May 8, 2023 - EyeClarity Podcast
I had a great chat with Sue Choi about her work and her new book.
Sue Choi is a somatic movement teacher and bodyworker with over 2 decades of experience creating body solutions for clients. Her goal has always been making enduring and sustainable changes for people in their bodies that they can carry into their daily lives. Driven to understand how mental and emotional connections show up in the body, she has a particular interest in how the deep currents of trauma distort a body.
Her professional trainings include yoga therapy at the Krishnamacharya Mandiram, Continuum Movement with Emilie Conrad, Rolf Movement with Hubert Godard, neurosensory training in the Masgutova Neurosensorimotor Reflex Integration Method™, manual therapies in craniosacral, visceral manipulation, myofascial release. Perceptual trainings include the Tomatis Method™ sound therapy and natural vision. The work of psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and academics as they apply to the sensory system have also informed how she works with the body in movement. Enjoy the show.
Contact Sue Choi
Website: coherentbody.com
email: info@coherentbody.com
Instagram: @coherent_body
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
book, people, vision, sue, somatic, body, balance, movement, head, hearing, preserving, feel, wrote, context, posture, brain, system, outcomes, read, parents
Hello, everyone, it’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to hello@drsamberne.com.
Hey, everybody, its Dr. Sam. And I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast today. So we have a special guest. She’s an author, she’s a somatic educator, she’s a friend from LA, her name is Sue Choi. And she’s written a new book, which I just finished. And it’s called when things stick, untangling your body from old patterns. And I am so excited about the contents of this book. And I just add, I have Sue on So Sue, welcome to the program. And can you give us a background on where you’ve come from and who you are?
00:46
Thank you, Sam. So happy to be here. I have I’m a somatic movement therapist, and educator, I’ve been doing this work for over 20 years, a whole body of work that ranges from somatic movement to hands on body work that I do for private one on one clients in person. So I it’s been a fun journey to bring all these things together. And it was a big kind of effort to put the book together to distill things down. But I’m glad it’s out there.
01:26
Well, you know, when I read the book, you know, what, what jumped out at me is how you have put all these different disciplines together. And so how did you develop this system?
01:41
You know, it was, it was kind of piece by piece, mostly, it was focused on how to improve outcomes for clients. So if there was something that I could kind of see that just wasn’t fitting in place, I would research it, I did a lot of different types of trainings that may be kind of unusual, but I, one of the books that really turned things around for me was Dr. John Radies book on the fourth theatres of the brain and attention, and he, he’s a psychiatrist, and he wrote about the sensory system, and the importance of it. And it really spoke to me, because I was already doing the modest work. I had been exposed to Bates work, back in the early days when I first studied yoga therapy, and was training. So I learned about that in India, and I said, Oh, that’s just yoga for vision. And so the, as every, the threads of these things came together, and I read his book, and he wrote about these case studies where he worked with people and their sensory system and change things for them it was so it really struck me because I could see some of those those tendencies and certain people and I could tell that they’re, that’s what they needed, they didn’t need to do different movement, they needed to have different inputs. So I started to kind of work with the body as a as an information process and said, you know, ask myself how could I get better outcomes by perceiving and working with the body on that level?
03:25
So the people that you help what are some of their symptoms
03:31
um, I don’t know if it’s more symptoms is more their kind of self perception. If they kind of feel like they’re, they they’re not they can’t quite name then they know that there’s something going on with them or they need to they keep kind of hitting the same walls I think it goes down to more behavioral things. I mean, people do come to me in person for your, your typical pain, you know, back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, that sort of thing. But you know, I have worked with a wide range of people and then and over the course of time, so they may be coming to me for back pain, but then we work on their knee pain or ankle pain or balancing issue, you know, a lot of it does come to balance and bringing the body into organization.
