Somatic Healing for Wellness-Focused Women

(#72) The Body Remembers: Somatic Anxiety, Sensation Tracking & Somatic Healing

• Rae The Somatic Coach • Episode 72

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If anxiety lives in your mind or body as tension, tightness, or a constant sense of unease—this episode is for you. Today, we explore the powerful truth that your body remembers! We discuss how learning to track sensation and work with the nervous system can lead to deep emotional healing, relief, and regulation.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
 🌀 How anxiety shows up in the body—tight chest, shallow breathing, numbness, buzzing, chronic illness
🌀 How the mind-body-soul connection plays out in every area of life: relationships, work, business, and health
🌀 The transformative impact of somatic healing, from my first breathwork session in Vermont to supporting clients today
🌀 Simple, embodied tools for regulating anxiety

Through somatic work, you can begin to alchemize anxiety, shame, grief, or emotional discomfort into clarity and connection. When you meet what’s arising in your body with compassion and support, you create the conditions for healing.

“Emotional suffering is optional in my world. There gets to be another way.”

📩 Sign up for the newsletter to receive somatic tools, soulful reflections, and updates—including details about the upcoming Return to Soul Retreat.

🎧 Tune in now to reconnect with your body, regulate your nervous system, and return to the wisdom within.

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Disclaimer: Please remember that the information shared on this podcast is intended to inspire, educate, and support you on your personal journey. It does not substitute for professional mental health advice. I am not a psychologist or medical professional. If you are experiencing distress, mental health challenges, or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified professional.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Radiant Life Podcast. I'm your host, rae the Somatic Coach, and I'm here to support you in healing your past, living in the present and creating your future so that you can become the most centered, embodied and happiest version of yourself. Each week, I'll be bringing you episodes to help you navigate life's challenges, ease stress and tension and learn more about holistic healing, spirituality and wellness. If you're interested in becoming the best version of yourself so that you can live the life of your dreams, then you're in the right place. Subscribe to the podcast and the monthly newsletter and follow me on Instagram and TikTok to know when new episodes are released each week. I am so happy that you've landed here. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the podcast. If you are new here, I'm Rae, I'm a somatic coach and breathwork facilitator, and if you aren't new here, welcome back. I'm so glad that you're tuning in for today's episode. So one front desk item for you before we dive in is that the name of the podcast is now Somatic Healing for Wellness-Focused Women. And yes, I did change the name last week and now it's a new name this week. So that is the life of entrepreneurship and, yeah, we're running with it. So I'm glad that you're here. I'm excited for this shift and this change and, yeah, so for today's episode on the podcast.

Speaker 1:

We are doing the second episode of the series Rewriting the Story of Anxiety, and this is a topic near and dear to my heart. I love helping other women navigate anxiety, because it's something that I myself have struggled with for a long time too. So today's topic is all about the body. The body remembers anxiety, navigating different sensations and the somatic approach and somatic healing. So the first time that I actually understood what it meant to feel connected to my body, I was in a session. I was in the beginning of my somatic coaching certification program and we were doing a partner exercise. And so I was in the beginning of my somatic coaching certification program and we were doing a partner exercise, and so I was in when I say in a session, I was in like a breakout partner room of doing one of these exercises and it was all around the sensation of safety and the questions that we were asking each other in that exercise was where do you feel safest in your body? And on a scale from one to ten, like, how safe does that sensation feel? And it was just this like exploration of this feeling of safety in the body, and I remember just feeling like so much relief and so much made a lot more sense to me because nobody had ever asked me that question before.

Speaker 1:

And when it comes to anxiety, usually typically the typical approach is really being focused on the mind and working with those worry thoughts. What ends up happening is there's a big friction, there's like two parts that are fighting with each other internally, get to release and subside and kind of breathe and exhale, and then we get all this other insight that we didn't have previously, because now we're working with the sensation and what's coming up for us from a different lens, from a different perspective, and it's really really nice, it's really awesome. Another time where I felt even more connected to my body was the first time that I had done breathwork, and I share this story because it was so powerful for me on my journey and it's also how I discovered breathwork and breathwork is so much of what I do today for my personal practice and also for the work that I do with my clients. And breathwork specifically.

