It’s so important. From the standpoint of when we work with somatic stuff, we’re working with the nervous system. When we’re talking about creating change and empowerment, and we’re talking about creating better self-worth and confidence, we’re talking about helping you to build your nervous system function. We’re talking about helping to become regulated in your nervous system. That’s the entry into this conversation, the entry into the land of somatics when it comes to women’s empowerment.

But as we go through the trajectory, one of the next biggest things that comes is the real, true embodied experience of choice. Because that’s one of the things that we do and we bake into all of the things that we do within the Somatic Coaching Academy curriculum, we start to really hone in on it in the level 2 program - choice and the way to give a client true empowered choice. People tell us all the time, "that’s the first time that I really had somebody help me to understand that I actually had a choice." We can't really get to a place of true empowerment in our lives until we’ve had that experience of making true empowered choices where I can say "yes or I can say no. Either one, I am safe in my body to know that I can make empowered choices."

The other thing is the importance of understanding core wounding. If we’re going to create true empowerment, we can’t really do that and come from a place of our true authenticity, our true self-expression, until we understand and can unravel and talk about the ways that core wounding is created in our system and how that’s a part of how we as humans may show up and to see the contrast of that to be able to move forward in true empowerment. What is core wound? Does everybody have them? How does that develop? What are we talking about?

Core wounding is wired into our physiology, wired into our soma. In terms of empowerment and self-esteem and self-worth, one of the things that happens is our negative self-talk, the cruel and negative ways that we talk to ourselves. It can feel like an endless battle of battling shadows that you can’t ever win against because we’re just being bombarded with all that negative talk. Instead, somatic coaching goes into the core work. As we change nervous system regulation, empowerment internally, we start to change patterns within our physiology, the negative self-talk starts taking care of itself because the negative self-talk is really simply a projection of what’s going on in the physiology and the nervous system itself.

It seems paradoxical that in order to deal with the self-talk, we would go into the sensations. But from a standpoint of how our physiology works and how the creation of our reality works, we can go into the sensations, do sensation work, and then the thoughts tend to take care of themselves.

Core wounds are exceedingly common for basically everybody. But what is a core wound? This is a big conversation. We’re just opening the door to it right here. As we open this door, if you have questions about it or if what we’re talking about creates confusion, just reach out to us. We’ll have a deeper conversation. We’ll let you know we can get more information about it because we only do so much in this framework in the context of a podcast.

A core wound sometimes can start to develop in utero, by the way. That actually used to be something people speculated, but now it’s pretty good. We’re conceived whole, if we have a pretty healthy incubation period in the mother’s womb and we’re born and we’re born fairly healthy, let’s just set it up that way for a second. Then we have all the self-esteem in the world, we advocate for ourselves. Babies advocate for themselves all the time. They let you know when they’re cold, sleepy, tired, hungry, that you know by crying, and then we attend to them. Babies are just one with everything. They’re full of love. They’re just inherently one with all. But what babies aren’t is safe. Babies depend on their security, depend on their caregivers. As babies turn into toddlers, turn into young people, what can happen is the belief systems of the parents, grandparents, community, family members, etc are going to try to pass themselves down into the offspring. Think about beliefs as viruses in a lot of ways. A virus, its whole job is to survive. It just goes from host to host to host to host to host and just keep surviving.

Beliefs are just like that, too. Even if you’ve lost someone. If I sit here and describe my great grandfather, who I remember died when I think was in my early 20s. I knew him for a couple of decades. If I describe him, what I’m actually describing are characteristics of the belief systems that he held. That’s really what lasts beyond the person. When we’re remembering somebody, what we’re really remembering is the belief that gets passed down. What we’re adopting from them are the beliefs. When someone says, "You’re just like your grandfather, you’re just like your mother," what they’re really saying is, "You are actually their belief systems". What exists beyond any one of us are beliefs. They just keep passing themselves down. They have an inherent need to survive. The way that belief systems get passed down through generations is through things like manipulation and punishment, primarily. That manipulation and punishment that’s associated with transferring the belief system results in a wound for a child if it happens before 14.

