Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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What I learned in that process is that Felvenkrais is not just for physical healing or for injury relief or pain. It actually was helping my mental health clients to get better and to feel more like they wanted to feel. That's my guest this week, Jenny Frank Doggett.

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a licensed mental health counselor and Feldenkrais practitioner. We talk about the intersection of mental health and the Feldenkrais method. This includes how Jenny incorporates touch and body awareness into her therapy sessions, the importance of sensing your body to get out of mental loops, what is sympathetic and parasympathetic activation, and what life looks like when we are well regulated, that is, when we are calm internally.

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Hi, my name is Jeffrey Schwinghammer and welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast, where we explore the mind and body through the lens of the Feldenkrais Method. More about my guest. Jenny Frank Doggett is a licensed mental health counselor, certified advanced clinical hypnotherapist, and a Guild certified practitioner in the Feldenkrais Method. She has been a student and teacher of psychology, yoga, and other esoteric and transpersonal practices

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for over 25 years. Jenny facilitates transformational therapeutic groups with Tom, her life partner of 26 years, and they have two adult daughters and many dogs. A couple of which you'll hear today. Onto the interview. Hi Jenny, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Hi Jeffrey, thanks for having me. I'm doing well, thanks. Good, good to have you.

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I guess I'd like to start with hearing about your professional journey. Where are you now and how did you get to here? So I am a, a mix of things now. Um, so right now I am a mental health counselor who uses Feldenkrais as a, um, a technique in my mental health practice. So I'm seeing clients.

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for counseling, for individual therapy and for relationship therapy, which is usually couples, I should say. And I'm also doing intensive growth and healing groups. And then I employ the Felt and Christ Method with several of my clients. So they're...

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seeing me for mental health but we're also using Felt and Christ to augment that, augment their growth and healing.

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So, oh you asked me where have I come from as well? Like how did I get there? Yeah So that's that's a more interesting question I was a I think I'm gonna start from the beginning rather than go backwards I've been in the mental health field for Somewhere north of 25 years. So almost my entire adult life and

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Started out as a Jungian therapist, which is working with people's dreams. Jungian, Carl Jung basically taught people to work with their unconscious mind or their subconscious mind, which is the part of the mind that is below the surface. So our conscious mind is everything that we know currently or that we think we know.

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Um, and it's our, it's the part of our mind that tries to figure things out and, uh, make plans for us. It's, it's, it's the part that we're aware of. And then there's the subconscious and the unconscious, which is under that. So Jung really wanted to help people to sort of dive into the terrain of the subconscious and unconscious to find, um, not only where do, uh,

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I'll speak in Feldenkrais terms like patterns that aren't serving us. Where do those come from? But also the unconscious has a great deal of resource in it. So we can find paths toward healing and toward, you know, like if you were speaking like in a like a coach, like to reach our full potential.

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So our unconscious has a lot, we have like a blueprint for health essentially in our unconscious. And if we're off track from that blueprint and we can go into the unconscious, then we can find that blueprint again and get back on track. So I was a union therapist, which involved a lot of talk therapy, a lot of dream analysis and some psychodrama.

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for many, many years. And then I started to train as a hypnotherapist where, and that helps you to get into the unconscious subconscious much more quickly. And I did that for, I've been doing hypnotherapy for about 10 or 12 years. And sort of on a parallel track to that, I've always been into sports and yoga and.

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very physical person and so I got interested in Feldenkrais about 17 or 18 years ago and started to use that to improve my yoga practice and other physical things that I did. And then when I started having injuries, I started going to Feldenkrais to help me to heal better and gain my capacity back from those injuries.

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Um, and then the most recent major injury was about six years ago. Um, yeah, it was six years ago. I broke my leg and it was a really significant injury. The, the Feldenkrais practitioner I knew who's, um, actually a parent at my children's school. Um, back then our children are adults now, but we were, um, friends and

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sort of family in a family community was with Jeff Haller and so he helped me with my significant injury and then I decided because of that recovery and how well it went I decided to do the training to become a Feldenkrais practitioner with Jeff and the Feldenkrais Training Academy. So I did that and that's how you and I met.

