Somatic BreakThrough Facilitator with 3 decades of experience. Book a low-cost $100 intro session with me: breakthroughcircle.com/intro…
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Wow, Jonathan’s review of his Somatic BreakThrough Dialogue Journey session provides an accessible blueprint for somatic-based, inner parts work-fueled emotional healing.
Jonathan provides a beautifully detailed description of how his current goals are impacted by a young energy within him that wants to be liked...and what to do about it. He demonstrates how to listen & hold space for it in ways that shift the dynamic. Thanks, Jonathan!
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My mother passed two days ago, after a week in the hospital and a week in hospice. And leading up to this, a decade of depression, Alzheimer’s and illness. She very much wanted to leave.
I feel blessed to have had two weeks at her bedside to say many layers of goodbye and to work through some deeper levels of mom stuff.
I’ve been actively working mom stuff for several decades. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving, even for someone whose life revolves around somatic emotional breakthrough work.
This turn of the initiation feels very different, though. As if a key is turning in a lock and releasing something important. Something yet to be revealed.
I’d love to hear from others who are further ahead of me on the Losing Mom journey.
What changed for you?
What became available?
What felt more complete?
How did your perception, compassion and agency shift?
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Before deciding what a body sensation means, I check the potato.
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge explains away Marley’s ghost:
“You may be an undigested bit of beef...a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you.”
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But here's where it gets interesting:
Meeting a physical need can make the emotional signal clearer. And I also suspect that hard-to-express emotional needs can borrow physical needs.
Hunger gets borrowed by deprivation.
Exhaustion by “I can't keep doing this.”
Gut contraction by fear.
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Trypophobic responses are interesting because they show how powerfully our bodies can respond to sensory information before we consciously make sense of it.
We may not choose the first signal. But learning to notice and stay with it without immediately reacting can create more room for what happens next.
I’ve seen quite a few of these and I remain puzzled how a restaurant owner cannot immediately see how terrible it looks. Why the obliviousness?
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First rule of Tantra: Don’t let the girl get cold.
a lab in the netherlands scanned couples during orgasm and stumbled onto the strangest finding in sex research.
when women wore socks, the orgasm rate jumped from 50% to 80%
the researchers weren't studying socks. the scanning room was cold, some women complained, socks were offered. suddenly the success rate exploded and the team realized they'd accidentally run the most important experiment of the study
the mechanism showed up right on the brain scans. female orgasm requires the amygdala, the brain's fear and threat detection center, to power down. cold feet kept the threat system quietly online. warm feet let it switch off. that tiny bit of physical discomfort was enough to block the entire cascade
- her brain cannot climax and scan for problems at the same time. the systems are neurologically mutually exclusive
- socks are a stand-in for the real variable: comfort. temperature, privacy, no time pressure, no risk of interruption, nothing pinching or hurting. every small discomfort is a tax on the fear center
- this is why the same technique works one night and fails the next. the variable that changed wasn't your hands. it was her nervous system's threat level
- the environment is doing foreplay before you touch her. warm room, locked door, no rush, phone away
men study techniques for years and lose to a cold room. her nervous system decides if orgasm is possible before your skills ever enter the conversation. handle the amygdala first. the socks were never about socks
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A facilitator doesn’t need access to your inner world for you to gain greater access to it.
I’ve worked somatically with clients around hot-button shame and core wounds without ever learning what they were ashamed of.
Disclosure and depth aren’t the same thing.
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People often begin opening up more by this point. But disclosure isn’t the goal.
Knowing they can keep the issue private allows them to share without surrendering ownership of the experience.
Privacy can support disclosure better than pressure does.
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Three years ago I wrote that the body knows how to heal physically and emotionally. Today I'd probably say it differently.
If I cut my hand, I don't heal it. I clean it. Maybe stitch it if necessary. Mostly, I try not to interfere with what the body already knows how to do.
I wonder whether emotional healing may work in a similar way.
Bodies know how to heal physically & emotionally, if we get out of the way. We store unmetabolized trauma until we're ready to release it. We can feel & work with these energies easier in expanded states (I use breathwork), coupled w/somatic & inner parts emotional healing work.
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That realization has gradually shifted the focus of my work.
Less toward trying to make change happen. More toward creating the conditions where protective strategies can relax enough for change to emerge on its own.
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