We Begin in the Body – Listening Deeply to the Somatic Energy Patterns in Your Body – Unlearning Stress Patterns, Befriending Your Nervous System & Releasing Trapped Trauma – Transform Your Experience of Anxiety, Stress, Sleep, Energy, Pain & Illness – Allow Yourself to Be Supported.

July 5, 2020

“Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.” ~ Unknown
 
Wellbeing begins by getting deeply in touch with your body. Unlock your body’s story and heal your emotional body. Harness the power of your nervous system to support healthy relationships and personal well-being.
 
We begin in the body – going into the wilderness of the body may feel out of control or uncomfortable for us and it can also be a place of joy, discovery and aliveness.

Being embodied allows us to build emotional and physical resilience. We can learn to be in the body and track everything that we notice. As we discover and uncover the energy of what is with us in the present moment – and touch in to what we did not know existed within us – feelings of anxiety, trauma, stress and illness begin to shift, change, move and lessen.
 
When we befriend our nervous system – and begin to notice the subtle cues that it gives us, we begin to embody our core intelligence – the ground of our being – and we begin to feel expanded, grounded, more awake and alive.
 
Most of us have experienced much more stress and uncertainty over the last few months than we’re used to experiencing in our lives. There’s so much information coming towards us, that we can feel consistently overwhelmed or numb or alternate back and forth between these states.
 
If you want to begin to feel better in your body, you can learn to pay attention to what you’re feeling moment to moment and give your feelings some space to be felt.  We practice unconditional presence – noticing the noise and discomfort that arises in the body and mind – and practice being with what we notice.

Unconditional presence is a way of being with whatever is noticed, like it or not, in a friendly, openhearted and curious way. We often need some support to help ourselves begin to pay attention and notice what we’re feeling, so we can navigate our emotions and don’t become too overwhelmed, anxious or shut down.

Sometimes it feels like we are falling apart from the inside – this is usually an invitation to go deeper, to acknowledge, allow and open to this experience. During our practice of unconditional presence, you may notice feelings and sensations arising from the body – including physical and emotional pain, which grabs your attention. You may also notice mental noise, agitation or frustration. Then, we can wonder – what’s the point of being so uncomfortable on the inside of ourselves?
 

Why is it that when you have a tense conversation with a boss, coworker, or partner, you feel like you’re staring down a growling tiger? How is it that both situations cause a fight-or-flight response—and what can you learn from it?
 
As it turns out, the same neurological processes that cause unwanted stress can also be harnessed to summon ease, relaxation and spaciousness. When you approach these subconscious processes with openness, mindful attention, and—above all—curiosity, you can gain the understanding necessary to shape their outcomes. Our most hardwired survival responses are regulated by the vagus nerve and can be consciously regulated through somatic processes such as Somatic Experiencing (SE), Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma, Relational Bodywork and Somatic Education, and Somatic Exercises and Specialized Movement.

You will learn and practice:

  • How to interpret the subtle language of the nervous system
  • Present-moment awareness and the mechanics of choice
  • Your personal “protection-connection” equation
  • How to cultivate positive nervous states
  • Examining your internalized stories about the world
  • How to discover the stillness available in every moment
  • What actually nourishes your autonomic nervous system
  • The continuum of resilience
  • T­­he process of reciprocity, rupture, and repair
  • How to recognize physical cues of both safety and danger

I will work with your body’s innate ability to pick up social signals and cultivate small-moments of safety, retraining your automatic responses to stress, conflict, and hardship. With somatic practices to help you achieve greater wellness, self-awareness, and emotional resilience.

Psychological and emotional processes manifest physically through the physiology, structures and usage of the body. Sensory feedback via interoception – of the bones, muscles, fascia and organs/viscera – provides information about our emotional state of being. That is, does the body signal alarm and arousal or safety and calm? If interoceptive systems signal discomfort, pain or distress, you may enter into and stay in a heightened state of arousal or activation through a self-perpetuating positive feedback loop. This can result in intrapersonal challenges, relationship, work and educational problems, chronic pain, headaches, gastrointestinal problems, sleep issues, feeling detached, anxiety, PTSD and other difficulties.

The emotional, physical, and physiological distress may stem from a variety of challenges, including: pre and perinatal difficulties, attachment insecurity or disorganization, physical injury, sexual assault, emotionally toxic relational or societal factors, natural disasters, car accidents, surgery/anesthesia, and other circumstances that felt threatening to us.

I want to help you create an ongoing connection and honour what is happening in your nervous system. The nervous system is the foundation for all of your lived experience – its where everything begins in the mind body system – it’s in the pathways – not in the brain – all of these things are built into to our human body for very good reasons – fight, flight, freeze and flee.
 
