The Medicine of Integration: Sustaining the Tensions Between Depth and Breadth in Somatic Practice
By Sarah Ann LaFleur, MA, LAC, LAMFT
Newly sober, restless, and manic, I discovered ashtanga yoga at age twenty.
Every morning, I entered the traditional ashtanga yoga shala, a green building with a pink door located directly across from the local train stop, beginning my practice with Surya Namaskar while the neighborhood was still asleep. My teacher taught me to focus on the trishtana while I practiced, a model that emphasized the three focal points of prana (breath), bandhas (energetic locks), and drishti (looking place), and detach from extrinsic distractions and comparisons. This went so far as to include a “no taking pictures for Instagram” rule posted in the shala for all yoga students. Apprentices, or students who were “blessed” with the honor of assisting my teacher, were banned from teaching for other studios and taking trainings from other teachers. Dig one deep well was my teacher’s mantra, and I benefitted greatly from this focus on singularity, depth, and repetition, at least initially. My teacher gave me a solid container to learn the practice of ashtanga yoga, albeit a container with rigid walls and a tight lid. This solid container grounded me in a solid beginning for spiritual and somatic practice.
Focusing on depth in this manner had drawbacks, however. Exclusivity required isolation from other yoga practitioners, communities, and traditions. Codified rules and prescriptive knowledge were touted above personal, subjective understanding and organic insight. The method catered to ascetic escapism instead of practical relevance, a sticking point that became more salient as I started teaching yoga in the addiction treatment setting and learned that I had to meet people where they were to be effective. Digging one deep well resulted in elitist superiority and undercut the wisdom of other traditions. At the beginning of my yoga journey, this kind of adherence was attractive because it inflated the striving, perfectionistic parts of me that wanted to engage tradition the “right” way. But over time, this blind obeisance to the lineage became challenging to sustain.
The practice started to work its way into my nervous system and psyche, taking precedence over my teacher’s directions and interpretations. I started dreaming in the sequence. I learned to breathe into my sacrum as a way of monitoring my center, discovering all sorts of connections between the breath and different energetic points in the body. I naturally began elongating the traditional 5-breath per asana count and cutting out second and third series (the more advanced sequences of the ashtanga yoga system). I became more spacious, tempered, and calm. The hunger for challenging asanas fizzled out and the simplicity of experiencing my own awareness crystallized into a gentler pleasure. I was outgrowing my narcissistic motivations for the practice and the dogmatic allegiances to the tradition. Being present with myself was enough, and the practice showed me how to do just that, simply by engaging with it.
My teacher’s lineage existed in a closed community that discouraged extensive contact with other communities. There was little to no permeability, unless it was on her terms. As the years passed, I cultivated a quiet relationship with the practice and began longing for a kind of relationality that my yoga community couldn’t offer. Hierarchy, lineage, and tradition were not comprehensive enough containers to incubate the insights that sincere effort, consistent practice, and lived experience were revealing to me. Just as the practice made me energetically and egoically softer, it also made me relationally tender and curious. The practice fostered questions in me that the lineage in which it was taught could not answer.
Years later, after I left the lineage and began a graduate program in Marriage and Family Therapy, I learned the language to articulate this psychological longing and philosophical dissonance that I felt toward the end of my participation in my yoga community. In systems theory, I learned that closed systems create narrow, confining roles for members of the system and rigid boundaries around their activities which prevent information from coming in or going out. Inevitably, closed systems always implode and fracture, for no person nor community of persons can exist without permeability. The absence of permeability is an absence of relationship, and we cannot experience the fullness of ourselves without making meaningful contact with each other. In a class on boundaries offered by the Embody Lab’s Somatic Attachment Therapy program, Dr. Scott Lyons (2023) defines a healthy relationship as one in which bidirectionality exists: information must come in to the system and information must go out. Contact with other systems is crucial to system health.
While closed systems provide security, containment, and coherence, their terms of engagement are often not sustainable for members long-term, as was the case for me in my old yoga community. When I made the decision to formally leave this lineage, I left with respect for the tradition but deeper trust in the practice that it protected. Emphasis on depth yielded to respect for breadth. My experience in the world of ashtanga yoga showed me that depth without breadth is like a well with stale water. Water is meant to flow rather than collect, and thus healthy respect for breadth allows knowledge to expand and form bridges with other bodies of knowing. When knowledge is hoarded, a dangerous circular loop occurs where perspective reinforces itself and rigidifies over time. But when knowledge is shared, it aerates and evolves in the light of contact and dialogue.
The tensions of depth and breadth need to be sustained and tended to with curiosity and sensitivity, for these tensions define the heart of relationship that Dr. Lyons defines. Embodied models such as ashtanga yoga need to steep within themselves and maintain boundaries to possess integrity, clarity, and a sense of identity, but they also need to interface with other models to strengthen and soften the bounds of this identity. Identity without the foreground of relationship is just is-ness, an echo chamber that doesn’t know it’s an echo chamber. Paradoxically, relationship and contact allow for individuality and identity to be fully realized and expressed. I believe this sentiment is captured by Nadia Bolz-Weber in an interview on the podcast On Being, where she says, “we need to respect tradition in order to innovate with integrity.” Tradition and innovation, like depth and breadth, are necessary principles that promote embodied practice.
As a trauma therapist, I am hungry to learn modalities that support the resolution of trauma and nurture the healing process. I am also careful to remember that efficacy does not rest in who holds the expertise of the model, but rather in who it nurtures and how it resonates. Client-centered, trauma-informed care innately places therapists in the role of stewards rather than experts. Experts instruct and disseminate knowledge from hierarchical structures of knowing. But stewards share knowledge to reinforce embodied domains of knowing, the kind that lives in the bones and swims in soul. This personal, subjective territory is where people heal, as it is a refuge of homecoming and deep belonging.
