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Welcome to the anxiety proof her Podcast, where amazing women come for education, inspiration and hope around healing from anxiety. Each month, you're going to hear from other women who took control of their mental health by using outside the box holistic strategies to cope with their anxiety and to ultimately thrive. You will also learn from experts in the health and wellness industry, about the tools they use every day to help their patients reclaim their well being. We hope this information allows you to see that there are many different paths to healing. I'm your host, Jennifer Bronsnick. And I'm a licensed clinical social worker, and anxiety treatment professional. I help women and teen girls who struggle with anxiety, self doubt, and perfectionism to tap into their innate resilience, get to the root of their fears, and implement custom healing strategies so that they can experience peace of mind, more self confidence and be liberated from the suffering that living with anxiety causes. I have lived with anxiety my whole life, and know how hard it can be. I also know that there is hope. And it's 100% treatable with the right information and support. Thank you so much for showing up for yourself and taking the first step to reclaiming your well being and resilience.
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So welcome to the anxiety podcast. As always, we get started by centering by grounding ourselves so that we can receive exactly what we need to receive during this time. So just take a moment to breathe in, breathe out. And if you want, you might envision that the breath is coming in and out from your heart center, or the space in your body that your heart resides. Just putting your attention fully on that space as you continue to breathe. And now I'm going to invite you to go back to a time where you felt fully embodied fully in your body. And maybe that was when you were moving, walking, dancing, picking shells on the beach. And just allowing yourself the gift to re experience any of those feelings that you felt during that time. That time that you were fully in your body. really fully grounded. And know that throughout this episode throughout your day, you can just come back to those feelings come back to the breath and become grounded once again. Whenever maybe your mind wanders or you feel stressed, always come home to this place. So today, I am very excited to welcome my friend Stephanie Cohen, on to the podcast and I've had a session with Stephanie. So I'm really excited to share her work with you because I know how powerful it can be. And so Stephanie has been a theatre maker, a movement teacher, a somatic practitioner, curator and performance artist. And her primary delight has been with the integration of bodily awareness, cognitive practice, spiritual mystery and the artistic process. She has supported hundreds of other artists and artists and creative explores in many ways and as an artist whisper of sorts. She's also served as a hospice worker providing direct hands on care and practical emotional support to terminally ill clients and their caregivers. And she has stewarded multiple spaces including the studio of movement arts and the light box in Again, and she has been a working artist for over 30 years teaching and performing in theatres, festivals, retreats, academic institutions, she holds a master's degree in dance and somatic wellbeing from the University of Central Lin Lang, Shire, Lancashire.
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Thank you,
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as a facilitator of authentic movement registered in somatic movement therapist and an educator through the international somatic movement, education and Therapy Association, so she has tons of knowledge and experience and I'm so happy that you are here today.
05:45
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah.
05:51
So how did
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you get into it? Like, did you fall into it? Were you a dancer as a kid? Like, how did this all happen?
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Yeah, that's a super good question.
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I
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I would say, I, as a kid,
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I
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knew from a really, really young age that I was going to be an artist and a mommy like that. Those words came to me back when I was about four years old, like filling out a doctor, some kind of Dr. Seuss activity book, my book all about me and the artist, and mommy. And so what that looked like, I wasn't, I didn't that. But I will say, as I, I did get really drawn in to making theater. I mean, I did all kinds of collaborative work with friends. And those were like, my favorite situations in life were the ones in which I was in some kind of artistic collaboration throughout my childhood, and then in high school, got real, real focused on theater.
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Acting,
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but also working as a stage manager, as a director, as a director at times, actually into, into university. So that was, I went to Brandeis University and focused on theatre. And when I, as I moved through and came came out of there, I was directing, directing one at play or not one place, I was directing, short plays with, directly with playwrights working working on helping them to get their plays developed. And at the same time, I was also really, really interested in, in work that came from it came from a more embodied place, and I was less interested in less and less interested in text, and more drawn to moving my own body dancing, but in particular ways, like I, I was a real, I became really interested in improvised forms of dance, that and what I ultimately have learned is really somatics. And I can say more about that, but ways of moving that center feeling over over the way that the movement looks and, and also be weighing ways of creating image and creating some images directly with our bodies, but that are still not for me was not based on patterning my body off of a body that wasn't mine. And that, that goes to lots of struggle and exploration with body image and I would probably use the word dysmorphia. But let's we'll take that we'll take the big word away unless you put to the side what the trip that has been laid on.
