Unearthing Your Soma Sapien Wisdom
Most of my clients come to me with a challenge they’ve been unable to solve, whether it’s chronic pain or some sort of recurring challenge on their life’s journey.
What they leave with is much more than pain relief, much more than a simple solution to the challenge they’re facing. Yes, solving someone’s pain or specific life challenge is always the priority we’re aiming at, especially for my new clients who don’t yet have the tools and resources to navigate it on their own. And, the solution to those challenges comes from building greater self-awareness and tapping into the innate wisdom of their mind-body System.
This is the process of becoming a Soma Sapien – a person living a fully embodied life, aligned with the deep wisdom that lies within the core connections of body, mind, and spirit.
My core philosophy in guiding people through their Soma Sapien journey is you can’t do what you want till you know what you’re doing.
Every client that comes in has an incredible opportunity to deepen their knowledge about their unseen habits, the ways they physically move through the world, how they relate to others, and the way they face life’s obstacles. Uncovering this information not only helps my clients recognize unhealthy or unproductive cycles they’re in, it gives them a crucial healing tool that unseen information keeps from them: choice, and the ability to change the things they’re doing unconsciously.
To help my clients tap into that deep well of internal wisdom, to find out exactly what it is they’re doing so they can create the change they want, I focus our work on developing their body-centric intelligence. Not their IQ (we all know that one, and most of us over-focus on its development and importance), but their other intelligences:
Emotional Intelligence (EQ). Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and regulate one’s emotions. An emotionally intelligent person carries a wisdom about their own emotional field and the ability to relate to other people with empathy. In my work, I help uncover areas to deepen emotional intelligence, from shining a light on the programming a client has from childhood about feelings to helping them understand how to respond to their or others’ emotions. Clients who struggle with EQ may come in with problems that manifest from stress, relational challenges, or chronic tension or pain resulting from some form of disconnection from their emotional self.
Kinesthetic Intelligence (KQ). KQ can be looked at in several ways, from one’s sense of body awareness in space and skillfulness in coordination and movement through the world, to a more simple ability to be aware of the many signals that our bodies are sending us in every moment through sensations and movements. In my practice, developing greater KQ is often the first stop on our journey, whether we’re trying to solve years-long pain conditions or an ongoing challenge in someone’s career, relationships, or life. The ability to skillfully sense and track what your body’s doing and how it feels in response to inputs from within or out in the world is the very foundation of “…till you know what you’re doing.”
Self Intelligence (SQ). If EQ and KQ are the “What are you doing?” part of the puzzle we’re trying to solve, SQ (as I’ve come to call it) is the “Why?” Your Self Intelligence is all about understanding how your physical-mental-emotional system is built. SQ comes from the work you’ve done to learn how you’re programmed, what conditioning you may have inherited or learned, the actions and ways of being you’ll default into if you’re not proactively trying to make change, and how your system is biased to relate to the world. Tapping into your SQ helps you understand your unique superpowers, the nature of the challenges you regularly face, and gives you to a solid pivot point to move from “…what you’re doing” to “…what you want.”
Do you have to be some sort of ninja to put this all together? No. Some of my clients have lived their whole lives in their heads, focused on their IQ. Others have developed one or more of these tools already and just need some help putting it all together.
I’ve seen individuals with excellent KQ – lifelong movers with incredible agility, presence, and body awareness – lacking SQ around why their posture has taken on a performance-like stance and the deep emotional connection to it. I’ve worked with folks who are extremely aware of their personal history (SQ) and how it ties to their emotions (EQ) – perhaps they’ve spent years working with a great therapist – but they haven’t yet made the connection between that information and how it shows up in their bodies (KQ).
Throughout my 12 years as a practitioner, the work I’m most proud of is when I can help clients connect these dots and find their own deep well of mind-body-spirit wisdom from which they can guide their lives.
This integration of EQ, KQ, and SQ paves the way for a fourth intelligence to emerge: your Adaptive Intelligence, or Adaptability Quotient (your AQ). If your Emotional, Kinesthetic, and Self Intelligences give you the ability to understand “…what (and why) you’re doing,” AQ is the set of skills that arises from there, giving you the power to “do what you want.” Rolling these skills into a high AQ gives you presence of mind and body in different environments and challenging situations, and direct access to choice and the discovery of new strategies when the old ones aren’t working. Read more in my recent AQ post here.
Sounds powerful, doesn’t it?
Some of you might be reading this and thinking “Yes please!” while others may think this sounds like an incredible amount of work. It is a commitment to your transformation, that is true, but there’s also this: all of this intelligence already lives within your System, we just have to dig past the ways that it’s been filtered out and covered up in order to unearth it for you.
Uncovering and developing this well of wisdom and AQ has opened up new opportunities for my clients to overcome challenges, persevere, and radically change their lives if they want.
If you have a particular challenge that you’d like help unraveling, or simply want to expand the depth of your own body-centric intelligence, let’s talk! Email me at evolve@somamike.com and tell me where you’re currently at on your journey and what you’d like to create for yourself!