04:29
Sure, so with the people that you work with, I mean, it’s kind of high level because they must have some self awareness they know something is off. And so how do you assess them what what’s your process and guiding them through? So they’re able to say as you say, improve their balance has one thing
04:49
Yeah, always walking. That’s that’s a very Yeah, yeah. I like to see how they walk, how they move how they carry themselves, because everything in The way I teach in the way I described in the book is around those two things. How do you stand on your own two feet, literally and metaphorically? And how do you move forward? So how do you walk? And again, literally and metaphorically, because all those signals underlying signals of what happens on that fundamental physical level translates into your kind of understanding of yourself and your movement for the world?
05:27
Well, since I understand, you know, the eyes and vision is one of our major guidance systems, how does vision play into your system?
05:41
The way I framed it out, is really about the nature of intention, and how using your visual system, the coordination of the two eyes, and also the coordination between peripheral and focal and how you can allow and expand the peripheral capacity, so that the focal vision emerges. Rather than being something that you do, that that whole organization guides you forward, it’s if you set your intention and use your visual system in the way it’s designed to. It’s almost like a parting of the Red Seas, it cuts a path because you’re connecting fully, wholeheartedly with the intention that you put forth. And that takes, it’s not just a thinking process. It’s a whole body process. For the way I kind of frame it. Yeah,
06:35
well, I think we share that because I always talk about vision as a whole body process. And so to introduce you, again, this is Sue Choi. She’s a somatic movement teacher. And she’s also an author of a new book called when things stick, untangling your body from old patterns. And so sue, why did you write this book?
07:00
I wrote it because you know, I would, I always think that when you do something, when you try something out, you feel it, whether you understand it or not just I always went for the change, let me show I’m going to give you a quick change in your body, so that you can change your mind around it. Because if you could get an immediate change, I mean, I have not strengthen the muscle over months, if you get an immediate change from you know, two minutes of doing something. So it, I always like to kind of prove the point first. And what I found, especially when I went online, was people didn’t have a context for it. They didn’t know how to make sense of what was going on. And then they use words like magic, or, you know, their their shots.
But and that’s wonderful, because then you open your mind to new possibilities. But if you don’t have a context to hold that new way of thinking, that experience is just a past experience. So I wrote the book to give people a context and their videos in it to so they do actually get the movement experience, but a context so that they understand that this isn’t magic, this isn’t something that’s mystical, or that they can’t wrap their head around, they actually if we keep going back to standing on your own two feet moving forward, then you you start to really dissolve those old ways of thinking and perceiving and, and have new experiences that, that open you up to possibility and it’s super exciting. You feel that on such a visceral level.
08:41
You know, in the eBook format, I was really inspired by the videos that you put in it just really helped understand, you know, it’s one thing to read it, but it’s another thing to watch the demonstrations like there was one where even just the way you were sitting, I got so much from that. And of course we’re all sitting so much the computer, what are some tips that you can maybe share from the book around sitting,
09:11
while sitting? Yeah, you know, I have this concept called the three keys. And that’s about balancing the three major weight centers in your body. And so if you’re sitting, one of the keys is what I call the head key, and it’s at the occipital base of your head. So there are two, two bony parts at the back of your head. And if you’re sitting and feeling neck pain, an easy thing to do would be to imagine that you are holding your head from those two points in the back of your head. And let’s say if you turn your head to the left, you’re going to use your left arrow key to turn to the left. You turn your head to the right you use your right head key so you manage and move your head from a different position and that can change just the nature of how you, you hold them in big and big heavy weight on your spine. Yeah,
10:09
yeah, I highly recommend this book. So we have Sue Choi. She’s a somatic movement teacher, she’s written a new book, which I just finished called when things stick on tangling your body from old patterns. And so I’m, I need to ask you this one thing, and I’m going to make a couple comments. And then I want to hear your point of view. As you know, everybody a My intention is to help people preserve their vision to be proactive. And it’s not just vision, but it’s hearing it’s, you know, how this is affecting our our brain health. And more and more people are being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, dementia, cognitive issues. And, you know, for me, in my own physical therapy that I offer people, I’m always bringing in things like balance orientation, the vestibular system, hearing and vision. And one of the key points that I observe is our posture. And you do that too. And I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind sharing a little bit of your perspective on that interrelationship?
