Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP):
Felt-Sense Attention in Emotional Healing
– Excerpted from the first chapter of the book, Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing, published August 2023.
Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP)
This book is about the practice of Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP), a simple, compassionate, and mindful process of acknowledging, processing, accepting, and honoring our direct, body-based emotional experience. With MBSEP, we witness and compassionately observe our emotions as they arise and unfold from moment to moment in the body. In that witnessing, we avoid judging or interpreting our emotional experience, and we accept our feelings instead of struggling with them. When we witness our feelings, acknowledging them in the absence of struggle or judgment, we allow them to show us an emotional truth about ourselves.
That truth is not the product of any evaluation, analysis, judgment, or interpretation. It is not a story or representation. That truth is a direct statement about the emotional truth of our experience, and it is separate from, and independent of, any story we typically create around our feelings. When we recognize and accept that truth, we are more deeply aware of our feelings. This cultivates a relationship with our emotional experiences in which we are more receptive and accepting towards all of our emotions, and in which we are more honestly connected to ourselves.
“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge”. – Audre Lorde
When we recognize and accept the reality and the truth of our emotional experience, we can begin to identify and recognize the context, the history, and the significance of those feelings in our interactions with life. Then we can construct a more realistic, evidence-based understanding of how those feelings play the part that they do in our interactions with others and with ourselves.
Emotional maturity and emotional wisdom are not the products of controlling and suppressing our feelings; they develop from recognizing them, embracing them, and learning through them. We can learn so much about ourselves, our relationships, and about human life, from accepting, compassionately witnessing, and somatically processing our emotional experiences.
Over time, as we learn to relate to our feelings with acceptance and without struggle, we will develop a deepening appreciation for our complexity, our uniqueness, our vulnerabilities, and of our depth as emotional human beings. We also learn that our feelings are not dangerous, toxic, or destructive forces that threaten to wreck our lives. Most importantly, we acquire a simple and accessible way of supporting effective emotional regulation and emotional processing by tenderly witnessing our feelings in the body and by allowing them to move through, without judgment, and in the absence of struggle.
Eventually, as we develop a personal history of witnessing our emotional experiences through the lens of curiosity, receptiveness, and compassionate acceptance, we craft and develop a new and more respectful relationship to our emotional feelings.
In this new relationship to our emotional experience, we are more likely to regard our feelings as essential messengers about the truth of who and how we are: uniquely evolved and endowed human beings. When we relate to what is true and to what is real about our emotions, we can access some of the basic resources and knowledge that we need to more honestly, and more consciously, respond to the inevitable challenges inherent in our life’s journey as emotional beings.
There is an inherent, natural capacity in the human body and its nervous system for non-mental, non-cognitive emotional processing of emotionally charged experiences. This natural capacity for emotional regulation and emotional processing is brought forward and supported when the sensory experience of emotion in the body is mindfully and compassionately observed.
We began to do this work with our clients and discovered that this was a safe and simple way to support deep and effective emotional processing and emotional regulation. – Robert Weisz
Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP) is a way of accessing and supporting this simple, yet profound capacity for mindful, compassionate witnessing and processing of our emotional experience as it unfolds in the body in real time. The working principles of MBSEP are:
- Mindfulness– The willingness, the intention, and the action of consciously bringing focused attention and awareness to physical, mental, behavioral, and emotional experience, without adding judgment or commentary.
- Presence and Attunement— the willingness and focus for being fully attentive and receptive to the present-moment emotional experience of self or other.
- Quality of attention and attention to attention—a focused, receptive, open, curious, non-critical attention and awareness of the experience of self or other from moment to moment. Attention to how and where attention is focused.
- Witnessing—the conscious commitment to stay present, connected, and non-judgmental. An active quality of deep, focused, and uncritical attention that supports our presence with an emotionally charged experience, and the acceptance of whatever is unfolding in the present moment.
- Connection—the willingness to stay linked in relationship by being fully present and receptive to our own, and another’s, emotional experience as it unfolds in the body.
- Permission—the willingness to allow our emotional experience to unfold without attempting to censor, obstruct, or interfere with it. The willingness to stay present without knowing what will happen next. The willingness to be fully and uncritically present with what is as it manifests and unfolds in the body.