09:27
Yeah,
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he's right.
09:32
In white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, like insert, insert oppressive
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situation, just being able to my daughters both dance and if they weren't at this particular studio, which is amazing and loving and there isn't this like you have to be a perfect shape in order To be the star, or be in front or have a solo, which is not the case and many other but I look at, you know how this sort of, you know, comes back to what I'm hearing you saying is really, you know, I look at their being and dance as their sort of therapy, like their movement, they're expressing these feelings that, you know, they sometimes words do not work, like there are no words to get to what's really happening. And it's only through the experience of being in body really, that they've been able to process, like when they were in dance for a period of time last year. And, you know, I know some people said, well, it's safe, like, I don't care, like I, their mental physical health is, you know, the number one priority, and I see the gift that has come from it. And, you know, and the connections as well. So can you talk just from your perspective, like, what is somatic work? And like, Is that the same as embodiment work?
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Yeah, there's, you know, those
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are definitely terms that I, I guess I would I use, interchangeably, and so somatic. So somatic practices are ones in which, as I said, the, they center the way our bodies feel, over over, I want to say over the way that our bodies look, but coming to our experiences moving and moving in the world, with an awareness of our felt sense experience. So there are lots of different kinds of modalities, lots of different kinds of practices that fall under a category of soak up somatic, some of which are very, I want to say have have systems connected to them. That that helped folks to become, you know, particularly aware that have a hard time describing this part and it might be one that we decide to cut.
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I think so because
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I'm with you. Yeah.
12:42
Um, yeah. So there's, there's, there's some modalities,
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people can look up called
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the Alexander Technique or fill ranks,
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that, um, that like a framework for these different practices, basically,
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there's and there are some that are more that are, are a slightly more open ended, maybe more cognitively based. And so, my primary practice that I work with or that I build upon, is one is one called authentic movement. And in that practice has a history in as a kind of early articulated practice of dance movement therapy, okay? Not use necessarily, as a site is a psychotherapeutic tool. It is it is for sure, a healing modality and one for me, that that creates access to sort of artistic like a generative, artistic, generative process, a space of contemplation, mentioned earlier a space of spiritual mystery, a space in which I can come to know my body come to come to learn how it moves, what it wants, I can access a lot of really rich imagery, and that's it for me the work that I do with folks and with mice that within through myself is really in supporting I'm supporting an articulation of felt sense. So what what are the sensations what is moving in my body right now, to the extent that I can identify some of that and also what if any images arise in relation to that sense of movement?
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Okay. So It's
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rather than this, you know, mental awareness that we get sort of trapped in all the time, you know, we always go like brain is the, you know, the king of the castle in a lot of, you know, these modalities and but for a lot of people like that is not helpful, you know, like going just like cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, like for many people, that is not a helpful strategy for them because their feelings are not coming out of these cognitive thoughts, they're maybe intuitively sensed, maybe they're implicitly sensed where they don't really realize that it's a memory that's coming up, that's creating this, this feeling. And so rather than getting into this, like, you know, cortex based therapies, I love that there's work out there, that pulls us out of that place, because it's sometimes really not helpful.
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Well, and I think, you know, I think that, you know, I would further say that, that somatic work or the practices that I've been engaged in, take as a given that everything we're experiencing, in, in, in the world, everything we individually and collectively are experiencing, we are experiencing with, in and through our bodies, so so that there's there, there's a both and those, those thoughts that we're having, are emerging from an from the place of our body, we couldn't have thought without having a body we couldn't have. And so and that the experiences that we've had, both individually again and collectively, culturally, that they get stored, that gets that they get stored in our, in our bodies. And, and that with access to, to infer sensory information. We can we can listen for what, what we might need, at any given time, whether we understand where that came from, or not. Whether we know the because, or the what, or yet. Yeah, so the you know, yes. Yes, the information that we receive from, from our bodies can help us to shape behavior that's going to support us. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that there needs to be an either or, for me and for the you know, and in working with students, students and clients, we're often integrating, integrating information that that arises in one context with with information that arises in another. So I so I might work with folks who are also seeing that seeing a psychotherapist who, who might do CBT might be working with a psychiatrist
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ording who's supporting them in, in managing or in navigating, you know, about their experiences of bipolar. And, and we're, we're drawing on resources that, that we have connected with our creative imaginations can have to do with our sense of, of, Okay, here's, here's something that's emerging that's emerging from my body, here's, here's a need that's being expressed. Can I listen to that? Can I not apply meaning right away? So there so I'm, very often as I said, like an art art artists whisperer and I know that I didn't coined that term, but there's a way in which I can be in a really creative collaborative engagement with you know, with the students and clients I'm working with with myself, supported by my own colleagues and to
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to
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take to establish this, this just safe enough container. So and you you do that so beautifully, the beginning accessing ground, accessing ground what what are those spaces in which we can you're connected to what feels pleasurable, what feels centered, what feels settled, right? Feel settled. Something made me really want to say the T's in that word gives us then enough space to bring our curiosity to the what is actually emerging? What are what are the questions? What are the worries? But But can I flesh them out a little more? Can I give them some room to be heard? without allowing the thoughts to take over? entirely? So what we're going to we tend to way, way things as you sat in favor of our thought in favor of our cognitive assessees. And they just they just loud,
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they're just louder.
