EXPERIENCE: BODY POEM
“I was amazed by how quickly the body could tell me things and give me insights and answers to things I’ve been struggling for so long with, and how these sensations of stress and anxiety could easily shift into reassurance, and wisdom when I paid them attention.”
BODY POEM: ILLUMINATING UNKNOWN AND UNSPOKEN PARTS OF THE SELF
Body Poem is a therapeutic tool developed by Katie Sarra which supports acceptance and understanding of our hidden drivers, honouring and trusting the self-organsing intelligence inherent in every human being. It is a skilled synthesis of Body Focusing, Clean Language, and Dream Form. Through a guided meditation, the client is invited to notice what sensations are alive in their body. The structure of Body Poem is used to bring these emerging sensations into expression. The intimate revelations shared form the basis of a spontaneous poem.
BODY POEM: APPLICATIONS
A Body Poem can be combined seamlessly with any healing or therapeutic modality that involves holding space for others in an open-hearted way.
The video link below is a webinar, originally hosted by Embodied Health Learning, introduces the concept and practice of Body Poem and guides the audience through its structure incorporating a practical exercise and demonstration of a poem.
BODY POEM: ILLUMINATING UNKNOWN AND UNSPOKEN PARTS OF THE SELF
Body Poem is a therapeutic tool developed by Katie Sarra which supports acceptance and understanding of our hidden drivers, honouring and trusting the self-organsing intelligence inherent in every human being. It is a skilled synthesis of Body Focusing, Clean Language, and Dream Form.
Through a guided meditation, the client is invited to notice what sensations are alive in their body. The structure of Body Poem is used to bring these emerging sensations into expression. The intimate revelations shared form the basis of a spontaneous poem.
A Body Poem can be combined seamlessly with any healing or therapeutic modality that involves holding space for others in an open-hearted way.
This webinar, originally hosted by Embodied Health Learning, introduces us to the concept of Body Poem and guides the audience through its structure incorporating a practical exercise and demonstration of a poem.
CO-CREATING TRANSFORMATIONAL SHIFTS
Body Poem (and its twin Dream Poem) is a revolutionary tool illuminating unknown and unspoken parts of the self from spontaneously emerging poetry honouring and trusting the self-organizing intelligence inherent in every human being. It is a skilled synthesis of Body Focusing, Clean Language, and Dream Form and has two roles, the Dreamer and the Dream Scribe.
Body Poem provides a safe container for the individual’s expression of inner noticings and bodily sensations that are witnessed and fed back free of assessment or interpretation.
For professionals working with individuals or groups, Body Poem is a powerful modality to add to your professional practice, co-creating transformational shifts in a way that is truly client-centred.
The PROCESS
The Dreamer feels into their body’s communications (and the Dream Scribes) and trusts their attuned intuition reading aloud the Dreamer’s Body Poem informed with understandings about emotions, defences to emotions, and what supports integration, acceptance, and kindness.
A Body Poem session lasts between 5 minutes and 1 hour and can be used in longer sessions as the framework for listening and integrating the communications from a person’s story or body. It unfolds as a guided meditation where clients are invited to notice what sensations are alive in their bodies.
The PROCESS
The structure of Body Poem is used to bring these emerging sensations into expression. The intimate revelations shared form the basis of a spontaneous poem, transcribed to create an original piece of art that embodies the witnessed experience.
A Body Poem can be combined seamlessly with any healing or therapeutic modality that involves holding space for others in an open-hearted way.
This profound and simple process supports win-win, harmonious decision making with a new awareness of our hidden drivers.
METAMORPHOSIS
We might have felt many times in life being like a transparent prawn, either hidden and safe but lonely out at sea or exposed, frightened and with shame on the beach.
As we move between the sea and the beach together in the Body Poem structure inviting “What kind of sensation are you noticing? and what’s that like to notice? and if this could speak and had a voice what might it be saying?” we are learning the emotional fluency of a turtle.
Turtles are equally at home swimming with feelings in the sea and reflecting with identity updates on the beach. We can transform implicit memory from inside of us into the physical symbolical laying down of eggs in explicit memory to hatch out new ways of being, from safe foundations connected with the earth of the planet.
BODY POEM FOR YOU
Beginning with a relaxing guided meditation, you listen into the communications emerging from the physical, emotional, dream and sensual landscapes of your body, which transcribe into your Body’s unique Poem. Body Poem sessions sometimes begin with an “I want” list which is the fertile ground for your body’s unique poetry to grow from. The Body Poem structure guides you step by step into listening to your internal worlds, discovering words that come close to describing what you are noticing.