- Holding/Creating Space—the willingness to hold whatever emerges with empathy, care, acceptance, and compassion. A commitment to allow an emotional experience in self or other to unfold in a safe, uncritical, and supportive environment.
- Compassion–the caring, tender, moment-to moment presence with an emotionally charged experience as it arises and unfolds within oneself or within another. Compassion is the willingness to be fully present, to be fully aware and attentive, with the emotional experience of self or other as it emerges and manifests in the body in present time.
Compassion is the tender willingness to witness, to be present, in the absence of criticism or judgment, with how another person is feeling, or with our own emotionally charged experience.
- Acknowledging— the willingness to accept and recognize the presence of an emotional event or feeling or experience for what it is as a physical, sensory manifestation in the body, as it happens in the present moment.
- Acceptance—the willingness to receive, to respect, and hold an emotional experience or event as it emerges and declares itself. Acceptance is characterized by the absence of resistance, of struggle, of judgment, and of denial.
- Embodiment— To embody our emotions is to acknowledge how they are happening and unfolding in a very tangible and direct way as physical events in the body in real time. Our uncritical awareness of them brings us into the witnessing of what is true in our experience. What is true is what is happening here and now in the body, before we turn it into a story or a commentary.
- What Is is Simply What it Is—the direct recognition of emotional energies as they manifest in the body as physically identifiable phenomena. The willingness to attend to these sensory, physical experiences as what they are, while resisting the impulse to interpret them or assign meaning to them.
MBSEP is a mindfulness-based process with roots in Mindfulness meditation, the Buddhist practice of activating and dedicating the mind’s capacity for observing and witnessing the activities of the mind and body. The intention in mindfulness is to observe only, and to refrain from becoming involved or entangled in the mental or physical experiences that come into the mind’s awareness.
The observing, witnessing function engages the mind’s attention in a focused, intentional way that excludes the activities of commenting, interpreting, evaluating, or judging what is being witnessed.
In mindfulness there is an alert, curious, respectful, and accepting openness, a focused awareness, and a willingness to witness, to acknowledge, to accept, and to allow. Mindfulness involves attention to attention and attention to intention. The former supports focused, sustained awareness, the latter serves to maintain focused attention, to bring attention back to its intended target, and to honor the witnessing function. Mindfulness is an active, engaged, noncritical and non-interfering willingness to stay present with the focus of attention.
“With mindfulness, you can establish yourself in the present in order to touch the wonders of life that are available in that moment.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
– Excerpted from Chapter 12 of the book on MBSEP, not yet published.
Self-MBSEP: the Art and Practice of Witnessing and Processing our Own Emotions
The reader has noticed by now that we are presenting MBSEP as a method that can support emotional regulation and emotional processing with another person, and as a practice for supporting and enabling one’s own inner emotional growth and maintenance. MBSEP is a versatile and viable approach for promoting the embodied emotional processing work with another person, as in supporting a friend to work through a challenging emotional experience or issue, or in the clinical work of counseling and psychotherapy.
The authors have verified in their own practices, and from the reports of other therapists who have been trained in MBSEP, that MBSEP is a simple, body-oriented, mindfulness-based, and very effective method for initiating, facilitating, and deepening the emotional healing process in psychotherapy.
Additionally, we have consistently observed that clients who have been exposed to MBSEP in the therapy/counseling setting have learned to do “Self-MBSEP”, with the support of their therapists. They find Self-MBSEP to be a useful method for coping with emotionally upsetting issues and situations, and for supporting emotional regulation around challenging emotional states such as fear, shame, and grief. We have supported the careful, skillful application of “Self-MBSEP” by our clients as a way of helping them to develop their emotional resources. In this way, they can have access to a simple, mindful process for relating to, and working with, emotionally charged experiences in their lives.
In this chapter, we present Self-MBSEP as a simple and workable set of tools for facilitating one’s own emotional regulation, emotional processing, and emotional maintenance, and for developing a mindful, respectful, and compassionate relationship with our own embodied emotional experience.