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colleagues in that we were students together at FTA and it's been almost a year since we've graduated and in that time I have oh say that again yeah well I just wanted to say for listeners the Jeff Holler that Jenny's talking about is the same Jeff Holler I had on a few episodes ago for an interview if people are interested in that too yeah that's a that's actually a great interview people

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definitely listen to what Jeff has to say. It's the Jeff and Jeffrey podcast. So I would definitely listen to that. Anyway, Jeff was a really significant figure in my life mentor when I was doing my recovery and then you know, through the training. And during the training period, I started to incorporate

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Feldenkrais into my therapy practice. We had to have, not pretend clients, but people like clients to practice with, practice clients, essentially. So I had some therapy clients who did that with me. And what I learned in that process is that Feldenkrais is not just for physical healing or for...

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injury relief or pain it actually was helping my mental health clients to get better and to feel more like they wanted to feel essentially but when you say the word feel better it can mean like you're feeling good feeling better or it can mean that you're feeling more you're more aware

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more in tune with what's going on. So it definitely helped people to feel better, eventually to feel good, but better in that they were able to understand themselves on a deeper level. Because in mental health, you can just sit there and talk about yourself and your history and what you want to be better. You can talk about your future plans. You can do visualizations.

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But if you're not really getting in tune with your body and what's happening for you physically, you're missing a piece of who you really are. Right, right. I'm really curious about a piece of this of, when you were talking about Jungian therapy and hypnotherapy, you're working with the unconscious, that part that we're not quite aware of, how does the-

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body represent the unconscious. How does the body figure into that conversation?

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That's a great question. My experience has been that the body holds a lot of memory. So what happens in your body tends to stay within your musculature, your tendons, your nervous system. Some people even say that

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having to do with the mitochondria in your cells that like there's a cellular memory of everything that has ever happened in your existence all the way down to birth and even your time as a in the womb so prenatally that you have a memory of everything that's ever happened and your conscious mind doesn't

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Hypnotherapy oftentimes is a very somatic experience because you're using sort of what we call an affect bridge. So affect meaning essentially your feelings and emotions to go back in time. Hypnotherapy takes you back in time to whatever it is that you're trying to work on. Say it's an early childhood trauma that you're wanting to.

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sort of metabolize, like really understand what happened. And, you know, by metabolize, I'm using that as a metaphor, but metabolize means to understand what are the beliefs that I made about myself and my environment in that moment. And then what are the behaviors that I started to employ as a result of the beliefs that are related to that trauma.

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And so what happens in hypnotherapy is you're using that emotion, which is also felt in the body. That's an emotion or a feeling is that's why it's called a feeling you feel it in your physical body. It's not a thought. So you use that to go back in time and then you find that moment and metabolize through it. But oftentimes, it's experienced in the body. So

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many times we can have physical symptoms and not know that they are related to some sort of traumatic event, you know, and it doesn't have to be like a major trauma, you know, like abuse or something like that or a car accident. It could be that I, you know, I slammed my finger in the window or something like that or in the car door. Or it could be trauma could be.

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many think trauma, you know, essentially means that you stop functioning fully and your nervous system tries to protect you. And it's a trauma if your nervous system doesn't stop trying to protect you. You know, many times like difficult things can happen to us. And if we move through them and our nervous system doesn't keep guarding us from having that experience again, then it's not really a trauma, but a trauma is where you're kind of stuck.

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time and your nervous system is Continuing to protect you. So that's also how hypnotherapy is related to the body

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Right, so earlier you used the metaphor of metabolizing that previous experience. It's like kind of like digesting it. And so if we live our lives in such a way that we can metabolize our experience as we go, we're not storing it up as trauma later down the road to metabolize later. Is that a way to put it? I think that's right. Right, if you have...

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the capacity and ability not to hold on to the experience, but to move through it, then it's not a trauma. And you maintain your ability to continue to function in the world. Yeah. A long time ago when I was trying to sort this out for myself, the way I phrased it to a friend was that...

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if an experience we had overwhelmed us and then continues to threaten to overwhelm us, that's kind of a way to describe trauma, that even just thinking about that experience can overwhelm us.

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Right, a simpler way to think about it. Well, and it's important to understand that our brain and nervous system are designed to keep us alive. That's a really important thing to just keep in the background. And so the brain and nervous system are going to, or it's evolved to keep us alive. It's going to search the environment for possible dangers.

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and then protect us from whatever those dangers are. And so if, you know, essentially, if you're stuck in trauma or overwhelmed, that means that your brain and nervous system are actually working. They're doing what they're designed to do. But oftentimes, and I'm sure you've heard this a lot, and many of your listeners have heard this, what were...

