Hello, and welcome to the Somatic Approaches in Therapy Summit. My name is Kaleigh Isaacs. I'm the founder of the Awake Network, and I'm delighted to be here today with Susan Aposhyan. Susan is a master teacher of meditation, embodiment, and psychological wellness, skillfully blending the three in a way that is accessible, immediate, and profound. She's a psychotherapist and the founder of Body-Mind Psychotherapy in which she has trained practitioners internationally. She was founding director of Naropa University's Somatic Psychology Program. She's the author of several books, including her newest book, Heart Open, Body Awake: Four Steps to Embodied Spirituality. We'll make sure to have a link to that book below this session, and I highly recommend checking it out. Thank you so much for being with us, Susan. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. So to begin, as the founder of Body-Mind Psychotherapy, I was hoping we could just start with a sort of definition of that, and what is the difference between body-mind versus mind-body? Well, Body-Mind Psychotherapy, I started using that name in the 90s, I think. And that was a time where all of the somatic approaches were emerging. And that an exciting time for all of us, many of the people you've included in the summit. Um, and we were all brainstorming together. And at the same time, there was this necessity, economic necessity, for everybody to sort of mold their brand, so to speak. And so my work has always been founded in body-mind centering. Body-mind-centering is the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, and it's an experiential approach to anatomy, physiology, early motor development. And then from there, most body-mind centering people have studied a lot of embryology and neuroscience. I just thought, you know, while we were creating the field of somatic psychology, I thought we were all going to be studying the body intensely. And that's turned out not to be the case. I think it's for very practical reasons. You know, people, some people have worked really hard to bridge with psychiatry and therapy and I'm so happy that they've done that and it's opened the door for somatic psychology to integrate into most helping professionals work. Most helping professionals now use the question, how does that feel in your body? How are you experiencing that in your body? And that's what I hoped for 30 years ago. At the same time, I also hoped that everybody in the field was gonna keep deepening their understanding of physiology, anatomy, early motor development, neuroscience, embryology, and how it all works together. In this crazy ride that we're in right now called human development. In what I think is a dark night of the soul for our whole species. You know, our whole species is trying to find its heart, essentially, find its reason to be alive. And within that, many of us believe we have to find a sustainable way to live on this planet. And get along with each other. And live in a harmonious way with all the other life forms on the planet and the planet itself as a living being. So because we're entering this dark night of the soul of our species, then individual human development becomes essential there. We can only really work with our own development. And through our work with ourselves, we can support other people's development and our species' development. What we didn't have in the psychological world in the 90s, and we thought we were creating it in the somatic world, was a real understanding of patience and kindness and self-compassion. We were trying not to push, we were trying to be with and allow things to evolve in their own way. And it was a huge step for the psychological field that we all took back then, which was to feel the sensations in our bodies and have a sense of allowing and spaciousness toward what we felt there. What we didn't do as a field, the field of somatics, is recognize this distinction that you and I were talking about earlier. So I think I'm just gonna jump ahead. So please stop me because I know I've left your original question, but in neuroscience, there's a basic distinction that's used, and it refers to brain centers. So within the brain, we consider the prefrontal cortex, the top of the brain. And then the brain stem is the bottom of the brain. So even though there's horizontal dimension, we go from front to back and then down. This is the top, and this is the bottom, and then there's stuff in the middle. And so what we realized from that neuroscientific relationship of top-down brain functioning versus bottom up brain functioning, top down brain functioning is when I think a thought consciously, and I have an intention and then I convey that to my body and I enact it. Bottom up functioning is when something happens more intuitively, more instinctually, more before thought. And we were terrified of that as a society and psychology was terrified of that as field and And we equated bottom up with being crazy, being impulsive, being crazy. Being violent, being hypersexualized. There were all sorts of negative connotations that were kind of subconsciously in there. And so everybody was so afraid of including the body. And what we did as a field is embrace the body from a top down point of view. We said, okay, how does that feel in your body? Notice that. We didn't