were previously unconscious within us into the light of conscious awareness.
But over the years on this path of mindfulness and embodiment I've learned and experienced lots of layers of nuance around that statement.
Because awareness alone doesn’t actually make the change.
You've no doubt experienced this truth in your life when you've become aware of a habit that's causing you suffering but that, even while you cognitively understand how beneficial it would be to change this habit, for some reason you've just never quite seemed to be able to actually change.
This is because feelings are what ultimately truly motivate us to make sustainable change, not thoughts.
We can cognitively understand how harmful a certain habit is and think how wonderful it would be to change it — and even believe that change is possible — until the cows come home.
But without pairing that mental awareness with a clearly felt sense of just how bad this habit makes us feel in our body every time we enact it, we're highly unlikely to make a change that sticks.
Or if we are able to make the change, it will likely feel like pushing a boulder uphill, requiring a ton of effort, energy, and “will power”.
This is why I see the practice of cultivating not just greater mindfulness but also increased somatic awareness – an interoceptive sense of what we’re experiencing and feeling in our inner landscape, inside our bodies, in a given moment — as so key to creating positive change in our lives.
Because it’s incredibly hard work to make sustainable behavioral (external) changes until we're tuned in to what we feel inside our bodies in correlation with those habits of action or inaction.
But once we get in the practice of noticing not just what our minds think about a habit but also noticing what happens within our bodies in response to that habit — the internal feelings and sensations that get sparked each time we perpetuate the habit — we start to be able to more fluidly and easefully move in a different direction when we choose to.
The more practiced we become at tuning into what we're picking up through our senses in the body and noting and naming what we're feeling emotionally in any given moment, the more easily and consistently we can initiate positive change.
So mental awareness alone doesn’t make the change; but paired with somatic and emotional awareness and clearly focused intention, it most definitely can.
And if this all sounds nice in theory but leaves you feeling like, “But how on Earth would I actually start to become familiar with my inner landscape in that way??” my Flourish Coaching Series was created to support you in doing just that.
I currently have a few spaces available for this juicy, deeply intimate type of one-on-one coaching experience. Just reply to this email if you feel called to explore what type of authentically embodied transformation could be possible for you.
With Love,