Our brain develops differently between ages of 7 and 14 and then beyond. But usually, beneath the age of 14 is the critical period for someone. If the belief transference happens in profound ways in that amount of time, it can create a wound or a core pattern in the person’s, in the child’s physiology. And that core wound could be associated with lack of self-worth, essentially. And so basically, that not-whole-self, not-whole-worth becomes a lack of it, that’s a wound. A wound is something that’s not whole, if you will.

One of the things the experts and coaches need to keep in mind is not only are we helping these individual women to repattern and reprogram themselves, but through the process of repatterning and reprogramming each individual woman, we are repatterning and reprogramming the collective of what it means to be a woman. Those things have been passed down, that are held within each of us. It’s not held as just the thoughts that are swimming around in our head, it lives through our physiology.It is important in women’s empowerment work for us to be able to detangle these collective patterns that, by the way, don’t just affect women. They affect all of us with how we treat women, how we think about women, how we are with women, how we are with ourselves and in relationships.

At the Somatic Coaching Academy in our Somatic Practice Essentials program, we teach a few different ones. We teach some breathwork, gentle movement practices, self-massage and meditation. Just doing some of those things is like going to the gym every day to work your muscles. It’s like going every day to the gym and working the resiliency in your nervous system, the ability to be present and centered and grounded and calm and relaxed and those kinds of things, which through time, they feel good and they’re really important. If you want to keep going to create that lasting change and that lasting transformation, you’re going to want to continue to collect tools that can really help people to develop even deeper and more profound transformations.

Self-esteem issues and the self-acceptance issues don’t just live in a person’s head. They’re actually wired into a person’s physiology. And that, again, comes from this core experience that you have. If you don’t like using the word core wound, you can also think about it as a core pattern or a formative experience. You think about something that happened early enough in a person’s life where not only did their mental concepts get formed, but also their DNA got formed that way. The way their DNA expresses themselves got formed that way, and their physiology got formed that way. It’s a whole pattern that’s happening in the person’s body. And part of that pattern is being projected into our thoughts.

Another way to think about it, let’s say you’re in a movie theater where they used to have projectors. Imagine you don’t like what’s happening on the movie screen and you run up to the screen and you’re trying to like, “Don’t do that”, and you’re trying to stop it on the screen, and it doesn’t change. You got to go back to the projector to actually turn off the projector, and then the movie turns off. Often when we’re doing coaching work, we’re again, trying to get people to yell at the screen and think that we’re going to get an effect. We’re working with the projection, not the core stuff that’s underneath it. The core stuff is in a physiological pattern. When you’re doing somatic practices and somatic coaching, we’re working with the physiological patterns themselves. It allows you to put a different reel on the movie projector and then play a different movie.

That projector, by the way, is projecting through your physiology every 10th of a second or so. Every 10th of a second.

It’s never actually a weight problem. Every client who wants to work on weight, they know exactly what habits can help to create healthy weight - exercise, getting good sleep, diet. People understand that. It’s no mystery.

Every single time with the weight stuff, there’s something deeper going on. A lot of times, our projections are really wrapped up with emotional stuff. Most of the women who’ve had weight issues have already been to therapy. They’ve already worked for lifetimes worth of therapy. Out there in the world, we hear that coaches aren’t supposed to or don’t necessarily work with emotions, that that’s a therapist lane. The reality is that’s not necessarily true. Coaches work with emotions all the time. They may or may not be well-equipped to do it.

Even when people have had years and years worth of therapy, we start to work with the body components. What we find is there’s things to unravel within the body that help a person to then blossom. They don’t even care about the weight so much. They really care about being healthy. They care about the relationships that they’re able to have when they feel like they have a healthier weight. But there’s always deeper issues. One of the most powerful things that can happen within the context of a safe and trusting coaching relationship is a person can get in touch in the present moment with their body in a way that they can confront the sensations that are scary and have a witness and another person safely trauma-informed there with them to sit with uncomfortable sensations that are actually preventing them from moving forward in their weight loss journey.