Everyone has a nervous system that works generally in the same way – it’s the first system that entered our human species ancestry to immobilize in the face of threat – to disappear – to become invisible and will do this unless it feels safe enough to come back into being. How do you get a turtle to come out of it’s shell? I will honour your biological processes – and help your nervous system come into a more regulated state.
 
Our biology has created creative ways to survive – to stay alive – to fight, to shutdown – your biology takes over because it feels you are in danger. Your biology has taken you out of the ability to be present now. The goal is fluidity and flexibility in our nervous system – rather than always staying in one place in our nervous system. Our system is not able to stay in a place of connection at all times, but can become more flexible and feel safer and more open and curious during these times.
 

What does safety feel like inside of your body? More settled, more grounded, less in your head, more in your body. Feeling warm and connected to yourself is a part of this healing process.

Together, we will consider some very important questions about your experience of moving, sitting, sleeping, feeling, relating, breathing and being – here are some considerations for you now:

  • How do you know where your body contacts the world?
  • What happens when you notice your body?
  • What does your tension tell you about how you are moving in the world?
  • How do you know you are breathing?
  • How do you know you feel safe?
  • What does your body tell you about the space you inhabit?
  • How do you inhabit space and interact and move in the world?

Our patterns of behaviour arise from our life’s experiences and emerge through the filters of our perceptions and our conceived reality. 

From the beginning of our lives, we construct scenarios and strategies to engage with the circumstances and relationships surrounding us. This shapes our awareness of ourselves, others and the environment and lays a foundation for our movement, expression and communication in the world.

As we embody our cellular patterns of expectations and responses, we gain understanding of their relevance and importance in past experiences. We also gain awareness of and insight into releasing those aspects that are no longer necessary for our realization of self in this moment. We become freer to make different choices. As we release our stress-induced behaviors, we discover deeper compassion, wisdom, and ease.

Nervous system dysregulation arises from developmental trauma, medical procedures, accidents, assaults, institutional, interpersonal and systemic violence, abuse and neglect. Overwhelming experiences can be processed in a gentle way where the focus is on the body’s emotional and sensory data, rather than on the details of the actual event. This work helps with the settling of nervous system so that the body’s ability to self-regulate is restored – much like resetting a thermostat. The work focuses on bringing you to a state of relaxed alertness.

My work draws on the wisdom and biology of the body/mind to help resolve trauma and bring people to a greater sense of groundedness and stability. I believe that ancestral histories that remain unintegrated are held in subsequent generations – together, we can break the patterns of early developmental and intergenerational family trauma – so that you can discover and cultivate your inner mother.

Chronic stress takes its toll on our bodies and minds. Working with individuals from a body-centred framework, connects and integrates our experience – our sense of meaning, emotions, thoughts or the “felt sense” in the body. I facilitate your process of accessing the “felt” sense in your own body and support the here-and-now shift that wants to happen. I work with early developmental trauma, birth, sexual, intergenerational and prenatal trauma.

If you’re feeling anxious, stuck or overwhelmed by life – it’s time to begin again. Start with finding a therapist who takes a whole body health approach to your wellbeing – someone you feel comfortable with, who listens and understands you, who supports your growth, and honours your strengths. Together, we will uncover hidden trauma and chronic stress patterns and reactions, so they can be resolved and healed.

With a somatic approach to whole body/mind health – helping to ease emotions and stress, reducing feelings of overwhelm and overthinking. I will help you resolve anxiety, trauma, addiction, pain and eating disorders with an integrated approach rooted in somatic psychotherapy – helping you feel better.

Growing evidence shows the importance of touch in healing from developmental and shock trauma. Healthy physical contact supports healthy emotional connection for lifelong resilient attachment and bonding. When disrupted by developmental wounding, illness or shock trauma, or when insufficient for healthy bonding the infant can grow into a child, adolescent and adult in physical and/or relational dysregulation and freeze/dissociation. Appropriate touch also supports and promotes healing of physical structures in the anatomy that impact a person’s life because of pain and/or movement difficulties.

A gentle, somatic practice and co-regulating touch, compassionately and safely treats trauma and stored stress reactions, fight/flight/freeze patterns, self-defeating behaviours – restoring a sense of joy, freedom, ease, balance, happiness.

Somatic Experiencing and Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma, Relational Bodywork and Somatic Education – has changed everything about the way I work – and how I live my own life. This new awareness of how trauma and stress physiology affects every part of our lives is life changing. I see what happens for those I work with – and I know that you too, can experience lightness, aliveness and joy. 

My approach is relational, experiential, deep and embodied – helping you increase your capacity to be present with difficult feelings and emotions, and getting to the roots of what is troubling you.

I will share whole body health-focused processes designed to help you notice your thoughts, constriction and expansion in the body, energetic vibration, and what’s being reflected in the outer world that may be mirroring the inner world.

