How to Unlock The Wisdom Within
You hold the key to your healing.
I’m sitting here having a cup of coffee, and reflecting on psychology. I was listening to Dr. Gabor Mate this morning and enjoying his book In An Unspoken Voice How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Dr. Mate talks about how top-down processing is limited, and I agree with him.
I think of this as trying to do therapy only addressing our thoughts and attempting to think our way through uncomfortable or distressing cognitions and feelings. The somatic experience and what is happening in the body are keys to unlocking more wisdom within.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD in his book The Body Keeps the Score highlights how our physiology and physical body store trauma and the importance of the integration of mind and body exploration for healing our psychology. I have such an appreciation for their work. They point towards the wisdom in listening and tending to the information and insights that we get from mind and body. This is empowering!
The mind-body connection is powerful. It’s the reason why mindfulness and meditation are used at the world-renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center in the treatment of patients. There are studies demonstrating how mindfulness and meditation support positive clinical outcomes. (Sidenote: There are also studies demonstrating the effectiveness of mindfulness in pain reduction.) Peggy Huddleston talks about this in her book Prepare for Surgery Heal Faster. She references studies about how mindfulness impacts our physiology (think stress hormone levels, our immune system, etc) and promotes healing after surgery.
To summarize: Our emotions and thoughts have the power to impact our physical healing, and working with the body can help us heal emotionally and mentally.
What does this mean for me as a therapist? In therapy with my clients, it is helpful to explore messages from the body and the mind to help us identify their inherent wisdom and what is happening within. We also get curious about integration. How do we bring those pieces together, so that we have access to more wisdom within and are operating with more access to the self? I’ll also add that this process takes a lot of courage, sometimes we are afraid of diving deep because we have trauma or shame about certain things. My perspective however is that there is beauty and wisdom that can be found even in what we perceive to be the ugly parts of ourselves. The good news is that the therapeutic process is guided by the client. It is important to find a therapist that will meet you where you are at. In my professional opinion it is important not to take a client somewhere they are not ready to go, and only the client knows the path forward. The metaphor that I use to describe this process is like we are driving in a car. My client is the driver, and I am a co-pilot. I’ll offer options on pathways I see forward and what I notice about the lay of the land, but the client is the one who is driving and chooses the path.
The therapy process is like digging for gold within ourselves. What is the body feeling? What is the body saying? What does the heart say? What is the mind telling us? The exploration and discernment of this information is the connection to our wisdom within. Our internal landscape and psychological map help us understand ourselves, how we got to where we are in the present moment, and find our way forward. It helps us forge the pathway (neuroscience says-actual new neural pathways in our brain) forward to who we want to be, and what kind of life we want to live.