Whenever we’re working with people their challenges are being fostered or entangled with emotional issues. And a lot of those emotional issues can come from past history of trauma. A lot of that snowballs into a result of having weight challenges for somebody. So a lot of times you get all those types of things wrap themselves together. So when we’re working with people or women in empowerment or with weight challenges, lot of times, those challenges are rooted in trauma. The likelihood if you’re doing work in women’s empowerment, that the challenges that your clients are dealing with are rooted in trauma are quite high.

Most of the clients have some trauma history that is standing in the way of them being able to be the people they want to be, have the things they want to have, and do the things that they want to do in the world. They don't specifically seek coaching because of that, but because of the trauma sensitivity in our methods, we are able to be that safe place for the unraveling of the patterns within their system. We are not doing therapy. We’re not talking about the past memories, but we are unraveling the subconscious programming and rewiring their nervous system for true empowerment.

In the course of that rewiring, it’s like if someone is doing some structural work, some bricks need to be redone on the side of a brick building. What do you see? You see scaffolding go up. Scaffolding goes up to support the work on the building. You don’t just go up there and start whacking away on the bricks. Because if you don’t put scaffolding up and other security measures in place when taking out parts of the brick, the building could fall down.

You have to support the building while you’re doing the work to create a new building. That’s what we use with safety anchors whenever we’re doing work, even if we even suspect at all. We might think, "I’m going to start dismantling an old pattern, it’s like taking the bricks down on the side of the building. I need to have scaffolding in place to protect a person’s building from not falling all down". And so scaffolding are these anchors that we use. We create stabilization anchors, stabilization points for a person to be able to keep coming back to as those transformations are occurring because they don’t just happen all at once. They happen over a course of a week, months as you’re doing a program with people. Because now you just don’t one day get up there and change off the side of a building and it’s all done. It takes time to work through that and figure it out.

One of the things that we need to understand when we watch women not changing is their subconscious mind is not going to let them fall apart when they have kids to take care of, when they have a job to take care of, when they have elderly parents to take care of, and all of these things that women hold. Their system is not actually going to allow them to fall apart. If they’re not changing, one of the very smart things that their system is may be putting in place is they know very well there’s not enough scaffolding in that program, and their psyche is not going to let them change. And that’s not the fault of the woman.

That does not mean that she is broken. But you know what a lot of women are going to do? They’re going to go through a program and they’re not going to get a result. And at the end of it, they’re not going to say anything about the program or whatever. And they certainly aren’t going to know about the things like scaffolding. At the end of the program, a woman who doesn’t succeed says, “I’m broken”.

Part of the way we can do that is by having these trauma-sensitive skills, create that scaffolding, create those safe places, educate women on the trajectory of this, the investment that they’re making in terms of time and energy and the importance of it, and helping to hold them safe throughout the program. That’s all those trauma-sensitive practices.

We teach according to the natural laws of the universe, which say that nothing is inherently good, bad, right, or wrong. We start to actually unravel even what good means and bad means and positive means and negative means. We start to just take all of that very judgmental energy and look at it in a totally different way.

Because when we look at having a relationship with other people and with the world and with ourselves through the lens of the natural laws, we actually come into a real relationship, a whole relationship, an empowered relationship, rather than trying to have a positive relationship. We see a ton of toxic positivity out there. It could be really damaging in the women’s empowerment space. To really be able to create change, women have to be empowered in their know and in their emotions and in whatever comes up. We have so much judgment about ourselves, about what’s positive and negative and good and bad and right and wrong. So using the natural laws is a really powerful way to help people to step into true alignment that’s not polarized.

This applies to the idea of pattern deconstruction and reconstruction too. Oftentimes, our negative relationships with our bodies are baked into a pattern, and you could call this a core pattern, core wound. Every physiological pattern is four parts: sensations, thoughts, words, and actions. And internally, you can’t see somebody else’s sensations and thoughts, but you can hear their words and see their actions. The words and the actions are like, if we’re looking at that iceberg thing, that’s above the water, and the thoughts and sensations are below the water. In other words, I can’t see them when you’re experiencing them. But all four parts of them form a pattern. Oftentimes, those negative relationships we want to tackle are the thought part or the action part, potentially, or the words we use. But not many people are diving into that sensation area to deconstruct it and then reconstruct a more positive formulation. I really love the idea of the pattern deconstruction, reconstruction to help people have more positive relationships with their bodies.

