5 Benefits of Somatic Focusing

Over the years, as a Somatic Psychotherapist, I’ve encountered many tools and practices that promise healing and transformation, but few have had the profound impact that Inner Relationship Focusing has had on my life. More than a technique, it has become a way of being that continues to shape how I navigate life’s challenges and and precipitate the path ahead. Here are some of the powerful benefits that have nourished me on my own journey with Focusing.

1. Regulating the Nervous System

One of the first things I noticed when I began practicing Inner Relationship Focusing was a shift in how I responded to stress. Life still throws curveballs, but instead of feeling swept away by anxiety or overwhelm, I found myself with tools to steady my nervous system.

Focusing, informed by Polyvagal Theory, taught me how to ground myself. I learned how to sense when I was stuck in fight-or-flight and, equally, how to gently guide myself back to ground. In this way, Focusing has helped me to cultivate a deeper sense of safety in my body.

2. Discovering "Bodyfulness"

For over 20 years I have practised various forms of mindfulness and, in time, I qualified as a meditation and mindfulness teacher. It was only when I discovered Inner Focusing that I learned how mindfulness had also tended to keep me in the head, out of the body, and all the many different inner wounds that it held. I saw that I had been using mindfulness as an escape, to transcend my suffering and the various patterns of trauma held in my body. Inner Relationship Focusing was a profound doorway into a deeper stratum of healing, and empowered me to gently turn inwards, bridging the mind-body divide. In this way. In a world saturated with mindfulness, Focusing gave me the gift of bodyfulness—a way of being fully present in my body.

This embodied mindfulness helped me feel more connected to myself and my family of inner parts. Whether I was walking in nature or working through a specific trigger, it brought a sense of grounded presence that mindfulness alone hadn’t quite reached. Focusing has been like discovering a hidden room in a house you thought you knew or opening a whole new organ of perception, like a blind person discovering sight.

3. Unlocking Deep Insights

Some of the most surprising and life-changing moments I’ve experienced during Focusing have come from tapping into the Felt Sense—the fuzzy mix of feeling-sensation in the body that carries profound meaning. Focusing teaches us how to access the wisdom held within the felt sense that opens to reveal a rich repository of insight about our life or a creative way forward in a situation where we feel stuck.

There have been times when I was quarantined in thinking mind, ruminating on the hamster wheel with a problem, unable to find clarity, only to realize that my body held the answers contained within the Felt Sense. By learning to listen to these cues through Focusing, I’ve gained insights into my relationships, work, and even rusted-on personal patterns that I couldn’t resolve through logic alone.

4. Reparenting the Inner Child

Each of carries a tapestry of inner wounded children, each holding their own stories and grief and wounds. From feelings of abandonment and being unlovable, to being invisible or not enough, the inner children long to be held, and heard and tended. Focusing offers a deeply compassionate way to turn towards our inner children and to heal the emotional wounds that pattern how we think, act and show up in the world into adult life. Focusing gave me a way to gently meet these parts of myself, with care and a non-judgemental ear. Over time, this reparenting work has brought deep salve to old wounds, and helped me break free from patterns that once felt immovable.

5. A Lifelong Tool for Self-Healing

The greatest gift of Inner Relationship Focusing is that it offers tools that each of us, no matter who we are or the inner work skills that we have already learned, to self-heal and find greater inner wholeness. In this way, Focusing has companioned me through the ups and downs of my life; through the high peaks and passes of work, parenting and social life into a deeper sense of self love and wholeness.

Love, Rage & Pilgrimage

At the tail end of September 2022, my dad embarked on a profound pilgrimage. Following a lifetime of spiritual wandering, he walked through the gates of the Gomde  monastery in the French Pyrenees to begin his three year, three month, three day Buddhist retreat under the guidance of Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche.  This is an incredible voyage to undertake as a young renunciate, let alone in your late seventies, and it is a powerful reflection of my dad's dedication to find and embody Truth. 

It has also brought a mix of powerful teachings into my life.  On the one hand it has forced me to sit in the fire of old abandonment wounds: to fully inquire into the felt sense of loss in my body and unravel unconscious beliefs that I somehow do not matter or am unlovable. These mental and somatic 'programs' are carried over from childhood, learnt in the fray of a sometimes tumultuous family of origin, and paradoxically taken on as survival mechanisms that kept me emotionally shielded, safe and small. 

