Want to fix your mind? Let your body speak.
After asking my permission, Emily Price, the therapist on my laptop screen, talked to my feet. She thanked them, saying they probably had a lot to tell us.
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I had described a looming fear about of my writing, encroaching failure. Price sat in front of a hanging plant in her home office in Austin, Texas. With her reddish-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, her delicate features communicated a mix of directness and vulnerability that created a sense of shared space, intimacy, even through Zoom. She listened, took notes and, with a wave of her hand, suggested that we put aside my story of the situation. thing that bubbles up inside you,” she said. She informed me that we were "just going to be curious and explore" and guided me through my body, encouraging an awareness of physical sensation.
We we concentrated in silence, my eyes closed, the birds chirping outside his office window. Then she asked me to report. My shoulders were vaguely weak and wet, I said, and my calves and feet were more than vaguely consumed by a feeling of unease that was familiar but hard to put into words - a feeling halfway between an electric current and paralysis.
Price was giving me a demonstration session of a type of unconventional therapy called somatic experience. SE belongs to a growing movement of somatic – body-based – ways to heal emotional wounds. In therapy, whether we are troubled by low-level suffering or beleaguered by more powerful and relentless forces, we tend to expect that talking about our path to insight will lead us to become at least a little better, less overwhelmed, even happier. The mind is the way in and out. But a core S.E. principle is that, although we may assume otherwise, we live "bottom up", as S.E. practitioners say, and the content of emotional states ranging from common anxiety and depression to the onslaught of full-fledged post-traumatic stress disorder arrives in our brains from the neural circuits that run throughout our bodies. SE upends beliefs about the mind as the origin and essential location of our feelings.
After addressing my feet, Price asked me: "What are you n...
After asking my permission, Emily Price, the therapist on my laptop screen, talked to my feet. She thanked them, saying they probably had a lot to tell us.
For more journalism audio and narration, download New York Times Audio, a new iOS app available to news subscribers.
I had described a looming fear about of my writing, encroaching failure. Price sat in front of a hanging plant in her home office in Austin, Texas. With her reddish-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, her delicate features communicated a mix of directness and vulnerability that created a sense of shared space, intimacy, even through Zoom. She listened, took notes and, with a wave of her hand, suggested that we put aside my story of the situation. thing that bubbles up inside you,” she said. She informed me that we were "just going to be curious and explore" and guided me through my body, encouraging an awareness of physical sensation.
We we concentrated in silence, my eyes closed, the birds chirping outside his office window. Then she asked me to report. My shoulders were vaguely weak and wet, I said, and my calves and feet were more than vaguely consumed by a feeling of unease that was familiar but hard to put into words - a feeling halfway between an electric current and paralysis.
Price was giving me a demonstration session of a type of unconventional therapy called somatic experience. SE belongs to a growing movement of somatic – body-based – ways to heal emotional wounds. In therapy, whether we are troubled by low-level suffering or beleaguered by more powerful and relentless forces, we tend to expect that talking about our path to insight will lead us to become at least a little better, less overwhelmed, even happier. The mind is the way in and out. But a core S.E. principle is that, although we may assume otherwise, we live "bottom up", as S.E. practitioners say, and the content of emotional states ranging from common anxiety and depression to the onslaught of full-fledged post-traumatic stress disorder arrives in our brains from the neural circuits that run throughout our bodies. SE upends beliefs about the mind as the origin and essential location of our feelings.
After addressing my feet, Price asked me: "What are you n...
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