say as a group, but what I continued to say as an individual and then in Body-Mind Psychotherapy is give that permission to move. To breathe, to sound, however it wants to. Now, initially in the 90s, people were frightened about such an open directive, you know, I'm gonna get flooded with negative emotions, I might become irrationally angry, I might become sex crazed, you know, all of those things. I was afraid too, so I'd really go carefully in there. And we had Peter Levine, you know, guiding us all saying, titrate it in. That was an important message that, you know, kept us from some of the dangers, you know, bad things happened in primal scream therapy and, you know, transactional analysis groups, you know where it was just too wild and crazy. And so we were trying not to be wild and crazy, but we felt like, no, this, we really need to take the lid off of our felt experience. And as it's turned out, 30 years later, we did just fine. We weren't re-traumatizing people, that was the big fear. We weren' leading people into psychosis, into dangerous places. As it turns out, we all need a lot more bottom up functioning. We all need, let's just do it together. Everybody listening. We need to let go of our breath. Stop controlling our breath from the top down. Part your lips. Feel a shift when the breath comes on its own that you don't have to pull it in. You don't to push it out so you can pull the next breath in. You can just wait. You can let the breath come and go. And you can see I've got my hands on my jaw here because our jaws wanna take over. The mouth and the jaw are the minions of the brain. And they're just gonna say, okay, we've got this. We know what an alert adult breath looks like. Ahh. And that's how much of our brain thinks we should be breathing all the time. Top down breath. So it's it's a quiet little gentle revolution inside each of us to just say how does this body want to breathe right now? So that gives you a little bit of background, probably more than you wanted on Body-Mind Psychotherapy. There was a second part of your question too, but I can't recall it. Tell me if you wanna go back to that. Just thank you, Susan. That's a beautiful way to begin. And I really appreciate getting to just drop in with you in that way myself, the beginning of this. And I guess I'm wondering if you could give us kind of an example, everything you said was so helpful, sort of visualizing it in session with the client, what it might look like coming from a way of approaching the body from a top down approach versus this bottom up approach that you've been illustrating. Yeah, and I can do that within somatics too, because in people that are trying to take a somatic approach will say things like, notice what's going on with your breath right now. And I'm gonna do it again. So, you know, this is, I didn't think this through, but this is how I did it. Notice what's going on with your breath right now. So I'm moving forward, I'm very pointed. I'm directing my attention to you. Maybe we can all just feel the difference between letting go of the breath. And that kind of pointed noticing of the breath. So in my work, I'm trying to move out of being client-centered. And move into being energetically centered in the field of this room, this Zoom room, this recording room, which includes all of the future listeners. Feeling that in my own body. And allowing my breath to come in response to that. And then that becomes a bottom up invitation for other people to give their breath more room. And then the awareness comes secondarily. If we bring the awareness first, it makes us self-conscious. People do that with somatic interventions all the time in therapy. It's like, notice this, I notice you're doing that. What's this movement about? What's the gesture about? And sometimes it's, you know, a gift and a blessing. And other times it stops the flow and brings a self-consciousness that is different than self-awareness. I mean, those two words, if we look at the real definitions, generally mean the same thing. But the feeling tone, whatever each of us calls it, of self-consciousness versus self-awareness is very different. And what happens then as we support self-compassion and awareness that includes the self is it helps us stop fixating on ourselves. Which is arguably the root of all psychological issues. It's one thing to experience hardship, to experience violence, to experience life-threatening experiences. It's another thing to fixate on the fact that we've experienced that. And it leads to very different outcomes in therapy. People become stuck in an identity of being a traumatized person. Versus learning how to be kind to this person. And experiencing an atmosphere of compassion and kindness between themselves and another or others. So it's a huge shift really for all of us to make in the field of psychology. And it's happening, you know, it's becoming looser. It's becoming more compassionate, more compassion-based. And the idea of teaching people self-compassion is spreading rapidly. Mindfulness is spreading rapidly, and mindfulness begins, you know, the word mindfulness was really taken from the teachings of the Buddha, and the Buddha used a word that in Sanskrit means remembering, recollecting. And, but it did mean what we mean by mindfulness. It mean, it meant remembering, I think the