Why we can't heal without going to the body.

Have you ever been filled to the brim with awareness of what to do, but find yourself unable to do it? A desired expression of yourself, unattained or unsustained. Have you ever felt that you can’t have a difficult conversation, even with someone you trusted? Have you ever felt a longing that you can’t get yourself to express? Have you felt your body come to a close at the first instant of a touch from a loved one? Have you ever felt the frustration of not being able to touch pleasure within yourself? Conceivably even written out of what is possible for you? Have you ever felt your body say no, but you brush it off with a smile, a good compliment, a yes of appropriate behavior? A pattern that keeps repeating? A want that feels too much to express?

I have, but proceeded to self-develop with more intellectual techniques to bring myself to do the thing I really want to do, feel, and receive. Even opted for gentler approaches of meditation, breath-work, and journaling only to find myself dependent on them to feel good. Only capable of accessing states of bliss in the comfort of a sukhasana. 

In the wraps of biohacking, mind-over-matter, Tony Robbins, and endless wellness advice I found myself more exhausted than enlightened. Tired of operating from a place of mastering the body to age slower, perform better, and feel happier. A podcast found me two or so years ago talking of somatic healing. The first I ever heard of it. It was a breath of fresh air, a sigh of relief, and deep knowing in every cell of my body that I’ve landed. It  handed me a permission I wasn’t capable of offering myself. The permission to stop and listen to myself instead. 

I didn’t stop, not immediately at least. Not even fully now because recalibrating the modus operandi of discipline and willpower as the way to change and move towards a happy life takes heaps of unlearning. It’s an embodied mentality that I slowly dismantle. It might seem like yet another way of ‘doing the work’, but it’s not. It’s a radical shift of working with your impulses rather than against them. 

It all starts (and ends) with the nervous system

I realize I’ve probably set myself up for failure by attempting to unpack the nervous system in as little as a few paragraphs. I’ve referenced incredible sources if you’re keen on diving deeper into the theory, but for now, I’ll do my best to bring home why it all starts and ends with our nervous system regulation.

Our autonomic nervous system is essentially the locus of control on all sorts of functions including motor and sensory functions. It is the command system to all other systems in the body, and more importantly it is the system that signals safety and thus subsequent social and personal interaction and responses. While the understanding that our rational mind is in charge of our nervous system, thoughts instigating the sequence of actions and responses in the body, the infamous mind over matter decades long paradigm, the reality is the complete opposite. Our bodies sense and feel into the environment well before our mind starts to build the rationale around it. That sensing and feeling is a by-product of real or perceived happenings, often mixed with past imprints that the body remembers through implicit memory inaccessible to the rational mind through explicit memory.

Our autonomic nervous system’s (ANS) main branches are the sympathetic, primal parasympathetic, (Dorsal/back body), social parasympathetic (ventral/front body). It runs through our voice box, ear, heart, face, abdomen, and much more (more present in the body than in the brain), mobilizing a somatic response in the  body primarily. The polite smile, the clenched jaw, the tight gut, contracted genitals, poker face, lost in thought, all the way to more explicity  expressions and reactions, are some of the many ways the nervous system expresses outwardly. Underneath these reactions is an adaptive and protective responses more commonly known as fight (anger and frustration), flight (anxiety, worry, and fear), freeze (numbness, apathy, helplessness), fawn (appeasement and ‘social rapport’), and fit-in (isolation, imposter syndrome).

These emotional sign-posts of the nervous system are not even the first layer, there’s much that starts to unfold through the body’s language well before we get to feelings and emotions, let alone thoughts and stories. Thus any desire you have uncoil a pattern of behavior, get out of a situation, muster up the courage to say yes and no, feel into pleasure or pain, express anger, have better sex, starts in expanding  the nervous system capacity  to pendulate between safety and activation. Developing the capacity to hold a healthy state of either ,or both, before acquiescing to one of the five states listed above. 

