Have you heard of energy work? Maybe you’ve tried it before. Maybe you sat on a bolster on your floor, lit some sage, and tried to feel the energy around you. Maybe you waved your hands around your body dusting away what you perceived as negative energy. Maybe you felt silly. Maybe you didn’t try at all. Maybe you laugh at the thought of it. Or maybe not. You might have experienced deep healing. You might have been guided through different realities or ancestral pasts. You might have been visited by your spirit guide. If you were, was any of it real? Does the “realness” of it even matter?
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I’m lying on what resembles a massage table. Soft cushions are under me, including an extra one under my knees and an electric blanket to stave off any chills. Cozy sheets are wrapped around me. The energy worker passes sage smoke over me, herself, and her studio. Over the next few minutes she takes my pulse, drops herbal tinctures under my tongue that leave a hint of brandy in my mouth, and places stones and crystals in my hands and on specific points of my body. While there’s a part of me that is skeptical, a bigger part of me is curious and desperate to heal. I try to quiet the analytical part of my brain and settle into the experience.
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A few months after my first energy work experience, I’m sitting in my living room staring expectantly at my computer screen as I sip on a cup of honeyed green tea. Soon, I’ll be in a therapy appointment with someone trained in EMDR and hypnosis. My curiosity is bubbling inside of me. I try to remind myself that I’m here as a patient, but I know there’s a miniature-me in the back of my head who will be taking analytical notes the entire time. Throughout my sessions with this therapist, I’m never hypnotized. She leads me through rapid eye movements in some of our sessions, but for the most part, she leads me through imagery, my emotions, and how they are connected to my physical body.
One session when I’m feeling particularly anxious, she asks me where in my body I feel the anxiety. “My chest,” I answer. She guides me to focus on my chest and the feelings there. She asks me, “If these feelings were an animal, what animal would they be, and what would that animal be doing right now?” I think about it and decide the swirly frantic feelings in my chest are acting like a squirrel running, searching, hiding, scurrying, searching more, hiding again. She asked me what that squirrel needs; it needed safety and rest. So together with our words and my imagination, we built a cozy nest complete with a soft blanket for it to curl up in and relax. My anxiety dropped. Over time, this practice reminded me that I’m not my anxiety. My anxiety is this little squirrely part of me. I have the tools to soothe my anxiety.
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Four years before either of these experiences, I began CBT/talk therapy. Talk therapy has been very beneficial for me. It helps me to talk through my pain and traumas and make sense of relationships, family dynamics, and much more. My therapist offers a different perspective by helping me come to terms with what I’ve been through. I learned that my debilitating lack of trust in myself and others stems from anxiety, depression, and PTSD which are the results from key traumas (“big T” and “little t”) from my childhood and adolescence.
“Big T” traumas are what one usually thinks of when thinking of trauma: life-threatening experiences, sexual violence, etc. These “big T” traumas are what is usually associated with PTSD. “Little t” traumas include non-life-threatening events, bullying, emotional or verbal abuse, loss of pet or significant relationships, etc. Even though “little t” traumas are seen as smaller traumas, they can cause major harm with their insidious manner and are usually overlooked as “just the way it is” which is exactly what I was told about my “little t” traumas. As far as my “big T” traumas are concerned, my line of thinking (and what others told me) was that I deserved it. It’s my fault. I brought this on myself. Both of these lines of thought are common for trauma survivors and disrupt healing.
Therapy helped me rewire neuropathways to confront this line of thinking. However, over time, I felt like my therapy sessions were taking place inside a bubble. No matter how many times I would remind myself, “I’m not my anxiety,” or “I have the tools I need to face challenges,” I would inevitably find myself drowning in swirling thoughts of not-enoughness, self-doubt, fear, and panic. I continued to find this baseline layer of anxiety, reaction, and isolation that seemed to be integral to my personality.
So I looked for modalites that went deeper, literally, to the atomic, energetic level. I read books on the embodiment of trauma and the power of the mind and subatomic body such as The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk and Metahuman by Deepak Chopra and found an energy worker.
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With these new modalities, I learned to see myself in segments. There’s an anxious part of me, a hurt part, a scared part, but there’s also a creative part, a strong part, a passionate part, a nurturing part. I saw my anxiety as a squirrel, my scared part as a frightened and lost child, and my pain as black ichor sticking to my bones and organs. I called upon my strong and nurturing parts to soothe the painful parts of me. It was much easier for me to work with my feelings in this way than to talk about my feelings in a purely cognitive way.
As the energy worker pulled dark, heavy energy from my pelvis, I felt my neuropathways click into new formation. The darkest parts of my traumas and mindset live in me like a shadow feeding on the light around it. Expelling that shadow through energy work felt like talk therapy come to life. These conceptualizations of my pain helped me see “My pain does not control me,” in a way saying those words aloud or thinking them repeatedly had never done.
This new conceptualization of my trauma from alternative healing modalities brought me deeper healing than I could have imagined. As I thought this through, I realized this is cognitive reframing, a primary technique of CBT/talk therapy. Cognitive reframing is changing the way you view and interact with your irrational thoughts with the hopes of confronting and accepting them, instead of being carried away by them. Imagery exercises, such as with the dark shadow mentioned above, guide my cognitive reframing and changed how I view, accept, and live with my trauma.
This could be my unique experience with talk therapy, but I felt the wall I kept hitting was because I was addressing the wound in a purely cognitive way. What happened to me wasn’t a purely cognitive event; it was emotional, physical, and even spiritual (in the sense that my spirit was broken afterwards). I needed to heal all those parts of me and I couldn’t heal them solely by talking.
To me, CBT therapy addresses my issues from the top down while energetic and somatic work address my issues from the bottom up. Talk therapy is the safety flotation device as I explore the deep waters of my psyche and soul via energetic and somatic work.
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So occasionally you’ll find me sitting on the floor of my living room with sage burning nearby. I’ll do some breathing exercises and focus my mind inward. I feel the black ichor sitting in my pelvis, weighing me down, dimming my light. I imagine warm, healing light surrounding my hands. I take my hands to different areas of my pelvis, in front of me and behind, and scoop, actually scoop with my hands. I imagine the black ichor leaving my body as I scoop and throw it into the burning sage. In its place, nurturing light shines. This has become an important healing exercise when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed. It has become a form of therapy, of healing, and of self-care and self-love.
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I invite you to explore yourself. Try putting images and characters to your emotions. Maybe one day you feel the swirly, sparkly, and bright. Maybe sadness feels like Eyeore sitting on your chest. This may seem silly at first, but soon you'll find these images help you see your emotions differently than before. You might see them more fully, express them more clearly, and heal them more deeply. Whether in talk therapy or energy or somatic work the focus is the mind, the Self, the Being.
I’m reminded of a quote from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
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If you're interested in somatic work, read more about my Embodiment Practice by clicking on the button below.
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Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
May all beings everywhere be happy and free. May the thoughts, words, and actions of my own life contribute in some way to the happiness of and freedom for all.
With gratitude,
Rebekah
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