Listening back to your body’s poem can quickly give rise to epiphanies and insights not normally available in such short periods of time. Integration seems to occur internally as you experience the words from your poem resonating with lost and forgotten memory channels. Words carry unique associations with each of us and so yours are privately understood by you. Body Poets are trained to witness with kindness and acceptance, without interpretations. Body Poem is a therapeutic process that inherently trusts your self organising intelligence to restore harmony.
Body Poem sessions are typically 60 -90 mins in length online either in person, by phone or video call. Body Poem experiences can also be facilitated in 6 minute check ins or over longer periods of time where altered states of consciousness are being accessed through, for example, bodywork or in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Body Poem sessions have usefully been used to help facilitate integration of emotionally challenging life experiences supporting acceptance with change. When life feels stuck in patterns, your wisdom has been with you all along in the lines of your body poem, awakening the calls from within.
LISTENING TO THE UNSPEAKABLE
Some life experiences overwhelm hormonal biochemical balance and blow fuses in our nervous systems, shutting down our receptive capacities to remember pain. Body Poem can be a way of witnessing the impossible. Painful life experiences can feel bearable if we are understood and supported to make empowered choices about what happens next to restore balance and harmony.
Body Poem supports this human need for witness and justice and to feel supported with acceptance with the just is. Trauma happens when a person experiences a betrayal of trust where duty of care fails. Body Poem supports the integration of repressed memories that didn’t get categorised or sequenced at the time. These ‘censored out of awareness’ aspects of ourselves, traumatised in the past, can hijack and interrupt our current thoughts.
When the timeless mind does not know yet past from present, Body Poem can feel like a soothing structure that facilitates listening with non-hierarchical acceptance, bringing parts of ourselves left out in the cold back home with compassionate warmth. Attention bound up in fear projections can be freed up relaxing the mind and body sufficiently to reflect with emergent felt senses.
ORGANISATIONS, GROUPS AND LEADERSHIP
– with all the voices of a community included as part of the collective co-created focus, team work can truly begin. Fire fighting from reactive stress, often from parts of an organisation not having been listened to, is rarely productive.
Body Poem supports trusted leadership for directors of organisations who hold the duty of care when making decisions that affect everybody. Leaders can gain access to their inner wisdom to support congruence with the heartbeat of their intentions within themselves that’s choreographing and organising and flow of their organisation.
Every director needs access to both the hidden parts of themself and the hidden drivers within an organisation in order to be fully informed with every executive decision that affects not only the community of the organisation, but the people to whom the organisation is in service.
BODYWORK – SOMATIC OPENINGS
We can understand these moments when our emotions are touched through physical touch as “Somatic openings”. Integration is a lifelong process and through engaging with bodywork that catalyses and mobilises parts of ourselves from the unconscious into consciousness, we can understandably expect somatic openings to emerge into awareness. Body Poem is a structure to capture these openings like a dream being remembered that might otherwise be forgotten.
Body Poem is a coaching model to support non-hierarchical witness of the physical, emotional and sensual communications arising in bodywork. This structure also usefully supports remote bodywork effectively facilitating self reflection through the process of body focusing and self touch.
RELATIONSHIPS AND INTIMACY
When two people come together, it can be like two historical novels coming together co creating a new life chapter together. The internal historical pages of each other contribute to this chapter of life and sometimes have different styles of writing.
Conflicts of interest can be eased when all the voices are listened to, including the ones that have not yet had a voice. This is where the magic of Body Poem weaves two worlds coming together into a collective poem where heartache and challenges can become beauty. Couples can come together to co-create harmony as their souls originally intended, discovering what they possibly already know ( but without enough acknowledgement) about each other.
ALEXITHYMIA – A MODERN-DAY DILEMMA
A disconnection between feelings and language is sometimes referred to as alexithymia, common even with the most fluently articulate, which is not surprising given that the English language is made up of 70% nouns and 30% verbs. This means our language does not have its foundations in a world of descriptions-as-they-are-being-experienced, and thus inclines us to sum up and rationalise or conceptualise our experiences, so that they are already evaluated before we’ve felt the content of them. Body Poem miraculously bypasses this intellect and supports people to feel the hub of their body and heart again.
AN ALCHEMICAL EXPERIENCE
The Body Poem experience can never be predicted. It is the structure that holds and contains emergent communications. As the dreamer starts finding words for inner sensations, this process can take the Dream Scribe to the very precipice of presence and with our edges repeating back what has perhaps felt to be unspeakable before.
An alchemical experience, integrating censored and exiled parts of the self into poetry that updates and enriches identity with new meaning, supporting kindness and acceptance.
The act of reading back and repeating sentences and words during a Body Poem is very much like being the conductor of a chorus of voices and requires attunement to listen to all voices, discovering harmony and a fine-tuned moment to end the poem.
“I have endless pleasure in holding space for this way of being as it takes me to the edge and into presence each time which is timeless, a place where patience is timeless acceptance.“
