Somatic Process

The most important thing to remember throughout this process is to stay in your body as much as possible. It is similar to meditation in that way; if your mind wanders, bring your focus back to the sensation in your body.

1. Begin by taking a few deep breaths and getting settled in your body, either sitting or lying down.

2. Drop your awareness into your body and feel into where the emotional sensation is. The sensation is something hot or tight or heavy or staticky, etc. Sensation isn’t “anger” or “sadness,” sensation is one step before that, the thing you’re feeling that is telling you you’re angry, the internal experience that occurs before you name it. It may be somewhere in your torso, belly, or throat. Sometimes it is in the shoulders, limbs, or hands.

**If you feel it in your head, drop in deeper—there is sensation further down in your body that is the origin of the feeling. 

3. Approach the sensation with deep care and curiosity, as if you saw a young child with emotion on their face and you wanted to be there for them. Allow yourself to spend a few minutes with just the sensation itself—experience it. It just wants to be seen and known by you. See if you can describe it in sensation words (like those above) and in color or imagery. Anger tends to be a big sensation and wants some space. So it is often helpful to imagine that you can make yourself as big as you need to be so the sensation can be as big as it needs to be. Sometimes it's helpful to let the energy be as big as the room!

**If the sensation shifts into something else this early in the process, it likely means the anger was veiling a core emotion. Hopefully just giving space to this initial reaction has cleared the way to what you’re really feeling and now you can be with that. 

4. When the sensation is very visceral to you and you feel in touch with it, begin to ask how this sensation would like to express itself—in words, in sound, in imagery, or in movement. Wait until something comes from the sensation. This can be a moment when we start to experience the story jumping in, try to think bottom-up instead of top-down, let the sensation give you the information.

• If a sound or word comes, repeat the sound or word internally or out loud over and over as many times as is needed for the sensation to feel the resonance and catharsis. Own it!

• If an image comes, let the image play out fully. Even if it seems too much (like I’m burning down the whole neighborhood) remember that this is just an internal process and cannot actually hurt anyone or anything. Let the energy walk you through the image until there is a shift.

• If a movement comes, let the energy move however it wants to move. Sometimes this means your body actually moves, like pushing something away or shaking. Sometimes this can happen internally (sometimes coupled with an image,) like seeing flames fill your body as you let the energy light you up or like coming out the mouth like energy vomit. 

5. Stay with this until it shifts. The energy will shift on its own if you give it the resonance, space, and honoring that it needs. “Shifting” tends to mean that the emotional energy is not quite as intense, and we are often a little better able to breath and feel more grounded. Like flames becoming hot coals. We also tend to have a lot of clarity flood through at this moment, the gift of alchemizing our anger. At this point, the mind is helpful in service of expressing the clarity coming from the embodied present. 

**If you are having trouble contacting the sensation of anger:

If you’ve spent a long time repressing your anger, especially to survive a trauma you’ve experienced, you may find that it is very hard to find and stay with the sensation in your body. This is completely valid and not a problem. It just means that you will practice step 1 and return to step 1 often until it gets a little easier. You may also want to work with a trauma informed therapist.

You may want to try imagining a time you have felt composted anger and draw up the body memory. This would be a time you felt clear, empowered, fierce even for a quick moment. If you’re able to call that feeling up, you can move through the steps of this process with that as your sensation focus. 

You may also find that using the Parts practice in the next chapter is more available to you. The Somatic and Parts practices are working from the same roots with slightly different approaches. You can try each one on and see if one is more accessible for you. 

**If it feels like too much or overwhelming, it might be because you are contracting around it, so make sure you’re giving lots of space. Imagine the energy of your anger to be as big as the physical space you are in. 

**If you start to feel light-headed at any point in this process, try to return to the sensation you felt when you started and ground by focusing there. If that doesn’t help, come out of the process, reground, and come back to it again or take a break. Regrounding might look like taking some deep breaths, going outside, drinking tea or eating something substantial, feeling your feet on the ground, etc. 

**Sometimes an experience from the past will come up during this process. This is something you can work through if you have experience doing so, or bring to a therapist or counselor to work through. It can be a time when you were angry and felt you could not express it.