Mindfulness & somatics

Welcome to being and resting into conscious presence on traditional and contemporary exercises from mindfulness and practices oriented around compassion. We explore an approach to life based on presence and compassion, providing resilience under stress and resources for recovery and balance. When we practice mindfulness, we cultivate an ability to be with what is and step out of our automatic reactions and instead respond to life’s various events with greater compassion.

Mindfulness is described as a path of life, with it’s roots in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In west the mindfulness-practices has come to be widely researched and evidence-based methods to increase well-being, health and quality of life.

Some benefits of Mindfulness exercises are in service of:
– Stress reduction and recovery.
– Step out of your autopilot and increase our ability to consciously act instead of reacting.
– Understanding of your behaviors and their connection to thought, feeling, body and action.
– To face life and be with yourself from a conscious, compassionate and embodied approach.
– Body awareness.
– Learning Interception and tending to our bodily experiences.
– Mindfulness for everyday life.

Western research on and approach to specific practices of mindfulness has created a wide range of different programs aiming to support health and well-being. Meanwhile, to utterly understand mindfulness it can not be separated from it’s philosophical, traditional and spiritual roots. Mindfulness can serve all, no matter of religious or cultural identity and one important cornerstone of mindfulness traditions is the practice of compassion.

“Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity.” /Buddha

Compassion is a radical way of acknowledging suffering as part of being human and an understanding that when we are our ally rather than our enemy, we create more constructive and sustainable ways of dealing with life. We practice being our own friend, even when we need it most. Compassion is the key to responding to stress with care and to creating community in relationships instead of separation.

With compassion, we can build a foundation for inner support in all moments of life and a sense of belonging – with the ability for our nervous system to create security in contrast to the survival mechanisms our bodies use when we experience stress. A fundamental approach in Eastern philosophy is to understand how we all, both humans, animals and nature, interact and influence each other and therefore it is ethically valuable to take care of each other, to cultivate a concern for others. In Buddhist tradition, compassion is a guideline, something that leads to happiness and is a large part of the meaning of life. Compassion is today a proven and research-based method in the West as a way to increase well-being and resilience for communities in the midst of life’s challenges.

Selfcompassion means that we practice being our own inner support in the same way that we are motivated to support others we care about. By cultivating the care and ability to be with ourselves, especially when we need it most, our access to inner support and belonging, resilience, and recovery increases.

“… just noticing what’s happening is often not enough. We need to embrace ourselves. While mindfulness tells us, ‘Hold your suffering in spacious awareness,’ the wisdom of self-compassion says, ‘Be kind to yourself when you suffer.’ Self-kindness opens a new path to healing. Warmth creates space. Mindfulness invites us to ask, ‘What am I experiencing right now?’ Self-compassion invites us to ask, ‘What do I need right now?” / Dr. Christopher Germer.
Being mindfulness together with compassion is a corner-stone for the ability to be with ourselves, so to say the very central practice of meditation. Without compassion, being with discomfort becomes to hard and will guide us rather to dissociation than wholeness and connection.

When we integrate selfcompassion from tending to our bodily and sensory perspectives, we create the conditions to get in touch and be with what we are experiencing. When we experience stress, our body is the main source of coping with it. When we stay in touch with our bodies as much as develop intellectual understanding, we can integrate and find more ability to deal with our discomfort.

“Are you comfortable? That can be misunderstood. Are you comfortable? Even in great stress and pain, it can be comfortable in being ourselves. It’s not just not having any pain – comfort doesn’t mean not having pain. It’s that we are here in our body. Maybe we are totally miserable but we are here, with all the feelings and frustration and joy. It’s I’m still here. And I’m grateful” /Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

Developing our connection to our bodies and our felt sense is called interoception and is closely linked to how we manage and respond to stress, prevent exhaustion and overwhelm. Developing our interoception and connection with our body, together with a soothing and caring approach, can build space for recovery and more sustainable ways of coping with life. When we build inner support to our bodily sensations we tap into our calm and self-regulation system and integrate more conditions for recovery and resilience.

“When we are compassionate to ourselves when we struggle, our awareness is no longer completely consumed by suffering; it’s also full of concern for that suffer. We are bigger than our pain; we are also the love holding the pain. This lifeline can be a source of great meaning and fulfillment, regardless of how hard things are in the moment.”
– Kristin Neff, Fierce self-compassion

As we recognize ourselves with our breathing sensing bodies, the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform. Our understanding of life rises up from our living bodies. We can experience things – we can touch, hear and taste things – only because we ourselves are part of the sensible world we perceive! The Latin word soma means “the living body.” Somatic Movement is a field within bodywork and movement studies aimed at experiencing and feeling movement from within the body.

In somatic dance practice we learn embodied approaches to movement, the body and consciousness. With an experimental approach we learn body agency and anatomy and as well connection and integration of our being as a whole.

ElinMaria and Gabriel draw inspiration from Contact Improvisation, dance improvisation, mindful movement, developmental movement-patterns, Body Mind Centering, experimental anatomy, authentic movement and eco-somatics.

Eco Somatics is an emerging interdisciplinary field that connects body-shaping practices such as dance and healing art with ecological consciousness. Somatic movement practices has the possibility to break the dichotomy between man and nature and make visible that we are mutually welded together. We aim to bring awareness how body and nature are intertwined and that the body is nature; in it’s ongoing exchange of air with the plants and trees, food we eat, footprint that we make in our interaction to the ecosystem.

“We are not seprate from the Earth; we are as much a part of the planet Earth as each cell in our body is part of us.” /Mike Samuels, M.D and Hal Zina Bennet, Well Body Well Earth

Welcome to nourish connection and belonging to yourself and this beautiful planet Earth!

