In many ways inner work is learning to be curious about our curiosities—our own strangenesses like the jungle peeking out from behind the garden we keep carefully pruned or the colors that won’t flow within the lines we’ve drawn. This work creates an opening where we once might have imagined a chaotic jungle and instead begin to see the fullness of our internal landscape. It feels at times like too much as if we might unravel and explode at the same time. What seems impossible from this vantage point is that once we’ve untied some of the knots residing within our psyche and soma we will have access to all the medicine that lies bound within the knot. Or, using the metaphor in the previous essay “The Call to Inner Work”, we gain use of every color in our own palette.
What could this mean in our daily lives?
It could mean all manner of wonderful things depending on our desires and leanings. More ease, freedom, fun, abundance, a better attitude, more depth? Knowing that we’ve lived our lives fully and will have fewer regrets because of it? Feeling wildly creative, loving, and loved? They’re all possibilities through the process of inner work. As we loosen the knots that formed out of necessity, more energy is freed up and we open to greater range giving us more choice.
There are many ways to expand our sense of self and our interiority as a means of effecting change in our outer lives. This is ‘the work’ as it is often called. Here I’m focusing on a somatic approach because it is the framework that I have found the most effective in my own life as well as those of colleagues and clients. It is powerful in its subtlety and has the added benefit of being able to dovetail beautifully with other frameworks.
The somatic approach is the work, embodiment is the fruit of our labor. Through it we have the potential to unite a divided will and ultimately become our own bridge between inner and outer, being and doing. It’s this unity of a more integrated self that gives us a foundation of choice and coming to it through somatic work offers greater resiliency and the potential for lasting change.
In herbalism, I was taught about compliance, whether or not a client was able to make use of the herbs and lifestyle recommendations I offered. It wasn’t uncommon to work with people who weren’t able to get started with a protocol or stick with one that was successful and who expressed frustration at this difficulty.
In the creative arts, people may suffer from blocks and dry spells beyond the occasional kink in the flow of inspiration. Creativity, whatever expression it takes, can feel incredibly expansive in the body. In a blocked state, however, we may seek it while also shrinking from it and it can be painful to experience and hard to understand this schism within.
The healing in the first example and the expansiveness in the second can trigger contraction when they threaten to go beyond our capacity to feel safe within them. I’ve heard this referred to as set-point and upper limits to the goodness we can receive. Moving toward healing and creative expression can make perfect sense to our minds and yet something within us is not in accord and has the ability to shut us and our best efforts down. In the language of the nervous system, it is outside of our personal window of tolerance. As humans, we have a few predictable ways that we respond to being outside this window that we’ll explore in future essays. For now, it’s enough to note that our window of tolerance is our body’s brilliant safety zone in which we are able to operate most effectively and without stress or depletion and that somatic work allows us to grow our window, or our capacity, by developing the undeveloped parts of ourselves. This begins simply by relating to ourselves and our bodies with compassionate curiosity.
Somatic work allows us to enter directly into the ties that bind and begin to loosen them, much the way we gently massage a delicate but tangled chain between our thumb and forefinger to create space for it to unwind. This is precisely what happens in the body through somatic inquiry and practices, allowing us to begin to renegotiate and complete cycles that were interrupted earlier in life while gently expanding our vocabulary around our experience and tolerance for more of life.
Focusing our inner work through our bodies, we can come home to the felt sense of safety we were lacking when these cycles and rhythms were interrupted. It allows us to find the resources within to both metabolize the pain that caused these knots to form and find the safety within to be with ourselves fully and find the experience affirming rather than threatening.
It’s worth mentioning that we can’t think our way into a relationship with our bodies. In fact, it’s a cruel joke of our culture to think we can have all the benefits of embodiment without actually being in our bodies. However, working through attunement with the body doesn’t preclude using our cognitive abilities. In this work, a broader, richer, and more fertile field develops for our thoughts to germinate, take root, and thrive. Rather than living in a permanent state of separation, our minds and bodies begin to cooperate in increased harmony and information can grow into knowledge, understanding, and eventually develop into a deepening and co-creative wisdom. It is this well-rounded, fully-informed wisdom that has the potential to shed light on the unfolding of our lives into our deeper longings.
Taking a moment now, as your eyes scan the words on the screen, notice what what it’s like to be reading about inner work and having a healing relationship between mind and body. Perhaps you are alight with possibility, heavy with grief, or hesitant with trepidation. Turning your attention inward to the sensations and emotions present and noticing how it feels to give them your curiosity and attention without an agenda for this brief time.
Also, noticing yourself in your surroundings and your body’s position in them. Giving yourself a softer, fuller breath and knowing that your innate wisdom can guide you home.
If you are curious about how somatic work can help you take the next steps on your path, I invite you to reach out.
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