Self-MBSEP can be very effective for promoting emotional regulation (the capacity to stay present, to tolerate emotional intensity, and to witness their own emotional arousal and activation from moment to moment). It is also a reliable, effective method for processing and discharging physical and emotional activation in the body resulting from stress, physical and emotional trauma, emotionally challenging issues, experiences and memories, “emotional upset”, and relationship issues.
We strongly discourage the reader from attempting to process major traumatic life experiences through Self-MBSEP. That work should be undertaken through formal counseling and/or psychotherapy, conducted by a trained and qualified therapist who specializes in trauma work.
Major trauma can result from multiple experiences characterized by overwhelming emotional and/or physical pain, where the individual is helpless and powerless to prevent or escape the situation. If, or when, the individual who experienced the major trauma does not have the opportunity or support to process the traumatic experience, they are likely to carry the trauma as a deep, often unacknowledged, emotional wound.
That said, we would like to present this chapter as a simple manual for the application of Self-MBSEP as a viable, accessible set of tools for emotional regulation and emotional maintenance. Self-MBSEP can support the individual in management and reduction of their own emotional activation through mindful, compassionate attention and awareness upon the body’s experience of emotion. When emotional activation is reduced and managed, intrinsic, somatic, non-mental emotional processing is possible, and likely to move forward through the practice of Self-MBSEP.
Self-MBSEP can be very helpful for working with emotionally charged experiences that we typically label as “upsetting”, and for supporting emotional regulation in the midst of emotionally challenging or stressful situations.
It is also a simple, enjoyable practice for accessing, strengthening, and appreciating emotional resources (See Chapter 14) which help us to relieve stress, and allow us to take an internal “vacation” into relaxation. peace, and enjoyment.
Goals of Self-MBSEP
- Getting in touch with your emotional experience by noticing how it is manifesting in the body in present time.
- Bringing sensory awareness to emotions instead of trying to solve, explain, or block the experience of those emotions.
- Witnessing the emotional experience as it unfolds in order to “see” it more clearly and deeply, not as a story but as a moment-to moment manifestation of emotional energy.
- Acknowledgement and acceptance of the emotional experience by witnessing it instead of struggling against it.
- Supporting emotional regulation by staying focused on the moment-to moment experience of the emotions in the body instead of the narrative or story about them.
- Processing the emotional experience through the body’s innate “animal intelligence” instead of analyzing, interpreting, or evaluating it.
- Developing a compassionate, respectful relationship with emotions and emotional experience through witnessing and accepting them as legitimate events which carry a direct, experiential truth.
Example: Use of Self-MBSEP to Process Difficult Parental Emotions
My son, who is now twenty-one, was sharing an evening meal with me, his sister, who is twenty, and his mother. He began to complain about something. Without thinking or pausing, I jumped in and told him to stop. My son responded to me by saying, “Don’t bash me, Dad!”. His words went through me like a spear. My son was standing up for himself, and taking steps to set boundaries with me. But his doing so illuminated many exchanges between us over the years, where I had taken an authoritarian position and spoken to him in anger.
In the days that followed this exchange I felt a painful distance between my son, whom I love dearly, and me. I noticed a deep feeling of guilt and shame in my chest. I also was struggling with thoughts of being a failure as a dad, and I was feeling the guilt and shame in my body. I kept saying to myself that I had hurt someone I was supposed to protect. The pain of these thoughts was excruciating.
I decided to work on these feelings with self-MBSEP. At first the feelings were pervasive and sweeping. I sat quietly and slowed my breathing. I noticed where I was feeling the pain of my guilt, shame, and sadness in my body: just underneath, and all over, my chest and throat.
I stayed with these sensations as they happened moment to moment, while keeping my breath slow and exhale-oriented. I noticed my mind jumping in and saying “I gave my heart and soul to this kid”, “I am not a bad dad”; or, “I’m not getting any credit for what I did well”. I managed to thank my mind for jumping in to support me and I asked it, instead, to please observe with me, as I carefully noticed the sensations of my emotions in my body.
