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Somatic Awareness & SOmatic Breathwork
*I am currently unable to work with new clients. Please check out my group work offerings if you are interested in working with me. I will open up my client roster in May 2025 when I finish my Master of Social Work program.
‘Somatics’ refers to a body-based therapy that seeks to uncover what is blocking healthy movement of energy and the body’s innate ability to heal. As a field and practice, the usage of the term somatics is also problematic due to the colonial extraction and appropriation that was/is a part of “Universalizing” this field of practice. I will continue to use the word somatic to describe my work in various ways, but I do so with full understanding of its complex history as I actively research to strengthen my relationship with the true roots of somatics multicultural history and lineage.
Somatic is a term that refers to the body’s subconscious and autonomic (automatic) reactions in the form of sensations, movement, visuals and various other types of communication that generally skips conscious processing. As a model of practice, it guides us (incrementally) towards a reclamation of our body’s natural ability to come back to a healthy baseline after intense or traumatic events.
Somatic Awareness
I believe that we each have the wisdom and insights we need awaiting inside of us. For many of us, as we move through life and instinctively adapt to cope, survive and protect ourselves from our environment, we lose touch with this wisdom. It gets buried beneath chronic dysregulation, limiting beliefs, negative comparison, compensations, habits of perception, busy-ness, and poor mental and physical health. This manifests in many ways, including a disconnection from our breath.
Your brain predicts and prepares your reactions and actions using your past experience and what you learned from it. If you could “magically” reach back in time and change your past, your brain would predict differently and you would, in turn, experience the world differently. While you can’t change the past, you can change…
how you feel when you recall your past,
how you relate with your past and the parts of you most impacted by it
what you made it all mean about you, others, and the world around you
how you think, move, breathe, and act today and into the future.
With somatic awareness and breathwork, you can enhance your response flexibility, which is the skill to pause during stimulus and reaction to consciously respond and reconsolidate memories with more compassion and understanding.
Somatic Breathwork
Breathwork is a deliberate practice of taking conscious control of your breath in various ways to upshift, downshift or amplify our current physiological state. This can be practiced for both acute and chronic alterations of one's mood, emotions, health, beliefs and perspective. Using the wisdom garnered from slowing down and listening deeply, we can engage with our breath to experience altered states of consciousness, deep relaxation, or as a gateway to release what is stuck in the soma.
This practice is done either sitting up or lying down on the back, and you will be guided to breathe in a conscious, connected, and relaxed way. You will learn when and why to choose breathing through the nose or mouth, or a combination of the two.
When circular breathing is sustained alongside the felt sense of enough safety and support, we are finally resourced and ready to “meet” our repressed and suppressed old stories and stresses, rather than simply be taken over or overwhelmed by them. Additionally, these ‘intentional doses of chaos’ induced by conscious overbreathing and underbreathing builds resilience and expands your ability to remain present as stressors come (and hopefully go) in life.
In a breathwork session, sensations, emotions and visuals may surface that are “tied” to past experiences. By slowly and safely recalling what hasn’t yet been resolved or released, we are able to witness ourselves in a new way. From this new perspective, we address these moments that have been frozen in time with corrective experiences and garner wisdom from them.
I teach, guide, and hold loving space so that you can come back into a healthy and integrated relationship with your bodymind.
How?
By teaching you how to:
create space for every part of you with deep embodied listening,
support your internal system to work together as a team,
consciously breathe to shift nervous system states as needed and desired,
mindfully move your body as you listen to the wisdom in your tissues,
understand the inner-landscape of your nervous system so you can work with it,
create a clear direction or goals map while equally honoring and steeping in where you are now,
expand your perspective outwards (and backwards - ancestrally) to see the larger systems impacting your beliefs (which impact everything).
When you truly know how to access loving presence and take charge of your energetic states, you will discover that you have everything you need already inside of you.
Learn how and why we stop breathing well, and how and why we vacate the body as a way to protect ourselves
Learn how to increase your sense of safety so that you can explore the deep workings of your psyche
Learn how to create and conserve high-quality energy
Learn how to meditate and practice mindfulness in a way that truly serves who and where YOU are now
Learn how to practice new routines to create new healthy habits
Learn how to show up as your best self in the areas of your life, and in the important relationships, that matter most to you
Learn how to calm yourself down or amp yourself up (be your own Nervous System Whisperer)
Learn the art of proper breathing and utilizing sound and mindful movement as medicine
Learn how to reframe your life’s experience and beliefs through the transformative process of non-ordinary states of consciousness with breathwork
Learn how to create and hold space. Where there is space, there is more awareness, and the possibility for alternative pathways and choices that you may have not seen before.
What this looks like?
It can look different for everyone. Reach out and we can discuss and make a plan together.
marinmccue@gmail.com
Check out what some of my past clients have to say about their coaching program....