11:21
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it’s kind of well known that preserving hearing and vision contribute to too healthy brain. And, you know, there have been studies that show that more than stopping smoking, or improving your social connections that the vision and hearing are paramount to, to preserving your brain health. That helps your perception of your environment through those two senses help to manage your head, which manages your spine, it’s kind of like the basis of what a lot what they teach an Alexander technique. But then if you bring it down into an How do you find your support? How do you find your support through your legs, through your pelvis through your sacrum? And when those two things come together? It’s really filling out the fabric of your experience? Like how do you have a whole experience not a fragmented experience? Where you’re just focusing on one aspect of it, but how do you have that whole experience all at once? And to me, those are the three, three big things really impacts posture from information processing perspective.
12:40
I mean, what comes up for me when you talk about this is the experience with children. I don’t know whether you work much with no children. I, I would recommend for parents here to read this book as well. You know, I work with a lot of special needs kids in spectrum disorder, kids, and I’m always bringing all these into it. I may not name them, I’m on the floor with them. And we’re doing, whether it’s reflexes or cranial sacral or, or vision work, whatever. But that that relationship that you speak about? That’s, that’s an audience that I think could really benefit from your work. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that. Obviously, the elders for sure. What do you think about, you know, at least bring this in to the awareness of parents, you know, that children and learning in school?
13:44
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I definitely you know, I’ve studied the developmental process and gained a lot from learning from those communities. For me working with them directly, I there’s a whole nother layer that of working with the parents and their thing that really resonates with me, because I think working with children, the the conversation that you have with them is very different from an adult. So when I was doing the tomato, this method, and having a lot of people from that community come in to see me it was a parents that I worked better with, I mean, the end it was the parents who had to help the children. So to me, it’s working with the Yeah, the adults in the room that that really speaks to me. I used to do yoga for a volunteer program where it was at a residential rehab center so the girls had dual diagnosis. And, and I could see that they were so burnt out, they could barely really pay attention in the way I teach how you pay attention. I eventually changed the program. So it was a part of the school curriculum. But I can teach the staff too. Because that environment that context is, is necessary. And to me that, you know, it’s the context is the matrix of your, that helped his organization, you can’t do it on your own, you know, you you have if you are working so hard to change your inner world, but your outer landscape is still a toll in total chaos. It almost helps to, to heal and work with that outer relationship. You know, to work with them simultaneously, a little bit, rather than to work internally a lot. You know, it’s just a you better outcome, I think. And that’s, you know, the Why do a multi sensory approach, because, you know, you just work with one thing like balance all the time, but your, your vision is kind of pulling you in a twist all the time, then yeah, it really, it serves to do both of them a little bit simultaneously, and then you get results.
16:14
So we’re coming down to the end of our interview, first of all, how can people buy your
16:19
book, I will provide a link that you could put in the show notes, or they could just go to my website coherent body.com. And they scroll halfway down, they’ll see a place where they could click to order the book, and but I will give you a link for a special link that your audience can follow because I have a special bonus offering for them. And, you know, their specific interests around vision.
16:47
And what about your other offerings, private sessions, workshops, what, how can people work with you?
16:56
Well, once they go through the book, if they want more support, they can join a live group coaching program that I have, and I have different kind of tears, where they can have more private help, more kind of specialized classes, you know, that they could sign up to, to determine what might be best for them and their their goals and their, their state where they are right now.
17:24
Okay, and so you work online, you can work with people, you know, in any location.
17:29
I do. Yeah, yeah. I work with people globally. It’s a pretty spectacular thing to be able to do
17:36
- Yes, it’s, it’s great. So, Sue, I wish you the best of luck. I’m going to promote your book through my channels. And thanks for taking the time today for speaking with us and I wish you the best of luck as as you move forward.
17:55
Thanks so much, Sam. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it.
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