SOMATIC STRESS RELEASE™

WHAT IS STRESS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Stress related health challenges are now a widespread global issue. Research links stress to physiological conditions like cardiovascular distress, immunosuppression, and gastro-intestinal problems. Stress adversely impacts attention, concentration, critical thinking, and other cognitive functions. Family and social relationships suffer.

While we might perceive stress as happening around us, it is actually happening within us. A physiological stress response happens throughout every system of the body, ultimately interacting with every cell. Our stress responses are interwoven with our emotions, immune function, thoughts, breath, and movements.

Our innate stress response could be described as a natural and helpful response to adapt and thrive in the world. But at times a lack of support and resources take our stress response offline and thwart our ability to utilize our stress response to navigate and have agency in relation to our current situations. When this happens we are unable to properly process and mobilize stress. We begin to form compensational patterns that over time wear down on our nervous system and show up as challenges to our health, focus, productivity, behavior, and relationships.

As we lose our ability to adapt, we start to experience a flooding of incomplete stress responses, known as chronic stress. Chronic stress wreaks havoc on our health, impacts biological energy conservation, and makes us less attuned to the need for self-care.

A SOMATIC APPROACH TO STRESS RELEASE

Somatic Stress Release™ is a holistic approach that recognizes the complex layering of each individual's relationship to stress. Stress manifests itself in each person’s body differently. Understanding this unique body response allows each person to process and navigate the intricate layers of stress. One of the most effective pathways towards that awareness and negotiation is through feeling a deeper sense of and connection with the body-mind, an approach called somatics.

‘Soma’ is a Greek word for ‘the living body known from within’. As infants, we addressed stress through our primarily modes of communication and expression- movement, sound, and touch. Stress is experienced and expressed through the body- and therefore can only truly be processed, metabolized, and healed through the body. We can’t think our way out of stress, and we can’t meditate our way out of stress. Stress is fundamental to our survival- however it was never meant to be unchecked and driving our lives.

The inability to process and actualize our stress response creates an overwhelm in the body. This can take us away from feeling at home in our body, and creating a split within ourselves. This disconnection leaves us with less resources to work through stress to adapt and return to balance. Addressing this damaging cycle is an integral component of this modality.

Returning to our primal modes of processing stress through body-based therapeutic techniques allows us to come home to ourselves to address habitual responses more quickly of internal and external stressors, and processes unresolved and stored stress in the body.

Somatic Stress Release™ offers holistic techniques for clients to sense and regulate their own physiology and states of being. This includes building more resources, building trusting and co-regulatory relationships, being invited deeper in the body to restore impulse and intuition, and given time and space to process the underlying emotions as guidance towards actualizing needs. Somatic Stress Release can access and metabolize deeply stored stress to help restore optimal functioning and well-being.