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Yeah, and they feel true. And right, you're true.
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Exactly. And the thoughts or the worries can can be real, but not necessarily true.
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Yeah. In
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so there's a, it's, it's a delicate dance of kind of giving every all these parts of ourselves, giving them their do, offering them respect, offering them gratitude for their presence, their participation, as we are trying to move through the world, with integrity, with authenticity, with a sense of purpose, with a sense of wholeness. So, yeah, so acknowledging, acknowledging what our tools and resources are. And even the ones that we have outgrown or were outgrowing.
22:08
So, do you have, I don't know, like I'm getting a division I'm seeing is like, coming into this big space, and there's like, movement and, you know, we're sort of together and holding this energy together, like I did. Family constellations, have you ever heard of that? Which was like a really, I mean, I don't know if that you would consider that somatic but it was like, you know, sort of moving using our bodies to feel out like what these other family members were experiencing, and we were all you know, how to explain it, like, we were holding the place for that person. And then the person who was in charge of it was their story was guiding us based on what they were feeling like their body, but it was like, it was profound, you know, just even being a almost like a character like an actor in their story role. So I can see how just getting the bodies to do these certain motions, and that's not dance or anything, like it was literally we would move in around the room, like, Come closer, you know, come You know, step back for me, like my body is needing you to be farther from me right now.
23:32
Playing playing Yeah, playing really wish them tools of Yeah. dance movement, performance. So, with attention to proximity and distance with you know, so I hear that
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as,
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as allowing your body to take on a different kind of stance in relation to the to the themes that you're working with. And a stance doesn't necessarily literally means standing. But um, I in that situation, I imagined myself organizing my body in in ways that helped me to access it. access different information. Yeah,
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yeah. And that, you know, that self awareness, I think, just leads to leaps of growth.
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Mm hmm.
24:41
So do you have, like, if someone's listening like okay, how do I even begin to get into my body in that safe space way? Like do you have a daily practice that you do yourself or that you recommend to others? People?
25:02
Yeah, you know, it's, that's a really great question. And I think, I think partially a response is to say, How are you already here in your body is to ask, what, what am I aware of? And, and yes,
25:22
I think, for me
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taking
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time in relation to, to ground is, is a is a great start. And so that can that can be in that can mean literally bringing myself down to down to the floor or becoming aware of what's, what parts of my body are really well and truly
26:03
accepting
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the support that gravity has to offer. And, and, and building on that. So gravity ground there. I'd say the practice that I'm most or a way, a way of orienting around body that I've been that I've been drawing on quite a lot, comes, comes by a teacher, a somatic teacher researcher, named Susan Harper. And she talks about ground space, flow and breath. And this is like one of the deceptively simple but ways of, for me, of, of getting connected with the body,
26:58
can I access, a sense of a relationship to gravity to crap to ground, and I think about that, I can
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really conjure
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a sense of belonging as a creature of the earth, as a creature that walks and moves on the earth. I I'm part of it. I'm not separate. And so for me, I, I can access the ground that's in my very bones. I know, I know that the minerals that make up my bones are, are are mirroring those that make up Earth. I'm part of it. And Earth's not going to let me float away from it. gravity's not going to let me do that. So I'm so feeling a sense of feeling into a sense of being held. And then from there, accessing, accessing, getting curious about where do I feel a sense of spaciousness? If anywhere? Where do I feel it? Like you said, Do I feel that in the space around my heart Do I feel that in the cavity in which all my other viscera, you know, lays do I feel that sense of spaciousness, can I feel it in my mouth? Do I feel it is it as a more as an image, both inside my body and the space around my body? What can give me room to then bring my curiosity what's moving in me and then flow. Acknowledging the fluid, the fluidity in me acknowledging the fact that my body is made, primarily of water. So getting to explore a play between that space of ground that's that, that that embrace of ground, that possibility of space. And to navigate between the to navigate between ground and space, by virtue of with flow and using breath you or listening to my breath. I don't need to change my breath, but allowing my breath to support those other explorations to support me in yielding to ground to support me in opening and breathing into space, to support me in feeling that sense of fluidity that has me able to change to shift
