In the second part of this three-part blog series, we’re exploring somatic yoga for beginners through a trauma-informed lens to explore unconscious beliefs through conscious movement. This week, we’ll look into the next step of this practice: noticing sensation, feeling, and identifying emotion.
Before beginning, I welcome you to start with the first post of the series to explore how grounding and resourcing are the first foundational steps to any somatic healing practice for your safety and comfort. You can also read below for a summary of this post.
When exploring somatic yoga for beginners, grounding and resourcing are important foundational elements.
Here’s a summary of what was covered last week:
- Somatic healing is how we use our physical body to understand deep rooted emotions, beliefs, and ultimately judgements that keep us feeling stuck in our lives. It is not a replacement for formal therapy, but can offer insights we otherwise may not have seen. For many, combining somatic exploration with a trauma-informed therapist creates a well-rounded, holistic care plan.
- Before beginning any somatic practice, it’s important to have grounding and resourcing tools we resonate with so we can stay present in our practices and find calmness within our nervous systems.
- Grounding refers to coming back to the present, while resourcing refers to a inner or external anchor that brings feelings of comfort and ultimately nurtures our nervous system when we begin to feel activated.
Exploring sensations within our bodies
Once you find comfort within your grounding and resourcing strategies, we can explore our sensations.
I offer a gentle reminder to take time when beginning to notice internal sensations, especially as a trauma survivor. I’ll explain ways to begin this practice if you’re unsure where to start, or if you don’t know how to feel within your body.
As we move within a somatic yoga practice, I invite you to notice sensations as they arrive. This isn’t the same as chasing sensation (feeling like a stretch is only working if we feel strain or feel pain.) We’re not trying to make any sensation arise, but bring an awareness of what arises naturally within poses. Moving within our comfortability still provides flexibility and keeps our bodies safer in practice.
Sensations are any physical sensations you notice as you move within your yoga class. There is no analysis involved, but we become curious and note how areas of our body feel. Here are a few examples:
- Feeling a pull in the back of your legs in forward fold
- Feeling the breath enter your nostrils as you inhale
- The sensation of coolness on your hands as you place them on the mat.
- A subtle tightness in your shoulder when seated with an upright posture.
- The sensation of a blanket draped over you in savasana or another pose
Noticing sensations is how we keep our practice healthy – as we only move within our comfortable limits. It is also how we can notice tension, and you have the option to adjust your body to create more comfort.
For trauma survivors, exploring sensations isn’t as simple as noticing our inner landscape, but there are ways to create safety within sensation.
For trauma survivors, this might be where the practice stays for a while. This alone can be activating for survivors because our bodies may not feel like a safe place to be in. There is nothing wrong with this. It’s still a somatic practice reconnecting your mind and body, which supports deeper embodiment.
For those who worry they can’t explore this on any level, they can begin on other, gentler levels, eventually leading to exploring more internal sensations. This is also your practice, and somatic exploration is deeply personal.
However you choose to explore a somatic yoga practice is your choice – meaning you’re never doing anything wrong. It’s as if we told someone who was dancing for fun that they’re doing it wrong – it’s their unique expression and there’s no need to critique it for perfection. Our yoga practices are the same.
If you’re looking for other ways to explore sensation without going immediately into larger parts of your body, you might explore these options:
- Focus on an area you feel comfortable with. You don’t need to focus on any areas you’re not ready for. For some, this might mean focusing on their feet or even a specific toe to begin.
- Explore your kinesphere. This is our personal space bubble and isn’t physically part of our body, but the space that our body moves within. This may be a supportive starting point. For exploring this, you might choose to skip sensation and explore feeling. You might feel your kinesphere is small and comforting in child’s pose, or open and expansive while in five-pointed star (standing with your arms pointed out like a star).
Once comfortable identifying sensation, we can tap into the more creative aspects of our practice – identifying feeling.
When speaking about somatic healing, feeling isn’t the same as emotion. This is how we interpret our sensations, giving them more meaning than just the sensation itself. There is no wrong way to explore feelings, because we all have different experiences.
To practice, I welcome you to explore a yoga class or movement practice of your choice and notice your sensations. You might choose to include grounding and your resource at any time, but this may be especially supportive at the beginning and end of your practice.
Below is an example of feeling. (Please note that you may notice different sensations and feel differently about them from this example.)