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reacting to in our environment isn't actually as dangerous to us as our brain perceives it to be. So the state of overwhelm that you're talking about is, you know, if you think about it in terms of the autonomic nervous system taking us into sympathetic activation or parasympathetic activation.

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start to speed up, our heart is beating, we're breathing more, our mind might be racing. Some of us in the modern world make big long to-do lists with sympathetic activation or we over function, like for instance, preparing for this interview. If I were in sympathetic activation, I would be reading lots of notes and looking at lots of literature to like study and prepare and write a paper before.

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we sit down and talk. Parasympathetic is the opposite. It's where you kind of check out. So if I took a nap before we were sitting down to talk or I was just spacing out or watching TV or something like that, that would be dropping into that. And it's a very relaxed state, but it's, the other way to think about them is fight or flight is sympathetic and freeze is.

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parasympathetic. So it's not necessarily relaxing watching TV. It can be another form of freezing where you're just not functioning.

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So I think I answered your question there. Yeah. I might have got off track. So when we have an experience that's traumatic or we still maintain some sort of trauma, this parasympathetic system, how does that play out in terms of our story or what's that relationship there? Would you tie that back together?

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Yeah, so I mean, you're not always in parasympathetic or sympathetic, or, yeah, sympathetic activation, you can be going through your normal everyday life. But if if you remember what I said your brain, and it's it's lower parts of the brain, it's it's like your mid and lower brain are constantly scanning the background for danger. So if there's a stimulus in your environment, that

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is similar to whatever the original trauma was, then you'll go into those types of activation. And then it's hard to just keep living your life, living your life normally, because you are hyper alert. And it can be that your mind is on hyper alert, it can be that your body is on hyper alert. So for some people, they and I've seen this a lot in my counseling practice, some people experience that.

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hyper alertness within their body and it manifests as, you know, neck and shoulder tension or lower back pain or headaches or that kind of thing. So that's a really nice place where Feld and Kreis, you know, for a counseling client, we can use Feld and Kreis to help to down regulate the nervous system, which means to help the nervous system to basically calm down.

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And it can go both ways. It can be like less active or more active because if somebody is in parasympathetic they need to Attune up a little bit so that they can be with themselves Mm-hmm. What would what would that look like if you were to enter through the body in the session? What does that mean? This this is the part of Felton Christ that I love and I think I got it in our training

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I mean, I certainly experienced it with Jeff and some of my other Feldenkrais practitioners as a client before I had this in the training, but I think it was maybe a year and a half into the training. I had an experience where I actually was consciously aware that the practitioner had connected his nervous system to mine.

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Um, so it's that that is the, like the kind of the wildest thing about this work to me. And it's sort of like, and you know, in that the first Avatar movie where they're sort of downloading and uploading information with their little squiggly lines that they can put into the, um, into each other or into their animals or whatever. It's, it's like that. It's the, the Feldenkrais practitioner touches the client in such a way.

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that and the Feldenkrais practitioner has to come from an equanimous, that's the word that Jeff Heller uses, state of being. So they have to be sort of down regulated and in a calm place and when they touch the client there's a connection of nervous systems. I believe that's called in in psychobabble we call that co-regulation.

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So through touch, we can co-regulate. And there's research, I think, through the HeartMath Institute that shows that when two people are in a room together, their hearts start to entrain and beat at the same rate. So I think it's related to that. The nervous system starts to entrain. And I've, so as a...

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practitioner when I touch a client, I can feel if they're activated, or not activated enough, and sort of match my body to where they are. So that I don't know if that means that I activate myself a little bit more, but I'm meeting them where they're at, and then pulling them back to more of that parasympathetic, like relaxed state.

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not so parasympathetic that they're not conscious. I mean, that can happen. Someone can fall asleep on the Feldenkrais table, certainly, because it's so relaxing, but to just bring somebody back to like an equanimous place. And so that's done through touch and very gentle, slow movement for me in my Feldenkrais practice. That's what I do with my clients. Touch and very gentle, slow movement.

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I even like to begin with people at their feet a lot of the time because in my hypnotherapy training what we learned was that when you are in sympathetic activation or what they called at the wellness institute where I trained they called it sympathetic shock. When you're in that activation you're not in your feet like you're all in your head.