One of the things we’ve been finding this year, specifically, as we’ve been working with women in one of our group programs, is how likely we are actually to have undesired sensations around things that "should feel good" and how we have patterns of self-punishment in place that prevent us from having the things that we really want to have and feeling good and actually feeling better in our bodies. One of the biggest patterns this year, specifically, that we’ve been noticing with our clients and students is rewiring those patterns of self-punishment so that people can actually accept feeling better in their bodies and raise their set point for everything, wealth, abundance, health, and everything.

There’s always this balance of relational dynamics. Is anything ever truly independent? You could be living on a desert island and you’re still really not independent of the environment that you’re living in. Is that how we want to think about life? I think that that’s one of the things that as we work with women’s empowerment, we get to be in this place where it’s not just experts like us standing up here telling you what is, but that we actually get to be in a co-collaborative environment where we’re asking questions that don’t have answers and we’re coming up with co-collaborative ways and creative solutions to them.

Oftentimes in empowerment and women’s empowerment, when we think about that idea of independent but also relational with the environment, that sometimes is that when we feel emotionally challenged or threatened, that our instinct is to reflexively try to change the environment because we feel emotionally threatened. That’s not always a wrong thing to do. However, it also leaves us in a place of diminishment or disempowerment. Because then what we’re still feeding into is that 'The environment is causing me to feel the way I feel'. I’m not saying that the environment doesn’t have something to do with it. It’s a both-and.

When we really work on self-empowerment, when we really build ourselves up from the inside, when we do that core wound healing work and start to transform ourselves internally for these deeper patterns, then we take actions in the world that naturally change the environment, and our tolerance to be in toxic environments goes way down. We don’t tolerate toxic environments as much anymore. We treat them less. There’s this back and forth. We have to be careful that if we’re in the world, and we’re always upset with what’s going on in the world, or we’re always trying to change what’s going outside of us, then we’re actually disempowering ourselves in a lot of ways.

Changing what’s going on within ourselves is actually best done not alone in our room with the door closed. It’s better done within the context of safe relationships, safe community, so that you can work in a balance of changing the outside and the inside together. They work hand in hand. We change better in community because we’re able to accept change more readily through our subconscious mind when we see that we’re being accepted by the people around us.

Ask questions about people, find out what their desires are, what their goals are, and then identify the gap between where they want to go and what they’re currently experiencing right now, and then help them experience simple tools to walk just a little bit further in that direction. When you can just give people the tools to walk a little further in that direction and to give them an experience of how profound the somatic techniques can be, oftentimes that reduces the level of skepticism.

When we really can claim our uniqueness and our authenticity, a lot of times we’re going to have to confront our own fear of the judgment of being weird. Can somatic techniques help you do that? Better than any of them. When you do that work within yourself, all of a sudden you’ll see that you’re not attracting people who are skeptical. You’re actually attracting people who are super magnetized to you. Because clarity, confidence, and authenticity is super compelling and magnetizing.

When I was working inside of the health care system as a PT, and I was making that transition into more body-mind work, when meditation was still weird at that point in time, 20 years ago. I had a lot of people that were like, "Why are we doing this? What’s going on?" It felt a little off and weird. But then as I picked it up more, as I really stepped into it and started to own it for myself, I started doing my own practices and really started to own it. That is when I started getting referrals within the clinic from other PTs because their clients started to want that. They’re like, "You know what? Brian does that stuff. Go see him." Then I became known as the person who did that. My schedule was so busy, I started my own practice. Because now people are like, “Go see Brian because he actually looks at you holistically, whole body mind.” They didn’t even know what that meant, but they knew that’s what they wanted.

The more you step into that being, becoming that holistic professional, people will identify you that way. People will magnetize towards you.

