What if the key to change is not in your head, but in your body?

Source: photo via Freepik

What if the key to change is not in your head, but in your body?

Contribution by LemonGrass Coach Janique Lock-Wienk

Psychological counselling offers valuable insights. It helps you recognise patterns, understand emotions and give words to what is on your mind. It helps you break through patterns in your thinking and this paves the way for change. At the same time, sometimes more is needed to transform old beliefs and this is why at LemonGrass Coaching we work not only with the head, but also with the body, the system and the unconscious.

I myself have spent the past 1.5 years studying how body-oriented coaching can help break patterns. This form of coaching focuses on your body's signals: tension, breathing, posture, feelings. Because your body stores experiences and often tells you what you need before your head does.

As a complement to psychological counselling, it brings depth and integration - not just grasping, but feeling through and anchoring. It connects head and heart, so that thinking and feeling can work together again instead of getting in each other's way. It helps you get out of your head, get in touch with what you really feel and let go of what no longer serves you.

Loes (fictitious name) also noticed this. She came to me because she kept getting stuck in feelings of insecurity. The conviction "I'm not good enough" was so familiar to her that it felt almost natural. She was now clear where it came from, how it originated - and yet it continued to silently steer her life.

We decided to do a body-focused exercise to work in a different way with the belief that kept her so small in her life. After some warm-up exercises to get Loes to sink more and more into her body, she closed her eyes and focused on what that belief was triggering in her body. She felt her breath sitting high, her chest tense, her shoulders small and restrained - as if her whole body was trying to hide. By staying with it and breathing to those places, by quietly dwelling on this, something began to shift. She discovered how to literally make space, how to release the tension and open herself again.

And suddenly there it was: a calm, quiet strength, the feeling of (self)confidence. Not imagined, but felt. As if her body remembered what her head had forgotten - that she does matter and is exactly right the way she is. With a relieved feeling and renewed confidence, she walked out of the session and into the day. And that is so incredibly nice to witness as a coach! Step by step, she can explore her body more and use it to get rid of her ingrained beliefs and emotional burdens.

If you would like to know more about body-oriented coaching please email janique@lemongrasscoaching.nl or approach us at our general email address: info@lemongrasscoaching.nl