What Happens in a Whole Body Health Somatic Practice session?

During a one-on-one session, you can choose to lie on a bodywork table in-person, you can sit on the couch in front of me, or lie on the couch in front of me with pillows supporting you or on Zoom call, from your own home. We join together and listen to what is happening in your autonomic nervous system, your thoughts, as well as other systems in your body, including: your fluid body, connective tissue, breath, bones and skin.

We take time to notice moment to moment – what your body and mind are telling us. Then we make adjustments to enhance emotional and physical somatic wellness. The autonomic nervous system communicates in sensation, emotion, images, and thoughts, as well as through subtle movements and gestures. It is through the vehicle of your nervous system that we find the tools we need to create balance and healing. This is a process of noticing threat and ease in your nervous system – along with witnessing and pausing for sensing what is happening in the here and now.

Whole Body Health Somatic Practice generates a body–wide experience of easing out of rigidity, tension or defensive body holding patterns (excess sympathetic or dorsal tone) and into the flowing ease of the ventral parasympathetic nervous system.

We are setting the conditions for flow to happen again in your nervous system. We have to encourage it with placing our attention into the present moment. There is a rhythm to the timing of the session, so I may ask you to pause and notice what is happening in the here and now, even when you are telling a story. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear what you have to say – I am listening to the language of your nervous system, and sometimes that means we need to pause to return to the present.

Developmental trauma interrupts our self-regulation, attachment and physiology. Together, we will work to repair attachment, bonding and the traumatic stress physiology held in the nervous system. We will get to the roots of the concerns that have been plaguing you – at the level of the nervous system – the interplay between your social engagement system, physiology and attachment dynamics – and receive somatic techniques for supporting resilience, nervous system regulation and repair.

This is a deeply rooted approach towards embodiment, attachment, how trauma imprints the body, trauma resolution and recovery through the body, and discovering your inner mother. Within a safe container, engage in a grounded, safe approach to healing trauma patterns.

Clear seeing is allowing yourself to be just as you are – fully embodied and alive. In your life, who allowed you to be just as you were? Mostly, at a very young age, we were taught to give others what they needed and to suppress what was really happening inside of ourselves. You will learn to be there for yourself and ride the experience of sensations, feelings and thoughts. Becoming present to the parts of your that have been ignored or inhibited and bring compassion to the parts of yourself that you disowned, that you believed were unacceptable.

I am now offering in-person Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma sessions in-person, as well as online.

Imagine being able to heal and release trauma, fully, without delving into the stories? Finding freedom from your family’s destructive and limiting patterns. Finally finding deep peace with your past, allowing it no claim on your future. Imagine knowing you have the capacity to expand and achieve lasting success and impact for yourself and your work in the world.

This work helps you come back to yourself again and again – and it takes time to do it – I’ll be waiting for you.

Let’s talk about your experience and how I can support you – so you can begin to feel better in your body – I will answer any questions you may have about working together.

I look forward to being with you.

with love from my heart, Kim xoxoxo
[email protected] / www.s3p.d51.myftpupload.com I

Whole Body Health & Well-Being from the Inside Out.
Deep healing at the level of the nervous system enables you to explore and expand your inner landscape where self – confidence and inner agency reside. When you heal your nervous system, you can more readily access deeper ways of knowing and being that include intuition, imagination, sensuality, and the subtle body of emotions. Get in touch to learn more about working with me – [email protected] / www.s3p.d51.myftpupload.com

What to Expect During a Whole Body Health Somatic Practice Co-Regulating Touch Session

For true emotional and physical healing, we can’t leave our body and how it feels and responds, out of the process. Each person needs something very specific in their healing journey, which is why it is so important to have a customized approach with sessions that are specifically tailored for you – a combination of emotionally-focused psychotherapy and body-focused Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma.

Your body doesn’t have energy – it is energy. When we allow traumatic stress that is contained in our nervous system to begin to move through our system – flow begins to happen in our body and we feel more energetic, grounded, healthy and alive.
 
We explore our fluid bodies through the language of sensation, co-regulating touch,and  subtle movement. We have the opportunity of allowing time to slow down, to notice, let go and shed that which needs to shed, and to come through anew and refreshed.
For those who would like to focus on a body-focused, somatic approach, we begin by talking about your background, symptoms and history. We do this online and or in-person by sitting in chairs across from each other or you lie on your back on a table. When you are sitting in a chair, we can do some talk therapy, and you may also be asked if you are open to closing your eyes and noticing your feelings, emotions and body sensations that are happening for you in each moment.
 
For those who would like to do Co-Regulating Touch Bodywork for Trauma – sessions consist of lying on a table with eyes closed – and I offer touch on several areas of the body: the head, stress organs, the belly, and joints in the body.
 