Buddha meant remembering here and now. And so the Buddha's four foundations of mindfulness begin with mindfulness of body. The best way to remember here or now is to feel what's happening in your body right now. Let's all do it together. Just take a minute and just scan through. Oh, your head. Hmm your throat, your breath. If you want to part your lips again to just free the breath up. Uggghh. Check in with your chest and your heart. Check in with your waist, solar plexus, diaphragm area all the way inside and out, front and back. Let's see how everybody's doing in there. Doesn't have to be a big deal. Check in with your belly. Your pelvis, and all the way down through your pelvic floor, your perineum, your seat, your bottom. Ah, this is the core of our bodies, right? See what you find, what's happening in there. It doesn't have to be a story, or psychological, or a big deal. Just could be a sense of awareness of your breath, awareness if there's any movement happening. How your digestion's doing, how your heart's feeling. And there might be emotions that are obvious to you in there. Let's check and see. Hmm. More and more, I've been working with people in embodied meditation and embodiment practice and not so much in psychotherapy. And people come to the embodiment and embodied meditation for different reasons than they would come to psychotherapy. But often people come to that after being in psychotherapy for long periods of time and not being able to really find any patience and kindness with their own issues. Needing to find more patience and kindness, more ways in, and therefore more ways through. So it's a slow process at the beginning. For some people, for other people, they take to it in five minutes. And that's very different than when you present it from top down. And same thing with leaving a somatic approach out altogether. You know, in psychotherapy generally the top down work is you wanna know somebody's history, you know. And then there's a way where we get into the telling of our history and we're reenacting it and reinforcing it and reinforcing all the neural networks of the history as we say it. Most people probably are familiar with that experience, right? And then when I was five, blah, blah happened and you know and once you get into the story of it, you're really re-enacting the story. And so it's strengthening the wounds and it's strengthening the identities and strengthening the traumas. So it's a tricky, delicate thing to go in there and let the history emerge as it needs to. But have a light touch with it. So let's try it all together. Think of something that you might think, I think I should go to therapy for that. Whether you would do it or not, if you've had that thought, pick something like this. And then start to tell yourself the story of what happened. Remember it, remember the vague story, and then feel your body and feel your breath as you tell that story. And see if the body and the breath can go into the story and kind of loosen it up a little bit. You know, I'm seeing in my mind's eye like tangled yarn, you know, and when you kind of get your fingers into tangled yarn and you're just kind of loosening it up, good. And then ask yourself, what is it I want around this issue? What do I most deeply want? Not, how do I get there? How do I figure this out? But what do I want? Let's take a minute to ask yourself that question. Get an answer. So, you know, Kaleigh, I don't know if you'd be willing or I could share what I was exploring, you know as a way of supporting the listener to think about how to do this for themselves a little more. I guess I would share that what I felt like I was wanting was more of a sense of like wholeness or completeness, a sense of like integration and okayness. Beautiful. And so, I'm just hearing those words. Will you do it with me? And you know, all of our listeners, if you want to, such beautiful words, wholeness, feel it reverberate in your body. Completeness. Integration. Was there another one? Okayness. Okayness. That's the best one, really. So what happens when you let those words float around in your body? There's a sense of more spaciousness in the body and like more spacious around too. And so you're making this gesture. So just check and see, is the spaciousness centered here around your heart? Heart and throat. Heart and throat, good. Okay, let's just go back into the heart and throat. Okayness, spaciousness, completeness. And just see if for you listeners, if that goes outside your body the way it did for Kaleigh. It does for me, I feel, okayness, really so important. And I feel my heart, chest, energy relaxes out into the space around me. And so what happens? When we look at what we're wanting around an issue. We're showing ourselves what that desire looks like, what it feels like, how it will manifest, and then it becomes a practice. So, you know, every time I think, oh, I'm not OK, this is not OK. What's going on is not OK. I could say. On the deepest level, everything's OK right now And then it happens, this thing I want happens. I have a question there, Susan. It's sort of coming from the mind, but I wonder, you know, I didn't have this experience when you were just leading that, but sometimes going to that space of sort of ultimate okayness, and it can bust through what might be holding us or which