Not Leaving Ourselves Behind

A lovely woman in the midst of a somatic movement training came to me recently for a session. (everyone I work with is lovely!) I was instantly touched by her vulnerability as she shared with certainty that she has no emotional intelligence. Her openness conveyed to me that she had plenty of emotional intelligence.

The training she’s in, immerses her in developmental movement which simultaneously reveals what we hold in our unconscious. Awareness of body sensation gives us direct access to what lives just below the threshold of our busy mind. But in her case, there was no support for integrating what arose psychologically or emotionally. What was missing was the explicit message that we cannot separate body sensation from emotional and psychological experience; everything bubbles together.

“I know intellectually that I have these resources within me, but I don’t know how to access them”, she said. That is the dilemma many of us have today. We’ve lost connection to our “Internal Guidance System” as I call it.

Her experience of deficiency was real, but it was misplaced. When we can let go of blaming ourselves or others for what’s missing, and then name and ask for what we need, we suffer less. We can change our mind, our heart, and our experience. That is what neuroplasticity is all about.

We are losing support for much of the natural call and response within ourselves – an embodied literacy, that allows us to listen within, trust our body sensations, and stay present to the core beliefs they reveal. Uncovering these core beliefs is essential to our well being.

In a world that teaches us to compartmentalize our lived experience, we feel we have no choice but to leave parts of ourselves behind and when we leave parts of ourselves behind, it is easy to begin leaving the whole living, breathing, world behind too. Our inner integrity lends itself to everything we do.

When we reclaim the value of body sensations, breath, and the ground beneath us, we directly access our IGS or Internal Guidance System. At the heart of emotional and embodied intelligence is the wish to include all of who we are and to extend that belonging to others.