Polarity Life Coaching: Trauma Healing and Restorative Practice
Polarity Life Coaching, also known as Blueprint Resonance is a somatic approach to trauma resolution, counseling and personal growth. It was developed by Anna Chitty from her 40-year therapeutic career working with clients to integrate somatic bodywork, verbal skills support, Polarity Therapy, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Matrixworks, and her deep spiritual practices developed from Zen Buddhism and the Diamond Heart Approach. The roots of this approach are in understanding the autonomic nervous system and the Health in our body-mind-spirit. Starting with the essential understanding that we are energy, and that if we are alive there is always health in our system that we can feel if we slow down and notice. The quintessential question that Anna asks is "what is happening"? What happens in, around or between the body and other living beings. The skills are then to help the client notice the health (The Blueprint) or what Peter Levine calls the counter vortex to the trauma. This is where we start, with feeling something good or even just okay in the body and the life of the person seeking healing.
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The next step is to embrace the difficult places in our experience as portals to our essential nature. These places are held like hard places in our experience. We tend to organize around them. In sessions (in person or online), we help you see the difficult places as opportunities for deeper healing. We use a titrated approach so that you can integrate the overwhelming, difficult, scary sometimes life-threatening experiences in small doable pieces of work. The approach is often combined with other touch modalities such as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy and Bodywork for Stability, Resilience and Transformation.
At Belvedere Integrated Healing Arts, we combine Polarity Life Coaching with everything we do. |
The image below shows the autonomic nervous system function. We have a natural rise and fall in our function, more action and mobilization to more rest and rebuilding (sympathetic and parasympathetic parts working in synchrony). When something overwhelming happens, we tend to go into fight, flight or freeze and there can be a cycling or spin there. We call this the trauma vortex. With Blueprint Resonance (and also Somatic Experiencing), we work to create the blueprint state or the counter vortex. Healing happens when we guide our client to deepen and broaden with the experience using the felt sense as an integrative tool. The stars in the image represent the felt sense. The arrows represent the guided facilitation of back and forth until the overwhelming experience dissipates. Overwhelming experiences from our histories are what we refer to as "imprints." They are memories that have not been made sense of, or it was too much to integrate at the time. There was no one who could help us integrate it and so it stay alive in our nervous system, sometime looping around without a story because it happened before we had language therefore it is a body memory. We are trained to deal specifically with these kinds of memories.