When in child’s pose, you notice a sensation of pressure on your forehead as it meets the mat, a stretch in your hips, and warmth in your breath. These are your sensations.
Because of this, you might acknowledge a feeling of safety, comfort, or groundedness. This is a feeling cultivated from your sensations.
Feelings can vary greatly from person to person, which is why trauma-informed yoga places such an emphasis on exploring the version of poses that feel best for you – what’s comforting to one person may be activating to another. An example of this is there are survivors of sexual trauma who may feel vulnerable in child’s pose, and so exploring another option that feels more comforting is supportive. This creates a more embodied practice and honors how we feel, instead of trying to convince ourselves that we feel comfortable.
How to practice feeling within our bodies
To practice feeling, you might start with yoga poses you gravitate towards. There is usually a positive reason we do this, and so it might be easier to notice the feelings instead of a pose that feels more neutral. It goes beyond the fact we love a certain pose and asks, “why do we like it?” Does it make you feel comforted, relaxed, supported, or grounded? Below is a list you might choose to explore for extra guidance:
Words to describe feeling within poses:
- Grounded
- Expansive
- Open
- Light
- Heavy
- Stable
- Soft
- Fluid
- Tense
- Relaxed
- Spacious
- Free
- Stuck
- Strong
- Nurtured
- Balanced
- Rooted
I welcome you to start with poses you enjoy, and then move onto more neutral poses once you feel comfortable. I invite you to explore your grounding and resourcing any time you choose.
Bridging our conscious and unconscious begins to happen when we start to notice emotions that arise from feelings.
Once you’re comfortable with noticing sensation and feeling, we can explore further by acknowledging if any emotions arise. There might be a desire to place an emotion to every sensation and feeling we have, but sometimes we might just have tension in an area due to physical reasons like sleeping in an uncomfortable position or muscle soreness from exercise.
Identifying emotion is where we start to rely on our intuition. Many survivors feel like they can’t trust their intuition or that it failed them, but intuition is not about predicting the future. We can strengthen our intuition with identifying any emotions that may arise from our feelings.
I welcome you to take your time if you choose to identify emotion, because it can be confusing or frustrating if we put too much pressure on ourselves. Here is an example of exploring emotion from feeling and sensation:
While in pigeon pose, I notice a gentle stretch in my hips. This brings me feelings of openness or even release. From these feelings, I start to acknowledge a wave of sadness and grief.
Hip openers are the emotional center of our bodies, and so it’s more common to notice emotion from exploring movement in this area.
When exploring emotion during your practices, it may be supportive to say (verbally or in your mind) what you’re feeling. Something as simple as “ I feel sadness,” is enough. This is where our grounding, resourcing, and practicing self compassion are especially important, because without these tools we might become overwhelmed or our emotions might take over, leading us to leaving our practice and feeling resistant to return. You might also choose to focus on areas with emotions you feel more comfortable exploring, like love or happiness.
As you begin to incorporate noticing emotions in your practice, I welcome you to first identify sensation, then feeling, then see if there is an emotion attached. If something doesn’t arise within a few seconds, there may not be any emotion – we don’t need to force or try to concentrate to find an emotion – they will arise naturally.
There may or may not be emotion, and that’s okay. Sometimes, we may feel like there needs to be an emotion to release, but there doesn’t always need to be. Some days we’re neutral and can just be in practice for the joy of being in movement.
Here are a few words to describe emotions in you practices:
- Sadness
- Happiness
- Anger
- Frustration
- Fear
- Peace
- Guilt
- Grief
- Relief
- Shame
- Empowerment
- Vulnerability
- Love
- Gratitude
- Excitement
Overview
Exploring your somatic yoga practice with somatic healing principles creates a much deeper experience than just moving through postures. You may also find that you don’t follow the exact formula of sensation, feeling, emotion. Sometimes, we immediately notice an emotion, and we can work backward to see where in our body we feel this emotion. This is a fluid experience, and everyone will experience it differently as we all have unique life experiences.
This was part two of the three-part somatic yoga series for beginners, and next week for our final week, we’ll be exploring how to take our practice even further to explore our unconscious beliefs and judgements that live within our bodies.
Trauma-informed yoga classes for exploring sensation, feeling, and emotion
I welcome you to join my free, private yoga library and community to practice these concepts with trauma-informed yoga classes. I explore common themes related to sexual trauma, and these are supportive of a calm nervous system and deepening embodiment. I welcome you to join me inside!