I just experienced. And then sometimes I feel like that can be sort of bypassing or going above something that's unresolved. And I didn't experience that in this moment. And I have a suspicion that it might be something to do with the way that you led it. So I just would love to hear you speak on that. Yeah, thank you so much for asking that question and recognizing that, because inevitably with bypassing, we're going out of our experience in the here and now and in the core of our body. So here's an example. I mean, ultimate okayness is so important right now because it's getting crazy out there. I don't know when, you know, this will air, but at this moment in the spring of 2025, you know the stock market's going up and down like crazy and people are in extreme polarization about the American government. Europe, Asia, South America, everybody's suffering from what's going on here in the American government as well as every government, you know? There's lots of turmoil on the planet. The environment is getting more and more extreme, climate change is happening. So there's a lot of issues that need to be addressed. And yet, what can we each do as individuals? It's very limited. So people are really upset and some people are not OK. You know, people are losing their homes, their livelihoods, their ability to feed their families. Yeah, and so as I say all that, I feel a lot of heaviness in my chest. And we don't want to bypass that. At the same time, we don't want to get stuck in it either. And it's a huge dilemma for all of us right now. So here's the embodiment practice approach. Feel the sensations in your body right now. Give those sensations permission to move, to breathe, to act, to rest, to imagine, to think. What really needs to happen right now inside your little body? Oh, Inside my little body, I need to metabolize this moment of heaviness and sadness. I need to reaffirm to myself that I'm doing everything I can think of. You know, I talked to a minister yesterday who's leading an initiative about how can I help, an interfaith initiative and international. And, you know, I said, well, truthfully, that's my prayer every day, how can I help? But from an embodiment point of view, how can I help and stay on this path of my own truth, if you will, personal development, where I really am right now, what I can really do right now. Which in my experience isn't much, you know. Other people look at my life and say, oh my God, you're helping so many people. Sort of, kind of. You know, but I'm not able to give people food that are hungry. I mean, I do a tiny, I have my $15 to community food share every month. And so we're all grappling with this. What can I do that honors my own path, who I am, what my limitations are as a human? And at the same time recognizes we're in crisis. This is a dark night of the soul for humanity, I believe. And, ultimately, at this moment we can always choose to be present, to be self-compassionate, and to be compassionate for others. So if we're holding that view, then we can introduce something like, you know, this thing I said, ultimate okayness. I've never said that before, but you know it's a good principle and there's many other good principles like that. Yeah. Susan, so much of what you're sharing feels like the place that it's coming from is where the potency really is. And so everything you're speaking to feels like it would be helpful as humans, whether therapist or client or anyone else. And I'm curious to hear you speak to how this comes into the role of a therapist and the therapist's own practice and embodiment and connection with that space and what impact that can have on the client relationship and in session. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of compassion for therapists because I've spent most of my adult life as one. And I've trained many and I've supervised many. And most people come into therapy because they're trying to solve the conundrum of their own personal issues. And so, you know, there's a little bit more baggage, so to speak, coming in than the average human. And then there's so much earnest desire to help. And it's so precious and beautiful, this healthy desire we have to help ourselves and help each other. And make the world a better place. Unfortunately it's very confusing, right? And if you look at the history of psychology and the history of psychotherapy, it's fraught with a lot of drama and a lot confusion about power and ego. And even in the kindest, sweetest, most compassionate psychotherapist, they've been trained that there are rules about you have to be there for your client in this way. And these are all the rules and some of them are not healthy. So it takes some rewiring. Often, you know, when I work with more mature therapists, it takes some rewiring for them to step out of the authority expert role. Step out of the idea that they know what's healthy and what's not healthy for another human. Step out of the reality, and this is the killer for most psychotherapists, that they have to hide their own confusion. They don't want to burden their clients with their own stuff, you know? And there used to be a lot of that, and now there's not so much. But in trying not to do it, we're still doing it, because we're all confused human beings. And if we're not coming explicitly from that place, then