Just as dogma subtly infiltrates traditions aimed at liberation such as yoga, dogma also enters therapeutic spaces like a shadow that doesn’t spot itself because its attention is so focused on the sun. I have witnessed firsthand how therapists have attached special meaning to therapeutic models because of the healing moments that they inspire. Although these healing moments are valid and these therapeutic models are powerful, if we uphold the model as cause and end, rather than a support or pathway, we risk destabilizing embodied knowing, extracting it from the person who had an experience with the model and assigning it to the model as an arbiter of experience.
This subtle enactment of vertical rather than horizontal knowing makes me skeptical of allegiance to one strict model, because when we think there is only one way or one answer, we super-impose dogma onto organicity, a principle of somatic healing that suggests we are always organizing toward growth (Mishke-Reeds, 2022). Believing that there is only one path of healing or that one size fits all is religiosity, as it depletes curiosity for other approaches and diminishes openness to confronting the limitations and contra-indications of one’s beloved modality. As helping professionals, curiosity and critical inquiry are necessary to respect and understand the approaches to which we steward.
Healing approaches create the conditions for a healing experience, but the experience belongs to the embodied knower, not the approach, model, or expert. This distinction might seem irrelevant, but for someone who has experienced the overriding of subjective knowing by dogmatic knowledge, honoring this distinction subverts power structures and restores agency. Since trauma fundamentally violates agency and exploits power imbalances, respecting embodied knowing is crucial to the healing process. And as trauma therapists, we need to be careful not to subconsciously replicate power structures in our healing work by proposing any one model as a monopoly of healing. I love how Manuela Mishke-Reeds (2022) speaks to this principle in last year’s Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy program as she says, “I believe that when you are sitting with clients who suffer from traumatic experiences, we cannot be limited to just one method. We need to build a whole repertoire.”
To use a wide repertoire successfully, we need to deepen our understanding of each tool without marrying ourselves to it. Widening the repertoire of tools creates choice points, introduces options, and cultivates cognitive flexibility and creative thinking, all factors that promote health for trauma survivors. A trauma-informed approach requires an integration of approaches. Research on therapeutic outcomes resolutely shows that the most important factor in therapy for positive client outcomes is the therapeutic alliance, not the intervention or approach (Sprenkle et al., 2009). Factors such as therapist warmth and accurate empathy matter more to the client than the intervention. Thus, utilizing an integrative approach and adopting an attitude of radical humility keeps therapists and helping professionals attuned to what matters most: the client and their experience.
To be of service to another person, we need to cultivate curiosity to that person’s healing process and reverence to their world of experience. Gene Gendlin (1990) speaks to this kind of humility in “The Primacy of Human Presence” when he writes, “So when I sit down with someone, I take my troubles and feelings and I put them over here, on one side, close, because I might need them. I might want to go in there and see something. And I take all the things that I have learnt – client-centered therapy, reflection, focusing, Gestalt, psychoanalytic concepts and everything else (I wish I had even more) – and I put them over here, on my other side, close. Then I am just here, with my eyes, and there is this other being.”
We need to keep our well of knowledge close enough to where our expertise is useful but not so close that we are sitting inside of it. The complexity of a person’s story is rarely resolved with the absolutism of one approach or the hegemony of our expertise; often, complex stories require complex efforts to understand and genuinely grapple with how a person has learned to organize and what is asking to unfold in the here and now of the therapeutic encounter. In a text on the therapeutic theory of common factors, Sprenkle et al. (2009) writes, “The more nonintegrative your model of choice, then, the more likely you will have to reach beyond it to succeed with some clients.” Reaching beyond our favored models to other bodies of knowing is not only an act of service to the client, who benefits from a client-centered approach, but also to the model, which benefits from integration.
References:
Bolz-Weber, Nadia. (2014). Seeing the Underside and Seeing God: Tattoos, Tradition, and Grace. On Being.
Gendlin, E.T. (1990). The small steps of the therapy process: How they come and how to help them come. In G. Lietaer, J. Rombauts & R. Van Balen (Eds.), Client-centered and experiential psychotherapy in the nineties, pp. 205-224. Leuven: Leuven University Press. From https://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2110.html
Lyons, Scott. (2023). Attending & Mending Boundary Ruptures.
The Embody Lab: Somatic Attachment Therapy.
Mishke-Reeds, Manuela. (2022). Hakomi: Core Principles.
The Embody Lab: Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy.
Sprenkle, Douglas H., Davis, Sean D., and Lebow, Jay L. (2009). Common Factors in Couple and Family Therapy. The Guilford Press.
About Sarah Ann LaFleur
Sarah Ann LaFleur, MA, LAC, LAMFT is a holistic, trauma-informed therapist who helps people express their authentic selves and cultivate connected relationships. She is trained in Internal Family Systems Therapy and integrative somatic approaches. Classically trained and still creatively experimenting with kriya yoga, Sanskrit, and felt sense writing, Sarah draws from her background as a yoga teacher and writer to interweave embodied and experimental modalities in the healing process. Sarah writes about relationships, trauma recovery, and the healing journey on Instagram @sarahanntherapy (100k+!).
Meet Sarah and learn more about trauma-informed therapy on The Embody Lab’s Therapist Directory.
If you’re interested in learning more about Somatic Attachment Therapy, The Embody Lab’s Somatic Attachment Therapy program is now available on-demand and can be completed at your own pace.