The goal, and this is perhaps the biggest misconception, is not to remain in a calm parasympathetic state (freeze, fawn, and fit-in are also parasympathetic states that indicate lack of safety), it’s the ability to pendulate between the two instead of remaining stuck in one. It’s knowing how to engage the sympathetic nervous system in a healthy manner (centered action and command), and resting intentionally into a parasympathetic state (sweet surrender). 

Somatic work is essentially creating the space for you to build that capacity. In it we allow for un-metabolized experiences to come to the surface and complete their cycle that have been otherwise interrupted by these adaptive responses. We build the capacity for choice, to shoulder pain without being swallowed by it, to open to pleasure with intention and ownership. The body knows exactly how to do that, we just need to create the space and environment for it to do so. 

The focus on training the mind and fixing the body is not only counterintuitive to true healing and vitality, it often creates added layers of self-judgment and criticism when things aren’t working. In the face of what’s not working, the answer is always to do less. To slow down. To listen. To let the body lead the conversation.

Building bottom up curiosity

The first step of somatic work is typically the hardest, simply because it requires the radical shift in perspective that nothing is wrong with you, and nothing is wrong with your body. That your body is always working towards homeostasis. Towards balance, towards its default state. Even if that looks like bursts of anger, like numbness, like weight gain, like anxiety, like lack of sexual pleasure. Its adapting to your safety in the best way it knows how until we learn to relate to the body differently. It is all the body very intelligently communicating to you the way home. The ask is to listen and observe. To track the messages and sensations towards opening and expansion.  To create containers where the body is orienting towards safety using different techniques of self-relating. It’s building the nervous system capacity we have to handle the desire we want. 

Bottom up processing or somatic inquiry is not about resting in the inquiry of why this is happening, but rather what is happening in the body right now. Centering the body for feedback. If it involves any work, it's simply directing your innate (already existing) sense of compassion towards yourself so you can listen and pause for feedback, before rushing to interrupt the process with thought. It’s simply learning a different language so you can hear the call. 

The process of doing so is unbelievably fascinating to say the least. Starting the inquiry from the bottom up, is accessing a more subtle and nuanced layer of information and self-understanding. What sits in the body is the full range of the human experience. The processing of pain and anger, and the relief of allowing the full cycle of these responses to complete and dissipate. The access of pleasure and joy devoid of shame. It’s leveling up our ‘ceiling for the feeling’ and what a world that opens. At the heart of it sits the reclamation of yourself, sense of agency, choice, and vitality. 

Do this with me: Find a comfortable spot to sit with your back and head rested. Important for both to rest on something. You can even lie down if you wish. Allow your body to be held by the floor beneath you and the wall or head rest behind you. Really give your weight to all the support holding you. From there start scanning your environment gently moving your neck left to right, up and down before coming to a stop where it feels good.  Notice the quality of your vision. Laser focused gaze vs. more relaxed. Allowing your eyes to drop into your sockets. Relaxing your jaw, band around your eyes and brows. Perhaps noticing any uplift in the shoulder, or contraction in your pelvis. 

Once you feel settled, start scanning your body for something that feels tense. Place your hand on that spot and simply notice. Notice what happens to this place. Does it grow? Dissipate? Become an emotion or memory? Maybe an image? 

You might feel a yawn coming, a sigh, allow that to be. You might also feel more energy building up in your system that you don’t know what to do with, or feel completely numb. All of that is information. You might escape to thought. Gently bring yourself back to the sensation. You might question  the absurdity of  exercise or if you’re doing it right. Notice that too. Is the inquiry coming from the top-down (evaluation of what’s happening), rather than bottom-up (experiencing what is happening). When you feel yourself disassociating from the body, allow yourself to take pauses, orient to the environment inside and outside, and then return to the practice once more. Titrate. It’s tempting to make sense of the experience, but try to stay with the sensation for now. Remember it’s a wave, and with time see if you can get to the backside of the wave. Observing the dissipation. 