there's a hierarchy that gets set up. And you have to keep tearing that hierarchy down intentionally, you know, and saying, look, I don't know what's right for you. I don't, I, you know, I barely know what's right for me. I'm just keeping my head above water like everybody else here. And even though when I say that, you know, I feel very aware of all of my privilege, you know, and that I do have enough food to eat and I do have the ability to help others in a way that a lot of people don't have access to. And I feel really pretty safe in my little bubble here relative to some of my relatives who live in war zones. You know, I have a first cousin that just had to leave Syria because she didn't feel safe. And our family had to leave Turkey because we weren't safe and come to Syria, you know, not that long ago. So, you know, I feel really safe and really privileged and still, because we're in a dark night of the soul of all humanity, we all feel, you know, moments of despair right now. Most of us do. I'm hearing that from a lot of people. So how do you include that without burdening somebody else with it? How do you show up and honor that, you know, here we are. We're just confused humans trying to find our way. And maybe if we're really kind to ourselves and really kind to each other, we can make things better. And maybe that will ripple out. Susan, do you happen to have like an example of how you've done that? Like how your own maybe bodily sensation or experience has come into session in a way that sort of shows what you're speaking about? Well, I literally do that all the time. I literally say, I don't know, you know, I'm just another confused human being. To get a little bit more colorful than that, I'm thinking of a session where this person came in and they had been stalking their ex-partners. And they were breaking the law, they were breaking and entering. I was afraid they were gonna get arrested. I was so frustrated and they told me that they had done it again and I went and they go, you love me, you really love me. And I just thought that was hilarious because I was just at the end of my rope. It's like, OK, you want to get arrested, you're going to get arrested. So, you know, it's just an example of being more in my own embodied place, showing my own reality more. But because I had that history with this person, instead of them going, oh my God, you're getting frustrated with me right now? You know, you are supposed to be my therapist, you're supposed to help me, you know, we had enough of a history that they could see me just shake my head in disbelief and frustration. And they said, you really love me. And it was true, you know? So they went deeper than I could go in that moment. You know? And that was beautiful and amazing. Is that the kind of example you were looking for? Yeah, that's great. What could the path sort of look like for someone who's wanting to show up in a more embodied way with their clients and sort of deepen that? What what would you suggest to those who are watching? Well, I have a very specific practice I call embodiment practice. I've written about it in all of my books. I have, you know, little videos on YouTube that can be helpful. And it's this, this is all it is. And we've done it already in this session. Let go of your breath. Feel the sensations in your body right now and give them permission to move, to breathe, to sound. To think. To rest. Whatever wants to happen. Just keep letting that happen. Keep letting go of your breath. You might need to part your lips to let that happen, you should feel a shift from a top down breath, a cortical breath, to an embodied breath, a bottom up breath, feels different. Ahh. And you can feel that shift through your whole body. It's a way of deepening your relationship with yourself. And, you know, embodiment practice is something that people, you know can deepen into over a period of months or years, to really find the fullness of it takes a while, but it's the basic practice for me for my whole life. It's the basis of embodied meditation. It's the basis of Body-Mind Psychotherapy. This is what I train psychotherapists to do, so that eventually they know in any given moment how their physiology is on many different levels. You know, they know when their heart rate speeds up or slows down. They're tracking their breath, when it's an embodied breath and when it is a cortical breath. They feel what's going on in their emotions and their digestion and their muscles and their movement through their whole body, their posture, their relationship. You can feel moment to moment, oh, I just reacted to that, what just happened with this person, you know. I'm trying to take Body-Mind Psychotherapy out of the realm of psychotherapy. I tried to change the name, but all my former students objected. What were you going to change it to? Oh, I was looking for something like with body, mind, spirit, you know, what I do in my own work is I don't call it, I don't call my work Body- Mind Psychotherapy anymore. I call it Body-Mind Consultation. And, but anyway, the point is we all need to learn to help each other. And there are no experts left in the world. Anybody that thinks they're an expert or presents themselves as an expert, you know, that seems kind of suspect to me. This might seem like an obvious question, but as you're