In this post, I’m going to lay out and introduce a bunch of modalities that can help you resolve issues in your life.

Let’s start with the most basic one. Talking to a friend / your mom / dad /the barber. When you engage in this practice to resolve your life’s challenges, you are relying on the ability of the person to listen, their knowledge of your past, your level of trust in them and their ability to give sound advice. This practice typically involves you sharing “stories” about your life to this person and this person listening and responding with “advice”. Sometimes the advice sticks with you, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes when it sticks with you, you try it out in practice and it resolves the issue. Some other times, your inherent tendencies are too strong for the advice to work effectively.

At some point you may realize that the advice you are getting from this person isn’t really helping you get through a certain problem. That’s when you upgrade to “talk therapy”. You hire a therapist to listen to your problems and the therapist guides you towards solutions. If you are the kind of person who hasn’t really had a chance to speak openly, just having a private confidential space with a person who is going to keep your secrets for you feels liberating. They may not know as much about your life, but that also means they have fewer old judgments about you. A good therapist will offer you “reflections” and “clarifying questions”. A “reflection” is a rephrasing of what they heard you say. Just hearing a well-attuned reflection can have a soothing effect on you. You (finally?) feel “heard”. A good reflection can also help you spot the inconsistencies in what you have shared. You might vent – “My boyfriend is a complete dick!” – and the therapist responds with “I hear you are feeling anger towards your boyfriend.” With this reflection, the therapist has rephrased your statement using language that is neutral and objective and helped you attune more to what you are feeling so you can work on that. A statement like “My boyfriend is a complete dick!” may make you feel stuck because you believe that as a reality and that there’s nothing you can do to change it, but a rephrasing of it into “I am feeling anger” completely changes the focus to what you are feeling and hence brings you back into the driver’s seat with regards to what you can change. There is a science to such reframing. One form of that science is NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming. This is something you can learn yourself and it’ll help you learn how to pay close attention to the words a person is using so that you can notice their unconscious biases. Another form of this science is NVC – Non Violent Communication. NVC will introduce you to a vocabulary of “feelings” which are related to a vocabulary of “needs” and help you distinguish between your judgment and objective reality – it’s a tool that is put to great use in conflict resolution by helping conflicting parties build empathy for each other by discerning each other’s fundamental unmet needs.

A “clarifying question” helps you onwards in your journey of introspecting about the issue you are attempting to resolve using therapy. Suppose you say “my boyfriend doesn’t show me love”, your therapist may ask you “How do you like to be shown love?”. May be you’ve never thought of that before. If you don’t know how you like to be shown love, how do you judge your boyfriend as not showing you love. So you start observing in your life what makes you feel loved and report back to the therapist. Once you figure out how you like to be shown love, the therapist might guide you towards sharing that with your boyfriend and lo-behold, you feel loved because your boyfriend now knows how to show you love – and you live happily ever after (jk). This example of a clarifying question is asking you about what you know about yourself. It’s helping you get a better sense of who you are as a person, a better hang of your self–identity.

There’s another flavor of “clarifying question” a therapist might ask. You might come in and start ranting about your boss. The therapist might interject at an opportune moment and ask you “how does that make you feel?”. The therapist is reorienting you (similar to the reflection example) towards your feeling so you are focussed on what’s in your control. Notice also that the question is phrased in the present tense. So the therapist is orienting you away from the past –things that happened with your boss who is not presently in the therapy room with you (hopefully) – into the present – what you are feeling right now. The therapist may take you a step further and ask you to locate where you can sense the feeling in your body. What the temperature of it is? If there is any color associated with it? If it has a shape? By doing so, the therapist is orienting you to the physical reality of the emotion you are experiencing. This is the essence of a “mindfulness” exercise. Often times as you begin describing the physical reality of your feeling, you may notice it dissipate. You suddenly find yourself open to exploring “mindfulness”.

You find your therapy useful and are drawn to learning some of these skills for yourself. So you learn NLP and NVC. You get to practice some of it in the practice groups that your NLP/NVC workshops provide. But you want more.

So you turn to “Circling”. Circling is a group conversational playground. A Circling group (4-10 people) get together for an hour or so and decide to share what’s present in the moment. You get angry with someone in the group and get an opportunity to practice NVC. Or you notice that someone else in the group is expressing in a charged manner and seem unaware of the judgments that they are making, so you try out your NLP skills in offering them a reflection.

You like the experience of exploring the present moment physical reality of felt emotions. So you go for “Gendlin’s Focusing”, “Somatic Experiencing” or similar other practices that help you explore that verbally 1-1 with a trained practitioner.

Now that you have established the link between your behavioral tendencies to emotions that you experience to the placement of those emotions in your body, you have an epiphany. You realize that if you could resolve these “kinks” at your bodily level, you wouldn’t have to keep working uphill against your behavioral “tendencies” but have them rerouted at a bodily level. If you are fighting your tendency to binge eat, you are going to constantly fail (every now and then). But if you rewire the tendency at its bodily root, you are set free.

That opens you up to a whole new world – the world of “somatic” practices. Somatic as in pertaining to the body. Less talking, more body. Dancing, shaking, shamanic breathwork, tantric bodywork, psychedelic exploration, Alexander Technique. Different modalities designed to release bodily held “tension” or “trauma” or “sankhara” depending upon what language appeals most to you, so that you can live a stress free life. Once you recognize the power of doing these somatic practices, you work on those.

Till one fine day, you wake up and realize that you are just fine the way you are. You don’t need practices, you don’t need therapy, you don’t need friends (although you love hanging out with your friends). You just need to slow down and listen to that voice inside you that you have been ignoring all along. Sometimes that voice tells you to set up a chat with a therapist and you do that. Sometimes it tells you to sign up for a tantric workshop and you follow suit. Sometimes it tells you to write a rambly blog post about presenting a case for therapy and modalities that build off of it, so you go do that.