6 Ways to Facilitate The Synchronous Field
I realized I’ve talked to you a lot about the other core principles of SomaField, but not yet very much about what I call The Synchronous Field.
It’s worth talking more about it because The Synchronous Field is an incredibly special and magical place and my wish would be that all practitioners learn how to facilitate it.
The Synchronous Field is present in those moments with clients that don’t feel ordinary. There's extra magic in the room and maybe you feel like the session is sort of doing itself while you’re simply guiding it. Time might slow down or stretch out and an understanding or capacity comes through you, the practitioner, that you didn’t previously know or have access to. This can also be a highly intuitive place, where maybe you know how to say just the right thing or you’re able to speak to exactly what the client is thinking before they even say it or you just know the right direction to go in.
To me, The Synchronous Field is all about knowing how to work with energy. Here are some ways to facilitate it:
This goes without saying, maybe, but get present. Presence is a dimmer, not a switch. In other words, you can be present, sure, but you can also reach an even higher state of presence by putting a high quality of attention on your body, the room, yourself, and the person in front of you. Part of how you do this is silencing the many other things going on around you and just trusting that even if you’re not tracking every detail, the important things will come through and you can simply be.
Get out of your head. Now, listen, sometimes being a therapist involves a lot of juggling, tracking, remembering, perceiving, guiding, etc. so sometimes there are so many balls in the air that your cognitive process is an important part of the work. But it’s also good to have the skill of silencing all of that for a bit and simply sitting with what’s happening in the room, getting out of your ideas of where to go or how to facilitate that, and letting things unfold. (Artistry, another of the SomaField core principles, is how you determine which of these modes to be in in any given session). What I’ve seen from practitioners sometimes is that they’re so determined to offer value to the client, so fixated on getting them somewhere, that they can get in the way of letting the process unfold.
Let go and follow their lead. There’s a lot of skill in hearing what a client needs and then facilitating that and yes, we need to know how to do that. But/and/also, sometimes the best way to facilitate The Synchronous Field is to sit back and listen, let the client lead the direction, and be responsive to that. Notice what you notice. Reflect it back. Leave space and quiet in between moments. And let yourself not know where they’re going. Trust that you’re paying a high quality of attention and there’s value in the exploration and you’ll be able to tie it all up in a meaningful way by the end of the session. It’s like beginning a painting and it all looks like mush and nothing and as you add more and more layers, what it wants to be begins to come through. Let it develop over the time of your session.
Work with your own nervous system and with nervous system literacy. I hear people say all the time, “I’m regulated.” Well, maybe. But what they usually mean by this is “I’m calm,” which is not at all the same thing as being regulated or as working towards parasympathetic dominance. Most in our culture (for all the obvious reasons) have lived with too much stress response (sympathetic nervous system state) and have lost the flexibility to move between states of sympathetic and parasympathetic easily. In sympathetic, also known as rest and digest, the unconscious brain feeds forward to us what we need to know and do now. No need to plan or figure or do a bunch of other work. We just know. We’re able to sit back and trust that the skills, memories, or right words will come through when we need them. So working towards not just parasympathetic in the moment, but parasympathetic dominance helps The Synchronous Field. I wrote a parasympathetic how-to practice to help you.
This one should go without saying, but The Synchronous Field isn’t a technique. It’s not a place you can arrive at if you just do the things I’m suggesting here. It’s reliant on an empathetic human heart inside of a practitioner who has a sense of self. Practitioners who aren’t in touch with their own hearts or who lack empathy (yes they exist) won’t be able to create this state authentically because they’re not able to attune or create a truly reciprocal relationship in quite the same way. Things might feel forced, flashy, or like the practitioner is showing off or trying to get you somewhere…whether that place is good for the client or not is another story.
All these things I’ve listed so far will help you with Artistry—knowing how to meet the moment. Artistry the way I define it is knowing when to slow the pace down, when to let the silence do the work, when to offer some psychoeducation, when to use humor to get them unstuck, or when to create an exercise for the client. When we’re in our Artistry, we’re highly responsive, attuned, and connected and we’re in a state that’s very supportive of slipping into that magical Synchronous Field.
Do I know scientifically what The Synchronous Field actually is or what’s going on in our brains? Nope. Not really. Some might think of it as a high state of presence. Some might call it god. Some might say it’s simply attuned connection. I would love if one of you wanted to study it. 🙂
What I do know is that this state can be very healing and deeply beneficial to a therapeutic process. It’s also a vulnerable state where a client can be susceptible to coercion, damaging ideas, or to unhealthy power dynamics in the therapeutic relationship. Yet another good reason we hope clients will choose therapists and coaches they can vet and trust who they can feel are truly on their side.
Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)
