What is Somatic Attunement

Supporting the Soul’s Landing in the Body

Shot by Camille Misty

Half a year ago, I launched into some work that is an amalgamation of several different methods, modalities, training, artistic experiments, and personal processes I’ve undertaken over the last ten years. What has been significant for me in composing this work is that it’s become an engine of curiosity and learning.

Somatic Attunement is the midline through which I have oriented myself - an exercise of restoring trust in the body, through direct relationship.

I thought I’d share more about what I’m doing and how it’s being done, through this platform, because it can serve as both a space for witness and also provide a historical account of the work as it continues to grow and refine.

I’m grateful to have had many people engage in this work through one-on-one sessions and groups. I’m blessed to have received generous feedback and learnings from each experience, which has helped me land more in the work. It’s nice to receive responses from life that communicate “There’s something here, keep going.”

What am I doing?

This work follows an “inherent treatment plan”, as Rollin Becker, DO would put it. Meaning, my highest agenda is having confidence in and allowing life’s healing impulse.

There is so much information and resources in our bodies that we have been trained out of feeling. The mind-body split, mind intentionally written first, often creates a power-over dynamic where we fight to control life. Where chronic domination leads to misplaced reactions and incessant tensions.

Many of us walk with questions about purpose and motivation. I have seen that when we are embodied, these questions lose their grip and the felt experience of “knowing my place” eclipses. We project less into the future and rely more on the sensations here and now that pull us toward potential.

So, a large part of my work has been to provide people a space to acknowledge and feel the already established resources in their system. Which serve as grounds for both orientation and expansion.

More practically, the sessions are broken down into four aspects - Somatic inquiry, touch, movement, and breath and awareness - that are all placed within the framework of a relational field. I go into detail below.

Somatic Inquiry

I have found that transformation is more readily available when the client has a focused inquiry. They know why they have brought themselves to my space, even if it’s vague. There’s some kind of symptom presenting itself in their life and it is unclear to them what the root could be. Symptoms could look like the all-too-familiar relational struggles, search for purpose, workplace conflicts, burnout/lack of energy, and confusion in decisions.

The definition of inquiry is “the act of asking for information.” So somatic inquiry is directly engaging with the body to ask for information to present itself. In the sessions, I ask people to presence a question surrounding the difficulty they are experiencing.

I do this because a question promotes curiosity and allows for a spirited exploration, rather than a shrewd look at the “problem.” We use this question as a fulcrum for the session. Through the rest of the session, we create space for the answer to arise. Creating space is done continuously through permission and engagement with the sensations presenting themselves in the body.

This is an important step for me because it leaves the power with the client. They surface the inquiry, create the question, and can find information in their body throughout the session. I just create the environment, reflect back what I sense and hear, and bring added awareness.

This builds strength in my commitment to honoring the intelligence of the body and allows the client to relearn how to listen to their body.

Awareness & Breath

A witnessing space is created during the session, where subject and object can find union. This is done with awareness building through resources like consciously observing the sensations and emotions moving in the body, feeling and allowing the expansion of the breath, and continuously giving space for thoughts to happen without needing to engage in their content.

Intellectualization can be a defense mechanism against feeling. I serve as an anchor to remind the client of this and also promote compassion when it happens. Awareness deepens through the process of allowing. If we can give space to what’s happening rather than trying to do something about, explain, or figure it out, clarity and ease become available.

Awareness is important because it takes us to the root of the problem. Otherwise, we stay in the muddied waters of the symptoms and usually end up trying to fight them through habit.

Sometimes, I will use specific breath techniques when they feel appropriate, but most often I wish to allow the system to regulate itself through the breath. This work is all about restoring trust in the body. Technique used inappropriately can override the system, which reinforces a need to control the body.

Through cueing the breath and guiding the client into their body, we create more self-contact and resource, which supports the unwinding of information and opens the possibility for revelation.

Laying on of hands

The power of one nervous system consciously and attentively attuning to another nervous system, through the hands, is transformative. “Listening hands” as many bodywork modalities call it.

When I apply touch, my hands serve as receivers for the fluid system of the body. Sensitive hands can feel the motility and availability in someone’s system. They can also feel where there is less movement.

My touch does not impose itself on the client. I don’t have an agenda of making something better. I strictly use the hands as a tool to listen and give resonance to the nervous system. The listening field I create is a constant negotiation with the clients’ system.

The receptivity of the hands creates a feedback loop. Relation intensifies as the nervous system downregulates. The client and I drop into deeper states of stillness, where insight, reorganization, and realignment naturally emerge.

Studies in the frameworks of Polyvagal Theory, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, Polarity Therapy, and Structural Integration support this part of the work.

Ground as Resource

Movement is an aspect of the session that integrates. I have the client interact with the space through small or large gestures, shaking, tapping, walking, spiraling, folding, and unfolding.

These movements are slowed down to magnify one’s kinesthetic sense. When we slow down, we can locate and interrupt chronic movement patterns that reinstate danger where there is none. For example, a constant subtle holding in the pelvis or jaw. Or a disconnect between the feet and the ground.

The main goal here is to support my client in finding pleasure in movement and to be able to use the ground as a resource, rather than fighting gravity.

This aspect is largely inspired and underpinned by studies of contemporary dance and butoh, yoga and tai chi, Moshe Feldenkrais, and F.M. Alexander.

The Relational Field

All of the previous qualities are cloaked and embedded within a holistic field of awareness that becomes the space for mutual exploration.

This work is deeply relational and can serve as an axis of our interdependence with all of life. The relational field is the starting point for this work. Without it, I as a practitioner am at risk of pathologizing my client and further rooting already ingrained material.

As a practitioner, I include my interior world - what’s moving in me as I sit with a client - while I support the client in permitting and accepting their interior movements. Through this awareness, we build the relational field that becomes intimate and safe enough for life to unwind what was held before.

It’s about creating a proper holding environment where a person can feel at ease enough to be and learn about themselves and their surroundings. The relational field restores contact through the resonance and responsiveness that I as a practitioner provide. The development of this field allows for a “meeting of” what has yet to be or insufficiently met in my client before - seeing what has been hidden.

It’s important to say that this field extends beyond the room of the session. I can attune to and get a sense of it before and after a meeting takes place. Several times I have experienced feeling a client’s current state and process before they enter my space. I don’t attribute this to giftedness, but the power of attuning to the relational field. Which already establishes itself when someone reaches out for a session. Additionally, it’s likely, given the nature of the nervous system, but not required, a slow and multi-session process to develop such a field of contact.

What’s most interesting about this for me is how new layers of information can surface when relationality is progressively strengthened.

Restoring the Fluid Body

The body holds fluid intelligence from embryo to death. Before skin, muscles, bones, and even DNA, there was fluid.

Embodiment, to me, is an ever-deepening sense of the quality of change. To get quiet enough to be in constant contact with Movement. To have a sense of awe for what is being made possible through the body.

In times like these, where disembodiment has led us to crises, we must find our way back. I hope my work will be a part of that pilgrimage.

“Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water.

Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid.”

-Lao Tzu, Tao Verse 78

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If you or someone you know would be interested in working with me, all information can be found through the links below.