When ElinMaria facilitate mindfulness and Somatics;

– I set up exercises and group processes with room for choice. I encourage and support participants to listen in, take a break and be with their boundaries.

– I integrate compassion in my teaching as a recurring approach to ourselves and each other, both through attitudes and specific exercises. With compassion we can build a ground for inner support inour learning-processes and a sense of belonging – with the possibility for our nervous system to create safety in opposition to those surviving mechanisms our bodies use when we’re having stressors.

– When we practice methods where we get more in touch with ourselves, our bodies and each other, I deliberately prevent participants from becoming overwhelmed. In my facilitation, I intend to honor breaks, work slowly, with space to step out of an exercise, to frontload with grounding resources and root us in this present moment so that it can be as safe exploration as possible.

– These courses are not group therapy, but education to support skills for tending to yourself on your day-to-day basis. If you need deep work to heal your past, the invitation is that you reach out for a therapist, teacher, healer, or shaman who specializes in trauma integration work, to help you on your journey.

ElinMaria Sydänvirta has more than 20 years of daily experience with somatics and meditation. Educated among others at Nordiska Yoga-institutet Viryayoga-teacher(RYS200h), Yoga nidra teacher (RYS30h) Mindfulness Center Sverige (MfC), ISLO Dance and Somatics and Somatic (1 year fulltime program) and as well Somatic selfcompassion® with trauma Informed Approach (100h). As well I have courses with Mindful Selfcompassion program. My background in somatic’s and mindfulness started when I was 14 years old and dived deep into the world’s of meditation and yoga, 5 rhythms, somatic practices and breathwork. Since then different movement- and meditation disciplines has been part of my daily life. In meditation I’ve been mainly practicing mindfulness-meditation and Transcendental Meditation (TM). My special interest is in compassion-based techniques and interconnectedness to nature.

For Gabriel, mindfulness and meditation have been part of life for a long time. After discovering meditation in 2004, he has meditated daily and participated in many Vipassana meditation retreats. While traveling the world, Gabriel has lived in ashrams, monasteries and temples, e.g. in Tibet, Nepal and India and spent long periods of time in nature in silence, fasting and meditating.
Aguahara, water treatments, water dance and being in the water has been a big part of this path. Mindfulness and staying present is important for Gabriel in his everyday life.

“Without inner change there can be no other change”
/Civil rights activist Kyodo Williams

We live in a world with multi-layers of crises. Awareness of the world’s crises or an indirect or direct exposure to them causes anxiety and stress for many. In compassion for what we are facing mindfulness and somatic’s can offer resources to heal, to be with, and experience embodied strategies for dealing with the suffering of our time.

The time which we live in is formed by the capitalist mentality, binary and gendered hierarchy, hetero- and white-normativity. These structures are not only working from outside, but actively creating the world as we feel it from inside. The world we live in is embodied in us. How can embodiment be a healing force while integrating social conditions, structural inequities and systematic forces of oppression? How does body-awareness bring radical possibilities for healing and empowerment for collective change?

We claim that coming aware of these structures with an embodied approach there is a possibility for sustainable transformation in both individual and collective levels. Embodiment in this context means to bring ourselves to body-oriented practices that engage other parts of our experiencing than only the intellectual understanding can. We will feel, sense, connect with and through our bodies. From this embodied space we will digest and harvest our new discoveries. Through individual awakening to one’s own patterns, we may also create awareness and change in collective structures.

Structural trauma, like individual trauma, breaks down the feeling of safety, connection and dignity in the minds, bodies and spirits of individuals and communities. It creates collective survival strategies which become embodied in cultural norms and practices. (Heines, 2020; 80).

It’s natural and many times needed coping mechanisms to go numb with the overwhelming suffering of this world. What happens as we open up and find possible coping strategies to face and embrace this pain? We wish to create a space where we can honor the pain, both individually and collectively, connect to the beauty of compassion and care for yourself and the planet, embrace it and transform our survival mechanism to be aligned with what we deeply value.

Often there are no common, shared spaces to deal with the pain. We may have individual therapy and collective activism, and there lies a powerful force for deep(er) change when these two fields are united. There is a need to have a discussion about current phenomenons in an embodied and trustworthy way. Embodied practices give us a wider way to experience and release the huge and intense information by which we are daily surrounded by. Sharing together the pain of the world’s distress and structural harm may give a space for deep healing and empowerment. We aim for empowerment as well as action.This may inspire us to create change where individuals’ own wellbeing is in the shared center with collective transformation.

“What makes us act on our empathy in a constructive way? How do we work through our empathic overwhelm when we feel another’s pain as if it were our own? Is there any way to act other than reacting with denial and shutdown vs hopelessness and despair? These are questions that I am genuinely engaged and curious about in our time of multi-layered world crises. This, of course, also includes our personal lives and relationships, with the small and large struggles and sufferings we experience from just being human. We can be happy that there are many people who are also busy with these questions. Dr. Kristin Neff has been researching compassion for decades, and it’s found that feeling another’s pain (empathy) in it self activates stress and fear responses in the brain. While directing that pain to compassionate responses activates the brain’s reward center, giving us resilience and strength to cope. Most of us can feel the pain of others, but we don’t always know how to connect it to our compassionate responses. I hope we can provide a empowering space; were we can address the pain we all feel through practically applied and felt-sense practices of compassion, belonging and dignity. Caring about the suffering of others is something deeply meaningful and profound, not only for other people’s suffer but indeed for our own dignity. Lets keep on learning this. I really think this is crucial in our times! ” /ElinMaria Sydänvirta

This text was created together with Julia Silvero.