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things are kind of racing up here and you can't actually feel your feet so I like to start with Feldenkrais clients at their feet and I envision or I imagine that they're pulling their attention through their nervous system all the way down their body into the bottom of their feet and I think that is something that we're working with as Feldenkrais practitioners is

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appropriate section so that people are able to feel with every part of their body. Cause if someone is activated and you're in a talk therapy session or using talk as the primary mode of interaction and talk is, you know, trying to think through things and if you're activated in a particular way, it's

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Like in my own experience, being activated and trying to think about something clearly is I can't. It's like a labyrinth or it's, it's, it's, there's an intensity or it's, it's confined in some way. My thinking is, and yeah, to be able to use this other resource of connecting with their body, their body, their feet to calm them, that then opens up more avenues of thinking. Right? I think so. You know, this reminds me of.

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um, earlier in my practice, I had learned this from some of my trainers in my therapy practice, that when you're sitting with a client, or when I'm sitting with a client, and they are super activated. And if I asked them, can you feel your feet, they oftentimes can't feel their feet, or there's like a tingly sensation, they don't feel the I guess the sort of

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New age word that we use now is grounded. They don't feel grounded, connected to the ground. So if someone's activated, they don't feel that grounding. And what I was taught to do is to take off my shoes as the therapist, this is before my Feldenkrais training, and have them take off their shoes, and I would come over and put my feet on top of theirs to help.

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them to anchor into the ground. And what I think that really did was some of that touch that I'm talking about in Feldenkrais, because I'm touching their feet and the bottom of their feet is touching the ground, then their attention starts to come down into their body, rather than just what their thoughts are getting lost in that labyrinth. And the body is very simple.

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I mean the body is very complex, right? But it's concrete, that's what I mean by simple. It's something that you can touch, you can feel, that's actually there. And when you're in that labyrinth of thought, you can get lost because thoughts are ephemeral. Right. And especially if one's own thoughts are stimulating or activating in themselves. You can have a thought that actually stirs you up more.

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That's, I heard a psychiatrist use this term long ago when I was a young therapist. Um, he called it kindling in the brain. And I think he was using it referring to bipolar disorder, but I think, um, it's a great word for, um, what happens when one negative thought leads to another negative thought, I mean, some people talk about it as the downward spiral.

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But I like the word kindling because it's a more physical word. And it actually describes what's happening in your neurology. When you are giving time and attention and thought to say, like you have it one negative thought and it's so it has a particular negative neural pathway in your brain. When you give that.

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your energy, you're basically giving it calories. Your brain uses up a certain amount of your calories to create these neural pathways. You're reinforcing the pathways. It's like walking on, say you have a new path from your front door to the mailbox, and you can't go on your driveway for some reason, your driveway's getting redone.

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and you start walking across the grass, eventually the grass starts to lay down and then eventually there's, you know, you start to see dirt. But just like animals in the forest, if you walk through a forest, you can find trails that elk and deer and bear and things like that have created from walking it frequently. And it's the same thing that happens in the brain. So the more energy you give to something,

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the bigger it becomes. Right, and then also, if there's a trail, well, you're kind of encouraged to use that trail again and again. It kind of draws you back to use it more. And I think that's what we find in the Feldenkrais method that, you know, many people come to Feldenkrais as a physical practice and for their physical body, because they are stuck in some sort of ingrained historical pattern.

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that maybe serve them well at a certain point in their life, maybe, but maybe they've come into that pattern because of, you know, a trauma. So for me, for instance, I broke my left leg and I couldn't, I wasn't allowed to walk on it for four months because of the heel. I wasn't able to put weight on it. So my right leg became my default leg to stand on.

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And to this day, even though I do felton criss, I do weightlifting, I do other sports, I'm certain that if I haven't done this, but if I took out a tape measure and measured the size of my calves or my thighs, that my right leg would be larger than my left leg. And that's because of that ingrained pattern because I'm used to standing on my right leg. So it's going to be larger than

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So those, yes, those are the patterns that we want to be able to shift out of, you know, mentally, physically, emotionally, even for some people spiritually, I think we get into these ingrained patterns. And it's important to learn that that's not the only way. Right, right. It's that ingraining that's the trouble, right? That you

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can't choose something else. Our teacher, Candy Canino, she uses the phrase, well, it was in a different context, but to be conceptually nimble. But I like that word nimble, right? To be nimble is the opposite of rigid. To be nimble is the opposite of being stuck in some ingrained pattern. OK, I can be on my right leg, and I can be on my left leg, and I can go between the two.

