What Happens When You Include the Body in the Conversation
My somatic teachers described the hands-on portion of a Pantarei session as simply “including the body in the conversation.” I’ve been thinking about this framing more and more lately.
When a session shifts from dialogue into bodywork, there is usually something showing up in the body. Whether the conversation has been about a tension with a coworker, a new relationship showing early warning signs, or one that’s going really well, the body offers its own form of information. This is what embodied cognition points to: the idea that the body itself is a site of knowing.
When the hands-on portion begins, I ask the client to start noticing their body, the sensations and emotions that are present, where their attention is naturally drawn, and to connect with their breath as a way of becoming more present. And when they do, they might notice a heaviness in the lower stomach, a pressure in the forehead, or a tightness in the chest.
When I invite someone to address what has shown up directly, “What is this tightness trying to say?” or “Why is this sadness here?”, people can almost always name what the sensation is carrying. “It’s the loneliness I’ve felt since moving to a new city.” “It’s the pressure I’ve been putting on myself at work.” And when I ask them to go deeper, to sense how old the feeling is or when it first appeared, what people can name, and how precisely they can name it, continues to surprise me. “This feeling of not being good enough is connected to my five-year-old self. That’s when my dad left.” “It’s me in high school. That was the happiest period of my life.”
What I find so interesting about this is that connecting to a sensation doesn’t just surface a feeling, it often opens up new cognitive territory. People start making connections they hadn’t made before, answering questions they didn’t know they could answer. We know so much more about ourselves than we think we do. Sometimes we just need to remember to include the body in the conversation.