Speaker 1:

I was at a yoga festival with one of my friends in Vermont and I saw, when you're at the yoga festival. There's like this calendar of like all these different classes that you can choose from everything you could even think of, from like dance to art, coloring, to yoga, to meditation, to different inspiring speakers and really cool stuff. And I saw this one class and it was radiant love or radiant heart breathwork, and the description was absolutely so wild and I was like I need to do this class. I have no idea what this is, but like this sounds like something I need to do and I want to say there was maybe like a hundred of us. The class was like pretty large and they had us all underneath this humongous tent and everybody was in a circle, so it's like one big circle. And it was such a powerful experience for me and it was the first time that I really felt connected to my body, safe in my body, and also I felt like a huge emotional release. So that is why today I'm so passionate about using the somatic approach and using breathwork as a way to work with the sensations and what comes up for people with anxiety, and anxiety shows up for us in so many different ways.

Speaker 1:

It's definitely very present in the mind. You know. That's when we experience worry thoughts. You might experience emotional spirals or anxious spirals, worst case scenario thinking. Definitely there is a mental component to anxiety and that's usually the thing that is the loudest and the most apparent and the approach with using the body we do get to the mind, but we start with really working from the bottom up and I'll talk a little bit more about what that means.

Speaker 1:

But there is definitely a component of anxiety in the body as well. There's physical symptoms tightness in the chest, shallow breathing. There could even be like a numbness, like so anxious that you feel like you can't feel anything. This is also where, like chronic illness can come out. So there's definitely body symptoms as well. And then there's, of course, the energy body as well. So that's when we're talking about, you know, the energy systems chakra, soul, spirit, things like that that are an element of anxiety as well.

Speaker 1:

That I don't think people really talk about or take a note of, and it's really important when working with the sensations of anxiety and working with the body and the mind when it comes to anxiety is taking in the energetic experience as well, and so you have these different elements of anxiety and then it can come out in our relationships. I mentioned a little bit about how that was happening for me in the last episode, episode 71. And then it can also come out at work. It can come out in our businesses. That was definitely something that was happening for me at one point. I think the beginning of my business was a really good healing experience for me. It was an outlet for me that allowed me to really work through a lot of the blocks that were coming up for me, and so that's been really fun and also really eye-opening and very rewarding for me as well. It can come out anxiety can come out in our health as well, so there's a few different areas of life that it can be present.

Speaker 1:

And what's great about using the somatic approach and working with the body is this element of being able to track the sensation in your body of what anxiety feels like. And what happens when you're using that tool or that approach is that you're really able to meet yourself exactly where you're at. So it doesn't matter what is coming up for you. It doesn't matter the different textures and layers. When you use the tool of tracking the sensation in your body, you're automatically meeting yourself with exactly where you are, with what's coming up for you, and this practice can be uncomfortable and the more you do it, the more that you're able to build that sensation of safety in your body as well. So you're getting familiar with safety, you're meeting your anxiety exactly where it's where you're at, and you're also slowing down. It takes a level of mindfulness and awareness to pause in the moment and slow down and meet yourself exactly where you are with a sensation or a feeling or emotion. And when you do that, it alleviates the resistance, that friction that I was talking about earlier. It alleviates the internal war that happens when it comes to uncomfortable emotion and sensation and feeling.

Speaker 1:

And practicing this sensation, tracking and allowing yourself to feel a feeling or something in the body, I think it is a practice. It is something that takes time. It's definitely not something that I was familiar with or really felt safe doing on my own for a very long time. And when I'm doing this work with clients, sometimes it's like a 90 second practice and they're like well, now I feel better, like now I don't have, like they're not saying the same story spiral of like being in the mind, like now they're in the body and they're just like well, how'd you do that? And I'm like I didn't do anything really like.

Speaker 1:

Well, maybe like some things, of course, like I'm guiding and I'm facilitating, I'm holding space, but this, the experience of you being in your body like you did that that's you meeting your sensation and your feeling of what's arising in your body, with my support, a regulated nervous system, energetic guidance, I there's a lot that's going on when you're sitting across from somebody and it's really allowing you the permission and the safety to go to this place of regulation and release and ultimately, alchemy, like alchemizing. What's occurring for you in your moments, in your spiral, in your anxiety. Um, and even to this day, like I have challenging arisings, I have challenging moments where I'm like this is not the best sensation or feeling or thought pattern. Um, definitely before I get my period pmsing, oh, my goodness, that is like really challenging for me. Uh, waves of grief I'm very hard. Uh, waves of shame, very hard, imposter syndrome, all that good fun stuff.