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not just be on one all the time. Right, and that's one of the things I love about, and I think you find that most people who become practitioners have maybe a love-hate, some sort of relationship with Dr. Feldenkrais, who's no longer with us, but it's one of the things I loved, reading Mark Reiss's biography.

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on Feldenkrais is that he developed the method because of significant patterns that were inhibiting him in his life. And he wanted to find a way out of those patterns and figure out how to be nimble so that he could do, you know, I don't know what, I'm not even sure what level of black belt he was in judo, but he was some high level of black belt and did other sports so that he could function.

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in his life and then he used it to teach other people how to come back and function in their own lives. You know, sometimes after horrific traumas. I'm sure you've maybe talked about this on your podcast already, but you know, the first Jeff and Jeff talks about this to how are that the first people he taught the method to were the people coming out of the concentration camps from World War Two, and just teaching them how to come in.

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in Tel Aviv how to come back to being a human in a human life after such horrific trauma. So it's really inspiring to think of how he used the method in his own life and then taught other people to use it in theirs. Right. There's this significant optimism that no matter what our past is, we can grow and mature and, you know, not...

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be so controlled or compulsively controlled by those stories that we can continue to make choices and live more fully. Yes. And I, as a counselor, I love that for anxiety and depression, for instance, because I think people believe when they have anxiety, it's debilitating.

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Some people toss off anxiety and depression is not a big deal, but it can be very debilitating, both of those. And I'm just using those because those tend to be the most common reasons people are coming to therapy. Anxiety, depression, and relationship problems, which can also be debilitating, actually. So to understand that there are options and...

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that we don't have to live in the same pattern that we've been in. I don't know, it's just super inspiring and exciting. Earlier, you talked about sympathetic and parasympathetic. If you were to approach this interview in one of those, you would either, if you were sympathetically activated, you'd be preparing, writing a whole bunch of notes, real activation, or if you were parasympathetic, it'd be...

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I'm going to take a nap beforehand or check out. What could you paint a picture for us? What is it like to not be stuck in either of those activations? How does one engage with the world? What does that look like? What does it feel like? Well, that's a good question. I think a lot of times when someone's not stuck in one or the other, they don't know it.

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and they're just living their life day to day and things are going well. I mean, things can go not well also, but it doesn't, you don't ruminate on it. So there's different ways of, you know, I think it's interesting. My tendency is to wanna talk about it emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, but really all of those things are the same thing.

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I think we've learned to break it down into categories and they really are, there is no mind body connection because the mind and body are the same thing. It's all one. So to be not in activation, I think you are.

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Well, let me let me say it most simply, like, to be in activation parasympathetic or sympathetic, you're in defense, you're protecting yourself, you're in protective mode. And to be out of that to like be in equilibrium, where you're you're not one and you're not the other, but you're just yourself, you're in growth mode. That's where you can engage fully with your life. And

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you know, I think we humans like we have goals and then we achieve our goals and then new goals come up. So we're just growing toward some point on the distant horizon, you know, and once we get to that point, there's another point beyond that. So I think it's expansive, maybe not not expansive in a bad way, but expansive in that that we're continuing to grow. And I think with growth, it's kind of

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like breath, we expand, and then we contract and then we expand again. The parasympathetic and sympathetic is maybe, you know, a holding of the breath. It's either holding the breath, this is a metaphor again, or it's hyperventilating. And feeling neither one of those is just regular breathing.

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easier. I think that's an awesome note to end on. Thank you so much Jenny. I'm curious where can people find out more about you? Oh thanks so much to you Jeffrey. This was fun. You can look at my website. It's tiger mountain counseling com. My partner Tom is also on there with me. We've been married forever and we're both therapists now.

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work together so you'll see him on Tiger Mountain Counseling but you can find out more about our work and our groups and about the Feldenkrais I do there. You can also email me at jenny at tigermountaincounseling.com. Awesome. Thank you so much. Alright, thanks so much, Jeffrey. That was my guest, Jenny Frank Doggett. You can find all of those links in the show notes.

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If you are curious to learn more about the Feldman-Christ method, I encourage you to check out my free guide, The 9 Surprising Benefits of the Feldman-Christ Method. You can find that in the show notes too. Because talking about what we are learning is so helpful for us in learning, I encourage you to talk about the ideas in this episode with someone you care about. What resonated for you? Jenny talked about using touch with the feet to help ground a person.

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So the question I'd like to leave with you today is, when's the last time you've touched your feet? Thank you for your attention.