Sessions are done fully clothed. Each session is one-hour, unless we are doing an extended session – and is unique depending on what you are experiencing on that day and would like to focus on during a session – we want to tune in and understand what’s really going on in your body – beyond pathology and diagnoses – to allow your body to move into a flow state, rather than to remain stuck in a stress response state – during the session and in the hours and days afterwards.
 

3-Month Online Offering – Cultivate Your Somatic Aliveness – access deeply held emotional, physical and relational concerns and focus deeply on you during this program. Starting with a one-hour introductory session, then a 1.5 hour family systems trauma session – to access and heal the roots of inherited family trauma that you are carrying with you and how it affects your health, relationships and work in the present day – then an additional 6 online sessions to help you access deeply held body holding patterns, somatic trauma and emotional patterns and integrating unconscious blocks to help you access your internal, somatic freedom. A total of 6 one-hour sessions, on Skype or Zoom, one 1.5 hour family trauma healing session, and homework to help access internal transformation from anxiety, depression, panic, trauma, stress, eating disorders, relational struggles, chronic illness or health concerns – get in touch to learn more – [email protected] 

Other Offerings – Family Systems Imprint – 90-minute Session – an in-person or virtual online Zoom session – an opportunity to get to the roots of intergenerational trauma patterns & begin a path towards relational & relationship healing. 

Discover Your Inner Mother – Healing the Mother Wound – uncover your family dynamics and trauma history – this is an opportunity to strengthen your internal relationship with your mother, father and extended family – in ways that contribute to healing – get in touch to schedule an online or in-person session – [email protected] / www.s3p.d51.myftpupload.com

Sessions for Individuals & Couples – an invitation for you – to slow down and feel the strength of a supportive resource, move beyond blame and notice how our nervous system states inform our interactions with our partner, feel present in your body, to unwind patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, hopelessness, chronic stress & pain, trauma, regulate your nervous system, to cultivate trust in your moment-to-moment experience, your naturally wise heart, and your capacity to connect to yourself, those you love and the love that surrounds us.

Somatic Body Learning & Practice and Somatic Experiencing Trauma Co-Regulating TouchBodywork for Trauma sessions are available for you now. Waking you up to Somatic Resilience & Regulation – the innate wisdom of your body, healing inherited trauma patterns, feeling yourself below the level of thought, and accessing your full beingness in flowing, fluid motion. 

Get in touch to learn more about Family Systems Imprint Sessions & Individual Body-Focused Therapy Sessions, and Somatic Trauma Touch Work in The Somatic Sanctuary – The Anxiety, Stress & Trauma Restorative Clinic – in-person, online or a mix of the two – and to set up a time to work together:   [email protected]

The Anxiety, Stress & Trauma Restorative Clinic:
Creating Well-Being Through Nervous System Regulation.
Heal Relational Trauma – Break the Cycle of Inherited Family Trauma.
Nurturing Connection, Restoration & Building Resilience.
Easing the Body ~ Calming the Mind ~ Opening the Heart.
Somatic Experiencing ~ Somatic Practices ~ Trauma Touch ~ Movement Practices ~ Whole Body Systems Approach for Healing Inflammation.

Somatic work can be done effectively online, as well as in person – online sessions are available for those who would prefer not to come in to the office at this time, for those who live far away from the office, or prefer to work from your own home – [email protected]

Working together enables everyone who is willing to do the work an opportunity to decrease feelings of anxiety, pain, depression, chronic stress, pain or illness – as well decrease the chatter in the mind, and ground your mind and body with the depth of the intelligence found in the body. Experience lasting somatic transformation and feelings of calm, peace and wholeness – within your own body and within your relationships.

You will learn to feel and by doing so, you will move towards whole body health and well-being that you can feel within you.

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Testimonial 1

When I came to you I felt confused, disconnected and broken. Now, I'm on my way to feeling whole. Thank you.
Kim Cochrane
2016-10-06T10:59:12-04:00
When I came to you I felt confused, disconnected and broken. Now, I'm on my way to feeling whole. Thank you.

Testimonial 2

I’m so glad I’m giving myself space to explore what’s happening in my life and to understand my feelings.
Kim Cochrane
2016-10-06T10:59:51-04:00
I’m so glad I’m giving myself space to explore what’s happening in my life and to understand my feelings.

Testimonial 3

I've wanted to do this for a while and I'm so glad I did - I trust myself more now, I feel more calm and open - working together has changed the course of my life.

Kim Cochrane
2016-10-06T11:00:16-04:00
I've wanted to do this for a while and I'm so glad I did - I trust myself more now, I feel more calm and open - working together has changed the course of my life.
0
Kim Cochrane