Somatic Psychology & The Satisfaction Cycle
Last month I spoke about the importance of movement, about how movement is the thing that supports us in life more than anything else. How movement taps into the inherent intelligence of our bodies and supports our capacity to sense and know ourselves.
This month I want to dive a little into the psychology of the patterns and maps that lie beneath the surface of the way that we live, breathe and move.
Let’s start with a question - “What do you feel & where do you feel it if you rock your spine backwards and forwards?”
Now I would like to invite you to read on and my hope is that your curiosity will be sparked and maybe a small seed planted, one that asks to be nurtured through yoga & somatic movement.
Everything is a pattern
“Every part of you, every point, each internal organ, and every point in space out to the end of your fingertips, is mapped inside your brain.” - Matthew Blakeslee
Your ability to sense, move, and act in the physical world arises from a rich network of flexible body maps distributed throughout your brain, that grow shrink and morph to suit your needs.” - Lisa Peterson
You have multiple layers of body maps and patterns, and you create different maps for different movements.
Cleaning your teeth, driving your car, doing yoga - they are all maps, each and every one of them different to each other and you use different receptors to inform, repair and update your body maps.
Take the thing that is unconscious & put it into the realm of the conscious
Studies have shown that it is in our most formative years (1-7 yrs) that we lay the tracks for our future selves, patterns are formed out of our most basic need for survival and whilst most of them are useful, not all of them are.
These patterns are deeply ingrained into our unconscious, they are bedrock of who and what we are, they are the ones driving the show, even when we don’t know it. They are the bit of the iceberg that we can not see.
They may show up in the form of tension, stress, or anxiety. They may show up as pain, shallow breathing or other breath patterns.
Perhaps you even notice patterns in your habitual movements, maybe in the ways that you move through your yoga practice.
Do you find yourself overly attached to a sequence, or an an asana? Or do you find it uncomfortable to consider doing something different? Do you find yourself getting stuck into repetitive cycles of doing the same thing or easily overwhelmed and confused?
When you look underneath the hood of the car bonnet it allows you to investigate why the engine is not running smoothly, and even to repair the engine, in the same way when you learn to sense and feel yourself from the inside, you can witness your own habitual patterns.
When held with compassion and curiosity, you create the conditions for change.
“If you can sense it and feel it, you can change it”
Yoga is a work in, not a work out
Practices such as yoga and other forms of somatic movement are the most effective ways to build internal awareness.
It is my belief, and I know I am not alone in this, but for the practice to offer real and integrative change, it needs to be a practice that puts you, the practitioner, as being centre stage.
Practices that tell you what to do, that take away your sense of agency and personal power, reduce your capacity to sense and feel.
Practices that invite you in, that offer you the chance to ask questions, to explore with curiosity and to self inquire, they are the ones that will fundamentally help on your path to peace.
As the wonderful Amy Matthews said “Just asking the question is 90% of the answer”.
By asking yourself the question, you are inviting yourself to slow down, to get curious and pay attention.
Maybe you skipped the question above and want to go back, no problem.
Maybe you wish to ask yourself a different question. No problem.
IT IS ALL IN THE QUESTION & THE POSSIBILITY IS INFINITE
As a Yoga & Somatic Therapist my role is to help you ask the questions, I am not there to fix you, nor even to give you the answers; instead I am simply there to open the doorway for you to walk through.
“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves”
The Satisfaction Cycle
The satisfaction cycle is a core principle within BODY MIND CENTERING and also within my own practice. I have been playing with these ideas since first introduced to me by Donna Farhi many years ago.
It is a cycle that integrates core movement patterns that are reflective of the intuitive developmental stages that we move through in the first year or two of life.
It consists of yield, push, reach, grasp, and pull. When you were an infant, these movements were relatively simple; such as, pushing into your arms and legs or reaching with your eyes and hands. As you grew, these patterns progressed into increasingly complex movement patterns that communicated cross-laterally in your body allowing you to crawl and eventually walk.
Returning to these principles as an adult allows you to explore the feeling in your body, to sense into your internal experience and play with questions such as “Can I give my weight to the earth whilst simultaneously receive support?” or “Can I feel relaxed yet powerful, at ease but not passive?”
YIELD
To consciously give weight in order to receive support. Yielding is an act of relaxation and trust and allowing oneself to be supported by gravity and the earth. The action of yielding facilitates breathing and creates a buoyant rebound through the body that is experienced as lightness and poise. When you yield, the bones of the body become a natural trellis of support. All graceful, seamless, integrated movement demonstrates the ability of the practitioner to yield. Yielding sets the baseline for all changes of tone in the body.
PUSH
Push orients the body towards gravity, weight, and a sense of being grounded. A push begins with a body part pressing into a supporting surface. Push patterns direct force inwards creating and organising a compressed relationship between bones and joints. During the push, all the muscles around the limb concentrically contract. This loads the joint and compresses the tissue. The compression provides kinesiological feedback about where the body begins and the outer world ends. It offers physical containment and a psychological sense of boundaries. Push relates to what Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen calls ‘the mind of inner attention.’
REACH
Reach orients the body towards space and levity, lightness and buoyancy. A reach also begins with a body part like the head, hand, or tail. It lengthens muscles, joints, fascia and other body tissues and takes out the slack. A reach can pull the body into one long sequential flow, or simply offer a counter-balance to the pull of gravity in static poses. It relates to what Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen calls ‘the mind of outer attention.’
PULL
A pull is the culmination of a reach. It brings you back to yourself. Imagine picking an apple from a tree: you can reach for the apple, but you need to pull it towards you to take a big, juicy bite. Similarly, the action of pull gathers the force you send out and draws it back towards you. Pull resolves the cycle which starts with yield again.
With credit to Lisa Peterson for these definitions of yield, push, reach & yield
“Somatic psychology reminds us that the body does not just hold the memory of what happened to you, it holds the memory of what wanted to happen. For example, you can think of a child who was threatened and wanted to kick, scream, or run away but wasn’t able to do so for fear of making a bad situation worse. Somatic psychology helps us to slowly and mindfully reclaim these movement impulses as part of our healing. Embodying the satisfaction cycle can help you to connect to your inner sense of self and restore your birthright of balance in mind and body.”