For about fifteen to twenty minutes I stayed present with the sensations in my body, which came, at times, as painful waves of shame and sadness. As I stayed present and focused on my sensations, they became waves of intense sadness, and I began to cry. As I felt the emotional energy and the emotional processing of the sadness moving through my body, I could also acknowledge my humanness and my fallibility. Underneath these feelings of sadness and shame, there was a deep sense of the love I have for, and share with, my son. I recognized that I was processing my feelings of responsibility for the rupture between us that my anger caused. I also noticed that my thinking mind wanted to jump in to defend me, over and over again. Each time, I thanked it, but then asked it to just continue to notice the sensations of my feelings in my body, to support the self-MBSEP protocol. Eventually, the crying stopped. I took some slow, deep breaths, and continued to notice my sensations.
I continued this Self-MBSEP work with my shame and grief and over a period of months. I felt a shift into a growing attitude of self-compassion for myself and for the errors I made as a dad. This eventually became a slow forgiveness process that I am still experiencing. It was also helpful that my son and I had some deep talks about how strongly my anger affected him, and that I apologized deeply, from my heart, for hurting him.
I continue to process my feelings with self-MBSEP after these conversations. I feel I am doing the work that is most important for me as someone who is committed to being a caring, sensitive, effective, and responsive father.
Basic Self-MBSEP Protocol
A. Beginning the Self-MBSEP Session with Breath Awareness
When starting an MBSEP session with yourself, follow these steps in order to create the conditions for body awareness and regulation:
– Bring your awareness to how your body is located in space and how your body is experiencing the effects of gravity.
– Slowly begin to shift awareness to how the breath is moving into the body and into the lungs with the inhalation and how the breath is moving out of the lungs and the body with the exhalation.
– Begin to notice the specific sensations of the flow of breath in and out of the lungs, so that you can identify the more subtle sensations in the inhalation and the exhalation.
– See if you can distinguish the difference between the sensations of inhalation and the sensations of exhalation.
– Inhale slowly and deeply while noticing the sensations of the breath.
– Exhale very slowly, with special attention to the sensations of releasing and letting go within each exhalation.
– Take at least four slow, deep breaths while being intimately aware of the sensations of the breath moving in and out of the lungs.
- Recognize that you are emotionally activated
(upset, charged, struggling, stressed, affected) and that you want to do some self-MBSEP work. - Take four slower, deeper breaths, with very slow exhalations, carefully noticing the sensations of your breath as you inhale, and pay careful attention to the subtle sensations of releasing and letting go of your breath as you breathe out.
- Scan your body with your awareness and interoception so you can locate and recognize the physical, sensory markers of how the emotional activation is being experienced in your body.
- Take note of where and how the emotional activation is happening in your body. Your interoceptive internal senses will provide you with that information. Focus your attention and your awareness on that sensory information.
- Dedicate yourself to carefully noticing, witnessing, and observing where and how the body’s sensory expression is happening in present time (Felt Sense Awareness), and resist the temptation to mentally think or comment.
- If your attention wanders away from your body’s sensations and you find yourself distracted, or thinking about your experience, gently bring your attention and your awareness back to what is happening in your body in the present moment. Do this as often as needed.
- The sensations in your body that represent your emotional activation are likely to change–in intensity, in quality, and, often, they will “move” around from one or more parts of your body to other parts. Do your best to stay present with them, wherever they are located in the body.
- If you become overly activated or upset, and feel you cannot tolerate the activation, shift your focus of attention to monitoring the sensations of your breath, breathing slowly and deeply, exhaling VERY slowly as you carefully track the sensations of releasing and letting go in every exhalation. As an alternative, focus your attention and awareness on the internal experience of a personal resource (Chapter 14). Come back to witnessing the somatic felt sense of your emotional arousal and activation when you feel ready and able to do so.
- As you witness the sensations of your emotional activation as they unfold and manifest in your body from moment to moment, you may notice that “waves” of emotional/physical energy arise and seem to want to move through you. Allow these waves of emotion to simply pass through your body, instead of resisting them or struggling with them.
- As you continue to mindfully witness your body’s emotional arousal and activation from moment to moment, you are likely to notice that the sensory markers of the emotional activation have changed. Often, but not always, there will be a reduction in their intensity, as well as changes in their quality and their location in the body.
- Stay with the MBSEP process long enough to notice if there has been a significant shift or reduction in your felt sense of your body’s emotional activation. Sometimes there may be spontaneous insights about the activation. Generally, you will sense that the issue or experience that activated you feels less charged, or has become less urgent.