We’ve referenced this in our past podcast on the Four Levels of Trauma Awareness. You definitely want to go check that out because understanding the trauma spectrum is really important to understanding retraumatization but also where you’re at. Because you’ve got to know, are you trauma-aware? Are you trauma-informed? Are you trauma-sensitive? Are you trauma-sensitive? You’ve got to know where you fall to be able to know how you’re helping clients and where the gaps are so that that doesn’t happen to you.

If you are following a trauma-informed framework, which is what we teach here at the Somatic Coaching Academy, that has the five steps of safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. That’s the fifth step. How do we ensure that we’re not we’re traumatizing. Well, we use that framework to do that. If we’re creating safety as the first step, that’s going to reduce the level of retraumatization, trustworthiness, reduce it, choice, reduce it, collaboration, reduce it. Then finally, we’re finishing with empowerment. Just follow that framework, and it really ensures that it’s going to happen in a powerful way for people.

The stress and the anxiety are actually superficial. What’s really underneath of that stress and anxiety is usually deep, deep shame. And people may or may not realize the depth of the shame that is holding them and their body image in place. One of the beautiful things that the sensation-based work does is it can help somebody to touch in on the depths of the shame. I’ll use a few other emotional qualifiers to talk about this - the depths of the guilt, the depths of the fear, the depths of the grief, humiliation fear, embarrassment, the depths of those kinds of things in a really unassuming way. Because if we hop in there and we talk about somebody’s shame or their deep fear or grief or fear of humiliation or embarrassment, they’re going to defense right up and right back to the scaffolding that you were talking about. Even really solid scaffolding, it’s not going to be enough when somebody gets really defenced.

Then they’re going to get intellectually defenced, too. They’re going to think that that’s not an issue. We can’t just hop into those really deep things or throw people in the pool. When we use the sensation-based methodology, first of all, we actually do soften the body, we soften the resistances, and then we go in in a way where actually the client has their own epiphany. We’re not pushing them in it. The client has their own epiphany. Because we can hold space for sensations that are felt, they’ll say, I’m feeling a sensation, and they’ll describe it. They’ll have their own epiphany, and then they can transform from there. That’s one of the most powerful ways that we really can empower people with body image stuff because there’s deeper things going on.

Of course, somatic techniques can help with stress and anxiety. Learn the somatic techniques. Let’s deal with the stress and anxiety. It’s very, very important. Also, please know it’s superficial because what’s really going on in there is some deep, deep stuff, and we can absolutely help that, too. And that’s what’s going to powerfully and sustainably transform body image stuff.

Oftentimes we think about resilience as the ability to overcome challenges. We call that macro resilience. Macro resilience doesn't serve us really well because then we are creating heroes because we have to come through some type of adversity. Then for us to have meaning in our life, we actually have to come through some adversity. I think then subconsciously, if we value on that, we actually will continue to find adversity in order to overcome. That gets exhausting and tiring.

We have a different conversation about resilience. Resilience is the idea of the window of tolerance. It takes us back to this trauma-sensitive model, that there’s a window in which our nervous system optimally operates. You could be outside of that window, either hyperregulated or hypo, not regulated, hypo aroused or hyperaroused outside of that window. That can happen when we have trauma reactivation, all kinds of things. That’s life, though. Life knocks people out of their window of tolerance. We can’t have an expectation that you’re always going to be in your window of tolerance. We have an expectation that we’re going to get knocked out.

Now, here’s where resilience comes in. Can we get ourselves back in? How effectively can we get ourselves back in to our optimal level of arousal? That’s microresilience. That happens every day for a lot of people, if not every week, if not every month. On a constant basis, we’re getting knocked out of our window, back into the window, out of the window, into the window. With the trauma-sensitive practices that we do, like with our cross-mapping practice, what we’re actually doing is widening the window of tolerance. Number one, so that people have a better level of stability, regardless of what goes on in the world. Number two, they have the skills to get back into the window after they’ve been knocked out of the window. A lot of the practices that we do specifically hone right into that.