becoming more and more familiar with your own sensations and experience and more attuned to your own state of being, how does that affect how you relate or attune to others, whether it's relationally in your life or with clients? Yeah, it changes a lot. It's changed for me a lot over my life. And I've realized that I started this practice as a teenager. I went through, my mother died when I was 17 and it was, you know, a shock to myself and my sibling. And I started then like trying to like help us move things in our body. And just, basically all it was was weird movement back then, it was like you know, just move a little bit and see if that helps. And what's happened for me personally over 50 years of doing this is that I know myself better, I'm more authentic, I accept more that I'm, kind of a strange human, you know, I don't expect to be treated otherwise, you know. I know that, you know, it can be a bit much being around me. I had somebody come in to see me for the first time in psychotherapy a few years back and maybe she came in a couple three times and and all of a and she goes, who are you? And I just, and I don't think she came back after that. She wasn't antagonistic in any way, but I, you know, I don' think she really needed to see me. I think she was doing fine, and you know she just kind of got it. But I'll never know, but I loved that moment. I thought it was just a hilarious moment. And you know probably I just shrugged and you know, didn't really have an answer, but. So I feel like I've become more and more myself and what's happening now as I get older, you know I'm more of a burden to people. You know, I'm bringing my own stuff more. I was so trained as a psychotherapist to leave my stuff out, you know and practice codependency essentially, you know be there for everybody else just try to manage on my own. And now more and more I'm saying, you know, to the close people in my life, like, that didn't really work for me. Can we talk about it? And it's hard, you know. It's hard for me to do that. And it's hard for them, for me, to, you know, change and kind of get more and more emotional and more and more relational and communicative. And so yeah, it's a process. I don't think it ever ends. Well, to close, I know that you speak about this practice of embodied listening and embodied speaking. And we've gone through several different versions of sort of just sensing into our own embodiment and embodiment practice. And I was wondering if we might be able to demonstrate what it would look like to take that into the space of listening, which obviously is very important space when working with clients. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you know, if you if you think of this body as being the nexus of a gazillion different energy flows, you know just take a minute and feel your body and just think there's all sorts of energies coming in through your eyes, your ears, your nose, your mouth, perhaps, your skin. Your joints, your pelvic floor. The soles of your feet, energies coming and going, coming and going, coming and going, you know, even if we just want to think of it as physiology or electromagnetic frequency or electrical frequency. So we've got all of this movement happening internally. And the more we get aware of that, the more then we can listen with our whole beings. So just try it right now. You know, maybe close your eyes, hear my voice, and feel how does the sound come in through your ears? Does it go through your head? Can you feel the sound of my voice in your chest? Or anywhere else in your body. How does it feel? How is it affecting you? Oh, what were we saying earlier? Okayness. There was a book in the 70s, I'm OK, You're OK. Right now, is it true? Right now do you feel like you're OK? That's embodied listening. Now if you're doing very active embodied listening where you, you know, are not just receiving but you're preparing to give or you are giving even in the listening. There's some kind of energetic positive regard or compassion or patience in your listening practice. Then you can feel that actively moving through your body. So that's kind of what it looks like after you've done it a lot. To begin with, just go back and forth between feeling your body and listening. And then see if you can do them both at the same time, which is easy for all the other mammals on the planet and all the people that are living in nature on the planet, the humans. So it's innate ability we have, but we've practiced out of it. We practice disembodied speech and disembodied listening. It's like, oh, yes, good. I'm so glad to hear that your family's all well, you know, and we're not feeling like, no, her family isn't all well. We practice trivializing and only seeing the intentional presentation of the people we're talking to. We're not supposed to listen deeply or look deeply or feel deeply. We're supposed to just do, how are you? Fine, great. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Susan, as we close, is there anything else that you'd like to share before we end? No, I'm just so happy to be with you and see what you're doing and yeah, I am happy that you're doing this summit, if that's what you call it. I don't know what you call it, yeah. And I hope it goes really well and I hope everybody learns a lot. Thank you, Susan. Thank you. Be well.