28TH EMCC GLOBAL MENTORING, COACHING AND SUPERVISION CONFERENCE 2022, 8-10 JUNE, ONLINE
Embracing the full body-mind experience helps spark real change in clients, proposed Simon Cavicchia and Charlotte Sills in their masterclass, Coaching with the Body in Mind.
Sills said that embodiment is “an antidote to the dominance of left hemispheric processes” and offers the potential for awakening to multiple sources of experiencing and knowing.
“When the brain’s pre-frontal context remains aware and functioning while the body-mind is re-experiencing the past, replaying old patterns with dual awareness, this is what causes change,” she said.
The pair proposed working with sensorimotor psychotherapy’s five core organisers of the present moment experience to help bring change in clients. The organisers are cognition/thoughts, emotions, five sense perception, movement impulses and sensations (Ogden et al, 2006).
Cavicchia said, “When we’re experiencing the flow of our knowing moment by moment, we’re not conscious of these core organisers. This map helps us discern and discriminate between different qualities and territories of experience which are happening whether we’re conscious of them or not.
“Working with the core organisers can help us explore closely, intimately and exquisitely the ways in which the client is organising their thinking. The more we explore this together, the more it creates the possibility for insight to develop and also for real change in perspective to happen.
On movement impulses, Sills said “We ignore what’s going on in our bodies, and we also ignore the movement impulses, and we’re used to keeping our movements small or contained…Here-and-now awareness of possibly long held patterns, this is how change can happen or triumph can be achieved.”
Cavicchia said when it comes to five sense awareness, “we may have preferences such as being very visually acute….and when we’re under pressure, certain senses can go offline or become more acute. And this can give us information about how we’re interacting with the world….How might we support the senses to optimise our responses?”
On emotions, Sills said, “We can get into habits with emotions too. Some will feel familiar or were commonly experienced in our family of origin or our organisation.”
How might we expand our emotional repertoire?
Sills said, “If cognition/ thought is our strong suit, we can start there and then go and fetch our other four ways of experiencing the world to really flesh out our experience of ourselves (top-down processing). Or we can do bottom-up processing (starting with sensations and working up) and see what happens then – we’re less likely to fall into old patterns.”
Reference
P Ogden, K Minton and C Pain, Trauma and the body, WW Norton & Company, 2006