What is Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing?

Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP):
Felt-Sense Attention in Emotional Healing

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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

Goals of MBSEP

1. 1. Getting in touch with your emotional experience by noticing how it is manifesting in the body in present time.
   2. Bringing sensory awareness to emotions instead of trying to solve, explain, or block the experience of those emotions.
   3. 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.
   4. Acknowledgement and acceptance of the emotional experience by witnessing it instead of  struggling against it.
   5. 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.
   6. Processing the emotional experience through the body’s innate “animal intelligence” instead of analyzing, interpreting, or evaluating it.
   7. 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.