Dad's departure has also forced me to examine the architecture of repressed anger towards him.  As a child it did not feel safe for me to voice such power and so I buried it, battening it down with a mix of unconscious mental commands and somatic contractions that kept it in the dark. When dad initially told me he was going to do a retreat, the initial flurry of emotions gave way to a kind of numbness.  Using Kiloby inquiry tools I leaned into this, asking the body whether I could freely get angry at dad. A strong 'no' in the body pointed to repression and using specific Kiloby tools, I have begun the work of reaccessing this anger in a healthy way, giving voice to the hurt of the inner child.  

This work is profoundly important because repressed anger holds a part of our vitality, power, and wholeness.  Left buried, it is often somatised, boiling over into chronic pain and other body symptoms.  And it is medicine in an era of spiritual bypassing (the push to 'transcend' our suffering or 'negative emotions' through transcendental practises such as meditation) and the cult of the happiness trap ("don't worry, be happy"). 

Many other feelings have emerged since dad entered retreat, but inquiry into both the abandonment wound and repressed anger highlight the bigger picture of my own life long search for Truth.  The truth of who I am, at my core, beyond all labels,  concepts and received ideas.  A truth that is multi-layered, not just soul-centric or spiritual - the preserve of the divine - but also psychological and somatic. Rooted in flesh and blood reality.  Liberated by the dissolution of cognitive repression programs, patterns of somatic contraction and the healing of old trauma.   

For me, healthy spirituality encompasses all four realms of being human: soul, spirit, soma and psyche.  And it includes all aspects of the human experience, no matter how dark or shameful, holding that each represents a doorway into a deeper truth. Arnold Mindell, the founder of process oriented psychotherapy, describes this metabolic approach to healing as rainbow medicine: a recognition that all phenomena are ultimately born of a non-dual pilot wave that animates and gives substance to the entire universe.  That in stepping through the doorway of even the most challenging experiences, we can access a deeper truth that has its rooted in the sacred.  This is embodied spirituality: the sacrament of flesh and blood; the communion of joy, love, rage and grief and the altar of this living, breathing, beautiful body that sometimes suffers.   

Dad, I wish you well on your voyage and hope we meet again.  May you be happy and know the causes of happiness.  May you find the truth that is your birth right.  Borrowing from the   liturgy we once recited together at the Awakened Heart Sangha in North Wales: May the heart's awareness awaken in the unawakened, where it has begun to stir, may it never fade, and may it awaken fully.

I love you.

Soulcraft, Emergence

The following poem emerged at the tail end of a Wild Mind intensive late last year.  It is significant for two reasons.  First, it tracks something of my life myth, the soul-centric blueprint out of which I am constellated.  Poet David Whyte describes soul as the truth at the centre of the image we are born with.  It  represents our greatest offering to the world, the unique ecological niche we were born to inhabit, and the largest conversation we are capable of having in our lifetime. 

Secondly, the poem marks a significant passage in my life from one life stage to the next.  Specifically, from what Bill Plotkin describes as the Wanderer in the Cocoon, wherein we have our soul encounter, to the stage of early mythopoetic adulthood, the Apprentice at the Wellspring, wherein we find ways to deliver the riches of soul to the world.  He writes extensively about this human journey in his book, Nature and the Human Soul.

In my experience, soul encounter was the culmination of an extended period of wandering the cocoon.  During this time much of who I took myself to be, and the life I had built, utterly unravelled, paving the way for an encounter with something that is at once powerfully familiar, yet also infinitely mysterious.  This encounter ultimately happened in the wilds of Wollemi on a solo wilderness fast.  Without exaggeration, it changed the entire course of my life.  After years of wandering, I had been initiated into something profoundly sacred. Something that is intimately human, that nature-connected cultures have always embraced, but with which industrial growth societies have almost entirely lost touch.

I will write more about the unfolding of my life myth in another post but, in essence, it uniquely constellates me to guide others to find the truth at their centre: psychologically, spiritually and soul-centrically.  Truth buried in the fertile darkness of the unconscious, prior to words, concepts and received ideas about who they are.  Truth precipitated by repeated time in nature, dedicated inquiry and a frame-shifting of ordinary consciousness. 