- Take a few moments to review your experience with Self-MBSEP, and be receptive to new information about how you emotionally relate to the situation or issue that triggered the emotional activation.
Exercise 1: Safe Place Resource
Take four deep, slow breaths, paying careful attention to the sensations of your breath as you slowly breathe in and very slowly breathe out.
Think about, and then identify, a place, a situation, an activity, or a relational connection where you naturally, effortlessly, feel safe, calm, and/or grounded.( For example, in the arms of your beloved; being in a special place in the natural world; taking a hot bath; cuddling with your dear dog(s) or other furry creatures; knitting; playing music, etc.)… Take a moment to let yourself reconnect as fully as you can with the experience of your “safe place”, so that you can begin to feel it in your body with your internal senses… Now shift your attention and your awareness to the ways in which you are physically feeling as you inhabit the experience of your safe place… Dedicate yourself to noticing the physical sensations as you appreciate and enjoy the sensations of calmness, of relaxation… of safety and connection… or peaceful grounding in your body as you abide in your safe place… Breathing slowly and deeply, take a minute or more to be receptive and to fully appreciate the qualities of your safe place as you experience them in your body through your internal senses.
Exercise 2 : Breath Resource
To begin, please take a moment to notice your current state of mind. Are your thoughts racing? How is your breathing? Is it rapid? Is it deep or shallow? Is it more evident in your chest or in your belly?
Now sit up straight, a little bit away from the back of the chair and put your hands on your belly, one just above and one just below your belly button. Now take a long, slow breath, allowing your belly to become quite round, and you can only do this if you allow the belly muscles to relax. You can arch your back slightly as you do this. Then, when you exhale, straighten your back toward the back of the chair. You can focus on pushing your belly down with the exhale. This will help to demonstrate the difference between having your belly muscles tight and relaxing them.
Do this a couple more times, breathing in, enlarging your belly, arching your back. Now hold the breath a moment and then exhale, straightening the back and pushing back with the belly button. See if you can make the in-breath and the out-breath a little bit longer. Continue with this for two to three minutes.
Now, check in with your state of mind and body. Has anything changed? Is your mind quieter? Are there less thoughts competing for your attention? How does the rest of your body feel?
Exercise 3: Processing a painful experience
Take four deep, slow breaths, paying careful attention to the sensations of your breath as you slowly breathe in and very slowly breathe out.
Internally connect with an experience that you have had within the last year, an experience that was emotionally or physically painful, that you
can access from your memory. Take a moment to focus on the memory of that painful experience. Now begin to pay attention to how your body is remembering that experience right here and right now. As you become aware of the sensations of that memory in your body now, take the opportunity to simply notice the sensations, without trying to change them.
Give yourself permission to simply notice the sensations in your body, without any attempt to struggle with, or change the experience, and without criticizing or evaluating the experience. Just maintain a simple sensory awareness of the sensations as they are moving through your body now. Give your body permission to let the experience move through you, just allow its energy to move through you.
If or when the thinking mind comes in with its commentary, simply go back to the sensory experience of your body. And make sure that you’re breathing regularly and sufficiently.
See if you can notice any efforts on your part to consciously or unconsciously resist or struggle with the experience. Simply allow your experience to manifest and to unfold. Make sure that you’re breathing slowly and deeply.
If thinking tries to come in and take over, simply bring your awareness back to the body. Just one moment at a time, just one breath at a time, always coming back to your experience in the body.
Compassionately, tenderly, acknowledge and accept your feelings as they move through your body. Do your best not to push anything away.
Notice with care and compassion how the internal experience in the body keeps moving and changing in some way. . Simply noticing.
No judging, no criticizing, no commenting. Simply noticing and witnessing.
And when you feel ready, you can begin to shift your attention back to the room, to how your body is situated in the chair.
Take a few minutes to reflect on your experience of tenderly, compassionately witnessing the pain you felt as you noticed, without interfering, the way that your body “digested” or processed the painful experience.
How do you hold the experience of the painful event in your body now?. Is there some way that you hold the memory of that event differently?