The Practice of Turning Toward
Having woken up early, my eyes are still groggy with sleep. I wear my stiff green work polo and formal skirt as I climb across the slim mattress in my spare bedroom and I try to arrange the pillows so I have back and neck support during the video call. I search for something to prop up my computer, finally settling on a suitcase, and I open a test browser on my Zoom screen. “O.K. you can see my head and my chest. I think I’m ready.”
I open the Zoom link and find myself in the waiting room. I’m early. I want to leave a good impression. I’ve followed all the directions carefully. Suddenly, I get the notification that he’s joined the chat. The webscreen shifts and starts to load the call. Then there he is.
His eyes beam thousands of miles away from me, yet also less than 1 meter away and make contact with mine. He smiles and a well of feeling, before unseen and unnoticed begins to bubble to the surface. By the time he asks, “Why are you here?” a few tears have started to trickle down my cheeks and I know, not in my mind, but in my body that this is a space where my feelings, deep, old, and often unnamable are allowed to be. Not to be changed, but just to be witnessed. My body knew what this space was before the session had even begun.
I can’t remember all of the details of that first session with Lawrence. I remember that many of those initial sessions were spent experiencing grief—a sadness I'd been sitting with, one whose seeds had been planted in my childhood and had been growing since then. When this sadness bubbled up, water collecting at the corner of my eyes or a quiver in my voice as I explained a challenge or story from my childhood, Lawrence wouldn’t respond with advice on what I could do to move through my sadness or let go of my past. Instead, he would ask me to notice my body and my breath.
I’ve tried many times to explain what a somatic session is to curious strangers, old friends, and new clients, and I often find myself stumbling over my words. It’s not something that translates easily into language—a common challenge when trying to describe a primarily bodily experience. You know it impacts your consciousness not through instantly quantifiable data, but through shifts you track in your own lived experience over time, like running a months-long experiment on yourself where you are both the researcher and the subject.
What Lawrence was guiding me toward—this practice of meeting my body with breath and awareness—wasn’t entirely new to me. Before we ever met, I’d stumbled on a principle that would become central to our work together.
Contraction describes how we unconsciously restrict the natural flow of energy, breath, movement, and awareness through our body-mind system as protective strategies to maintain safety and survival, which then become limiting holding patterns. I was first exposed to a method for working with stuck energy and difficult sensations in a book called Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. At the time, I was desperately seeking relief from chronic pain, including a mysterious pain in my left leg when I would stand for any extended period of time and severe migraines that could dominate my days.
The book’s premise is that when a negative feeling or emotion arises, rather than pushing it away and trying to resist it, or expressing it (venting, fixating or mentally dwelling on it), allow yourself to instead fully experience the sensation of it in your body without attaching to any mental commentary. The idea being that when emotions are neither repressed, numbed, or projected, but instead located in the body and allowed to be there without resistance (e.g. accepted through moving our awareness towards the sensory experience), they will naturally dissipate or change form on their own. The path of surrender means dropping any narrative attached to the feeling while staying present to its raw, energetic and sensory quality.
With no spiritual or somatic conceptual foundations to my name, but desperate for a way out of the physical and emotional pain I was in at this point in my life, I decided to test out this approach on my migraines. When one struck, instead of trying to escape the pain or feel sorry for myself for it, I chose to move my attention toward it with curiosity. I’d turn the lights off in the room, draw the curtains, tuck myself under the covers and have a special, intimate date with my migraine.
What I discovered was twofold. First, that when I stepped away from naming my experience as painful and sank into the sensory experience of it, there was relief. The pain actually became less painful the more I became curious about the raw experience of it. The second thing I found was that sometimes when I kept going towards the core of the discomfort, I’d find at its center something utterly different. When I moved my attention wholeheartedly toward what I’d been calling pain, sometimes it would dissolve into an expansive sense of relief and oneness, like finding the pearl tucked away at the heart of a rough clam’s shell. My forehead would relax, my neck would loosen and a warm spaciousness would flood through me. I’d literally watch my thinking mind switch offline and sense my whole body operating automatically. Thoughts would entirely drop away and I’d feel a sense of total calm and rightness at the heart of the tension I had decided to move toward instead of avoid.
This self-guided practice of moving toward rather than away from difficulty illustrates one of the principles at the heart of my somatic practice, both then when I discovered it while dealing with migraines, and later when I rediscovered it during my work with Lawrence: when we turn our attention towards the part of ourselves we contract around, resist and avoid the most, these parts of ourselves soften and change becomes possible.
Another way to frame this: instead of pushing something down or looking away from it, we can choose to make space for it. An effective way to do this is through the breath. The breath is our constant anchor to the present moment, a bodily, sensed experience we can always locate.
Lawrence taught me to use the breath as a way to touch sensation and contraction in the body. He had me imagine that the breath can flow over contractions the way water flows over rocks in a stream, shifting their form through gentle touch rather than brute force. Picture sending your inhale directly to a tight shoulder blade or clenched jaw, using the breath to carry your gentle attention into those held places. While the breath can’t literally reach every part of our body, when we imagine that it does and visualize the breath touching sensation, we use it as a felt tool for moving our awareness toward those contracted parts—the places we hold fear, sadness, shame, anger. With each sip of air, we make space for our contractions, allowing their edges to soften and more life to flow.
This idea of using the breath to meet contraction in the body is hard to explain and even harder to prove. The effects don’t show up overnight. Sometimes they creep in so subtly you hardly notice the shift until weeks down the line when you’re in a situation that would have sent your anxiety skyrocketing, and you realize it didn’t, or your partner says something that used to instantly set you off, but you’ve kept your cool. It’s the slow work of water smoothing stone, well-worn grooves and patterns gradually softening until life flows differently.
There’s much more I could say about somatic work now that I’m a somatic practitioner, and I hope in time I will. But I wanted to start here, with these core insights I learned from Lawrence: that our contracted places soften when met with attention, and that the breath is a way we can practice that meeting.
Original blog post written on Substack.
