On today’s episode of Balance with Sam, I talk to one of the most beautiful souls, Stephanie Rae. Stephanie is a Somatic Experiencing and Embodiment Practitioner and an absolute ray of light in my life! We talk about how we can find healing for our trauma through tuning ourselves into our body’s sensations and how we can give ourselves permission to feel pleasure and enjoy our bodies.

Stephanie has been in the somatic healing space for 13 or so years, specializing in sexual trauma and sexual embodiment. She has worked as a practitioner in yoga, breathwork, energy work and tantra. Somatic Experience was first introduced by Dr Peter Levine and is based on the theory that trauma is not cognitive, it’s actually held in our bodies. Somatic experience teaches us that until we can come into our bodies and be able to feel and release the trauma from our bodies, feel through the emotions in their totality, without the suppressing, the avoiding the dissociating, the numbing out, which we all do, the trauma will just stay there and wreak havoc on our physicality, our mental state, our mind, our body and our soul. It’s using the intuitive wisdom of sensations and experiences and using that to help find those emotional releases.

Top Takeaways

Everybody experiences trauma differently. You can have two people that have the exact same experience in every way and they could both walk away and process it 100% differently.  Women have been conditioned to feel unsafe in their lives and when stuff happens, it may not show up in ways that you may think. It may get buried within your nervous system and becomes invisible. It’s about noticing the sensations and noticing where you may be feeling stuck or feeling pain. Once you start paying attention to that, you can then begin to ask “How do I start to feel safe again in my body?”

Befriending your body and allowing it to feel pleasure is at the heart of embodied network. Start small. What actually makes your body feel good? Maybe it’s sitting by a window and feeling the sun on your face. How does that make your body feel? How do you feel when you feel that sun or when you put your feet in the grass or what smells just really light you up? It’s really coming back to this idea of falling in love with different sensations on the outward. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex or with food or the way that you look. Take all of that off the table to begin with and just find this embodied pleasure in the sensory in our environment.

Notice when you are in your head and you hear that voice that is telling you that you don’t deserve pleasure. The voice that says you don’t deserve to eat that nice meal or have good sex. That is not your authentic voice. Our bodies are meant for pleasure. We came out of the womb full of love, light and pleasure and it's other voices that have changed that. You should be able to walk outside and feel pleasure walking around on the grass, walking around on the ground and feeling the sun. That’s what our authentic voice and our bodies want us to do. Be present in your body. Listen to it.