When Yoga meets Somatic Experiencing
Recently I attended a workshop called: "Yoga & Psyche, Where Somatic Experiencing meets Yoga", created by Mariana Caplan and presented by the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute. I have been interested in this psyche-yoga fusion since 2005 when I was taking a teacher training in the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco, and we were studying anatomy and physiology. The information during the training was great and at the same time felt constricted to a materialistic view only. I have never been fully in agreement with the mainstream perspective of the body as an object that operates in separated parts like a machine, because dis-ease can be caused by many factors like: environment, social interactions, toxins, our birth, in-utero events and even from ancestral memory. Alopathic medicine has compartmentalized the body into different isolated parts, like a machine made of pieces destined to fail at any given moment. This sounds way more like a watch than a human body. The cause of cancer, bone degeneration, depression and scoliosis is way more deep and mysterious than mainstream culture and mainstream medicine has believed.
While teaching Yoga, even in the beginning years, I noticed that many patterns of behavior in the body, even misalignment or lack of body awareness, usually seemed to be directly proportional with the persons general personality, social and environmental attitude, and their history. If we pay enough attention, just by watching somebody's normal resting posture we can tell a lot about their present life and past.
Mariana Caplan is giving language and form to the psyche in the body, to what Gabor Mate talks about in his book "When the body says no", and what Peter Levine keeps giving attention to by working with trauma resolution in his groundbreaking work of Somatic Experiencing.
“In this field, the vast and ancient philosophy, science, and practice of yoga lies intermingled with the relatively new field of Western psychology, and the important innovations of somatics and neuroscience. When these two bedmates bring together each of their gifts, a new creation is born that is greater than either alone, and brings new evolutionary possibilities with it.”
The body is the place where all memory resides, and all our story is stored in our physicality, morphing our personality, social relating, posture, relation with gravity, bone-muscle-fascia quality, including elasticity, tension and strength. All experiences, including in-utero, are stored and shape us. The body is the place to resolve trauma or any kind of intense memory, The great news is that we don't have to re experience our traumatic memories, but only resolve them by processing and integrating the sensations stored in the body. I have been working at the this level for a decade and half, through Hatha Yoga, Process Coaching and recently through Yoga Nidra. The possibilities of healing and integration that can occur at this level are amazing.
For more information about this kind of work I am accepting a few private clients in person and via skype, and I'll be facilitating another 7-week series of Process Coaching and Yoga Nidra in September 2017. More information is available here.
Also, I'll be teaching some workshops at the Process Coaching Annual retreat in Sebastopol June 24 and 25 of 2017. Check the link here for registration: http://www.processcoaching.com/2017retreat