Wanting to feel better is normal. No one likes feeling bad. Most sessions with a skilled practitioner bring relief, regardless of the modality. Too often though the relief is temporary. Longer lasting change happens once a client trusts and feels a practitioner’s support. With this support in place, clients can look in directions they couldn’t before. Having new perspective gives clients the opportunity to have a new relationship to their story, and therefore themselves.
We all want to feel better. But feeling better and healing are not the same thing. We can’t feel better because we want to; but we can begin to carry our stories differently when we have enough safety and support in the present. From a somatic or body-oriented perspective, the keys to getting better are hidden inside the wounds. The journey to healing requires recognizing and simultaneously feeling both the depth of the wound and the presence of support now.
What this requires is being in multiple time zones at once, the time of the wound and the time of now. Over the course of our ten-module foundation training, practitioners learn how to plant a foot in each world. They learn how to be present to the pain of another and anchored in a place of wellness within themselves. It doesn’t matter if the pain is emotional or physical, what matters is that it is an old injury, it is not being inflicted right now. Once the body recognizes that the origin of its suffering is in the past, the experience in the present can change. When the past and present can touch each other, they can together create new ways of relating to a wound.