30:17
to meet
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obstacles with creativity. Yeah. With flexibility. Yeah,
30:33
but still feeling that held held ness is sort of what I was feeling that, you know, right now, I think that many of us, you know, are missing that healthiness. Like, it just feels like there's so much like, there's so many things, there's so many, you know, the mental load, the physical load, like the real life stressors, like it just can begin to feel like so much. And yet, there's gravity, there is Earth there is lying on the floor, Lying in the grass, there's, you know, that still exists amidst all of the things. And so, you know, I really appreciate that reminder, because sometimes we forget, we forget that that is still available to us that we can receive that, you know, that we can, you know, be in that space with, you know, we don't need money for it, we don't need to pay anybody for it. It is, it is there it is, you know, it's in our existence right now.
31:46
Absolutely. And I, you know, you, you make a really good point, and that, especially, under the circumstances of this pandemic, most all of us are, are needing to access resources, that, that we, we haven't in the same ways that are that in order to feel connection with others. Me, for many, for many of us, we were having a harder time, having our needs for touch met, having our needs for, to feel to feel connected with others. And I remember you were, we were talking earlier about school and snow days, and all kinds of things. I'm, I'm getting right now that we are there's a kind of cycle of grief
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that
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in which, like when we when we have lost when we have well and truly lost somebody we know, in many, many, many, many of us have lost people over this past year, there's very often unexperienced that, that we sort of need to go through of the entire year following of acknowledging the loss of that person in relation to the cycle, the cycle of a year, the holidays, the birthdays that and that we're, we are cycling to apart, we've been cycling to a part of the year that we didn't already have an experience with. So So the last couple of months this this winter time, we didn't have the experience of being in lockdown, we didn't have a pandemic experience. And now we are in for myself, I will, I'll say I have reached a point of, of crisis of like, I've been without some of these things for so long. I don't know what I'm going to get them again. And so you make this beautiful point around access to what is here at Okay, the ground is here.
34:19
Okay.
34:23
And,
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and then I would I would say, reach out, reach out, reach out. Because Because those kinds of inquiries can be held by others in ways that that really, that really, really support them to be witnessed to be held in these kinds of explorations that I've been talking about. is a big contributes to that. feeling of ground that feeling of connectedness and my capacity to, to keep listening for what's needed? And how do what how do I meet that? Including through through reaching out to others? Yeah.
35:18
So I always ask my guests if they have a message of hope, which I feel like that was a partial message of hope. But is there anything else that you feel like? We need to hear today?
35:33
Yeah, um, so, so I'm going to share the message that I need to hear most, which is that I am not alone, we are not alone. We are not separate,
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that this
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planet you're all on really well and truly needs us to show up, resourced, to show up supported, to show up whole, to show up purposeful. And in order to, in order to do that, we need to remember that we're part of a whole it for many people.
36:34
That's faith.
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And that doesn't speak to a particular religious context or spiritual context. But for, for me the sense that I am part of a larger hole that well and truly wants me to show up. Not Alone, not separate. Yes. I
37:02
love that. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your healing voice. I want to go lie on my floor, not outside because it's freezing. But I think a little grounding today would be really helpful. So can you please share where someone can find out more about you and your work? Absolutely. Thank
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you. So the wet my website for my practice is at WWW dot Soma. stories.net. So so much SLM a word stories. dotnet.
37:51
Wonderful. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for being here and for starting this conversation.
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Thank you so much for having me in for all that you're doing in the world. I'm so grateful to you.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to invest in your well being. I hope you learned at least one new idea or technique that you might want to implement into your own life. Remember, you're not alone, there is hope and with the right information and support you can thrive. If you're dealing with panic are looking for a step by step process that will allow you to break free from this crippling fear state. I want to invite you to check out my panic attack Survival Guide, you can grab your free copy at www dot Jennifer bronsnick.com Thanks for listening