Speaker 1:

So, although we're talking about anxiety in this context of tracking sensation, once you have this tool, you can have this tool. You can use it for anything. You can use it for any emotional arising, any anxious arising. It's going to expand your window of tolerance, you're going to have more capacity to feel, heal, alchemize and so on, so forth, and a few other practices that I find really supportive for regulating anxiety. And these are practices that you don't necessarily need to do when you're feeling anxious. They're mindfulness practices that you can do when you're not feeling anxious when you are. They're like mindfulness practices that you can do when you're not feeling anxious when you are. They're kind of like tools that you just always can use as a resource and really have in your toolkit, and they're going to be regulating for your nervous system in some way, which will, over time, compound and will affect how you experience anxiety, compound and will affect how you experience anxiety.

Speaker 1:

And the first is being able to orient to the space that you're in. So this practice is something where you can do this anywhere. You can do this on your lunch break at work, you can do this while you're going for a walk outside. You can do this in the comfort of your home. If you have a home office, you can do it in your home office. It's basically looking at each wall that is surrounding you, taking a moment to look and see the wall in front of you, see the wall behind you, to the sides of you the ceiling, the ground, noticing the different textures that you see and allowing this awareness of what's around you to bring you a sense of safety. No-transcript, always, it doesn't matter the setting that you're in. And then the second tool is somatic shaking. So this is really helpful if you're feeling really upregulated, in the sense that like you're feeling like a big feeling or you're feeling like you need to actually move your body, not be still.

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of times we can see, like you know, in meditation, you see like, like marketing wise, like you see like, oh, this person's meditating like they're so calm, they're so still, and nothing is wrong with meditation by any means and getting to those calm places. But sometimes that might not be what your body needs and that's like the common, that's like the north star of all this work is like learning to understand your nervous system, what your body needs and how your body needs to metabolize and alchemize and move through something, and for some that can be shaking and that looks like giving yourself some space, planting your feet into the ground, feeling grounded and then letting your body move and letting your body shake and you can keep your eyes closed. You can put on a song you can put on music to allow your body to move. For, you know, like a contained amount of time, if you play for one song you'll have a start and an end and then, after you're done with the shaking and moving your body, pausing, letting your energy settle and seeing how you feel in that moment, maybe you need to do a little bit more, maybe you need to move slower. So sometimes shaking you don't necessarily need to do it like fast. You can again check it with your body, see what your body needs, and again, this also can take time and it can take practice to understand what you need in that moment.

Speaker 1:

And then the third tool that I would love to share with you. This is the practice that we did at the end of our last episode, episode 71. But it's simple in the sense that you're going to take a breath into the body and sending that breath to a particular part of your body, and you can do that by placing your hand on that part of your body and letting the breath come through the center of your palm. So that's one practice you can do. And you can also simply breathe into your belly so you can let your belly expand and place your hands on your belly with your breath and then let that that breath release and take a few of those breaths.

Speaker 1:

So what that will do is really allow you to get connected to the present moment, get connected to your body and ideally, by getting connected to your body, it's going to quiet the mind, it's going to let the mind pause for a moment there and if you've come to a few of my classes, either online or in person, or if you've done breathwork with me one-on-one before, there's something that I always come back to and it's that your body knows exactly what to do and your breath knows exactly what to do. And when we combine those two things and we give ourselves the space and the time to work through what is arising for us with the body and the breath as part of the equation, it alleviates that heaviness and anxiety and worry can feel pretty heavy. But I believe that there gets to be another way that emotional suffering is optional. It is not the requirement, it is not the overarching state of our being. Emotional suffering anxious thoughts, anxious spirals, anxious thoughts, anxious spirals, emotional spirals is optional, and my belief is that your consciousness and your gifts and your breath and your body know exactly how to alchemize a challenging emotion, a challenging thought, a challenging sensation, and I believe that working with the body and working with the breath and working with sensation and then bringing in the mind is how you get to shift subconscious thinking. It's how you get to change and transform and ultimately move closer to how you're hoping to feel and how you're hoping to show up in your life without this challenge of anxiety running the show. And that is what we have for today's episode.

Speaker 1:

So we covered a lot in today's episode. Definitely, if you have any questions, just send me a DM, send me an email. I love to chat with you guys and, yeah, I hope you have an incredible rest of your week. I hope you have an incredible rest of your week, I hope you have an incredible rest of your day and I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. If you are moved or inspired, please share with me by leaving a rating and review on apple podcast. It means the world to me and I am so appreciative for your support in helping my podcast grow. If we aren't already connected on social media, head over to Instagram and TikTok and follow me at RayTheSemanticCoach, make sure you check out the show notes of today's episode for links to freebies, opportunities to work with me and ways we can stay connected outside of the podcast. I'm so happy that you're here and I can now wait to talk with you on our next episode of the Radiant Life podcast.