The poem thus reflects both the retrieval of a treasure from the subterranean rivers of soul, and my emergence back into the day world with that treasure. It points to some of my sacred wounding, to shadow work and the path through it into an embodied wholeness.  Ultimately, it speaks to the mysteries of nature and psyche, to wild encounters with dream figures and to the wild mystery of dreaming while awake. And it speaks to the incredible alchemy of awareness itself, which longs for us to embody all of who we are.   

If you are tracking your own descent to soul, or would like to know more about this work, get in touch.

EMERGENCE

Expecting grand words

I sat

In silence

Pen to paper

To pen much later

That the old is over

And new life 

Erupts

Electric green from midnight black

I walk the night now 

Bringing silver fish for my people

In a glass jar 

Of night stars

Hewn from the cosmic walls of a wombat's belly

Drunk on phosphorescent whorls 

And Eddie’s 

Of the animate earth

Gratitude flows as amber sap 

In this lone tree 

But the path was seldom free

Or easy

No walk in dappled shade 

Thank god

For I am made 

Of each and every agony

Now I live and love with dignity 

Grown from graft and grit, 

Ground by savage words 

And witless wit

Oh, long ago

I came to die 

On hallowed grounds 

As Odin did

Hanged in search of sacred runes

From Yggdrassil 

The world tree

Woe is me

Half blind

Half wild

Pitch poured black,

The devil’s horde,

Seething

Roiling

Breached the sides of me

And at the helm

No demon, 

Ghost

Or overlord, 

Coal charred and black abhorred

But the radiance of

The inner sun

Krishna dancing

Friends,

All things that roil on troubled seas

Are doorways 

Into deeper truth

Like rainbow medicine 

That radiates as gold

In darkness

From silent wells

Where silence blooms

And truth alone prevails

This patina of light and dark 

Flows as it has always done

As all the names and forms of god

Working Repressed Emotions

Could emotional repression be behind your depression, anxiety, addiction or chronic pain?

From grief, anger, and fear to joy and shame, almost all of us have some degree of emotional repression. This typically stems from early childhood experiences in which we learned one or more emotions were unsafe or unacceptable. Perhaps dad’s anger was frightening or mum couldn’t handle it when you were sad. Perhaps you learned you got love when you showed up as the good girl/boy and didn’t express your own anger. But that which lies buried ultimately festers and seeks release. The problem is that repressed emotion is unconscious. We just aren’t aware we are repressing it. 

Fortunately somatic repression therapy offers powerful tools to identify the extent to which emotional repression is behind your suffering. More than this, it offers powerful pathways to access, work with and ultimately liberate what lies buried, often yielding profound shifts in mental and physical wellbeing.  

Liberating repressed anger can - for instance - alleviate decades-old chronic pain. And bouts of depression - seemingly impervious to standard talk therapy - can be healed through the liberation of buried grief or sadness. 

If you’d like to explore your own emotional repression, get in touch. I offer tools to map what repression may be in place in your life, with tailored pathways to heal and find wholeness

Become a Nature Therapy Guide

I'm super excited to announce that in September of this year I'll be teaching a 9 month program in Somatic Ecopsychotherapy to therapists at Metavision Institute.  This represents a huge milestone for me as it will weave together two healing paradigms that have profoundly transformed my life: somatic inquiry and ecotherapy.  To my knowledge, it will also be the only program of its kind anywhere in the world.  First equipping students with the tools of inner relationship focusing that they are then better resourced to benefit from the profound healing power of nature therapy practices.  

On this multi-stage  journey, participants will learn tools to embark on a voyage into their depths, and ways to cultivate a more holistic wholeness that encompasses the four dimensions of being: psyche (mind), soma (body), soul (a thing’s ecological niche and purpose in the web of life), and spirit (the divine, non-dual substance from which we are wrought).  

The program is iterative in nature, starting with a grounding in somatic inquiry tools that will, in turn, catalyse a richer experience of and deeper unfolding in the final ecotherapy module.  This offers participants a rich opportunity to explore the powerful synergy of somatic work and ecopsychotherapy, and the possibility of being in relationship with nature through embodied practise.   

Ultimately, the program seeks to offer its own medicine in these times of disconnection, dissociation, depression and despair, offering up the salve of wild wholeness in service of the more than human community and, in some small way, to the evolution of consciousness herself.