The above might seem rather trivial, but it’s a 60 second of one simple practice to start to orient towards the body. For some of us, this might be extremely foreign. I know for me, my mental muscle was far more superior that beginning to orient towards my body left me more frustrated. Numb (numb is also a sensation). The more I leaned into somatic work, the more I woke up to the aliveness that sits within my body. Notice what it does on its own when I stop controlling it. The information and insights that came through when I created safety. The change it had on the quality of relationships, on my experience of pleasure, on metabolization of anger and pain, on joy in the mundane, in the possibilities I started to realize were available. 

The last point I want to mention here is that this isn’t about dismissing thought, but rather not over-identifying with it. The types of thoughts we have inform us well about the state of our physiology, it’s also information about where we are in our state of activation. However, thought is one of the many channels in which we interpret and store our experiences. Images, movements, feelings and sensations are among the other ways. When we get underneath the thought story, we get to interrupt default patterns and deepen the understanding in the present experience devoid of attachment to the past or future. 

Anchoring in pleasure

I add this here because I found it to be the most profound shift in perspective. To build the capacity to feel and move through discomfort (fear, sadness, longing, etc.) one has to anchor in a pleasure reference point. Know how to attune to the parts that feel good. My dear friend Reem always speaks this phrase ‘yes, and’, and anchoring in pleasure is the very practice of yes, and. It’s the recognition that finding what feels good and what feels hard laying side by side. 

One of the first portals out of what we pigeonhole into a label of anxiety is the somatic practice of anchoring in a pleasurable sensation in the present while acknowledging the past or future sensation that’s bringing about anxiety. It’s how we teach our nervous system this type of time discernment, and thus the way back to safety. 

As Kimberly Ann puts it, pleasure has to be part of the journey not the imagined destination. She goes on to say that we often think the answer lies in analyzing all of our problems and coming with a story of why we feel the way we feel. Creating a baseline of discomfort that starts to feel like the safe space for the body if that’s all it knows how to feel. 

She speaks of this concept of clean vs. dirty pain. Pain that is necessary vs. pain that keeps stuck. Building our repertoire of what feels good in our body makes space for  the discernment of the kind of pain cycle to stick with and allow for that cycle to complete, and the other kind that we’re indirectly meeting a need by keeping it there (getting sympathy and care through our problems, instead of asking for the connection vulnerably). 

Centering pleasure in somatic work is where we alchemize the shame of wanting what we want, it’s where we touch numbness into upper limit pleasure possibilities, where we take ownership over the experience rather than acquiesce to the right way of doing things, where we resign the belief that pleasure is only a reward following the next mountaintop challenge, where we find safety in the body instead of thoughts, intellect, and imagination. It’s also where we then lean into pain, sadness, and anger feeling the entirety of the activation without racking it up in our system and ‘getting over it’. 

Welcoming your primal self

Every time I’ve started studying different somatic modalities, animals (wild not domesticated) were the main reference point. Animals attune to the world from their internal environment of primal instincts and impulses. Whether that’s in getting what they want, nursing their young, dealing with threat,  resting and slowing down, or coming together in connection and community. 

Somatic work is waking up to the human animal. To sit in deep reverence to our desires. We are wired for connection, belonging, and dignity contrary to the misled belief that we are here to fight one another for survival. Innately greedy. The beauty of somatic work is honoring those primal impulses. Owning when we want to be the prey or when we are ready to pounce. When we want to pause for safety and rest, or when we want to ramp up movement. To eat when we’re hungry, sleep when we’re tired, say yes when we deeply desire, and no when we don’t. To live in accordance to our internal cycles, and in harmony to the cycles outside of us. 

I hope this offers you a sigh of relief as it did for me. That you’re not something to optimize. A mind to control, and a body to discipline. That you don’t have to be at war with yourself, that you always have a choice, and that there’s so much joy and peace in walking the way home to your body. 

Resources: 

The Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Proges 

Call Of The Wild by Kimberly Ann Johnson

Waking the Tiger by Dr. Peter Levine 

The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk 

If you’re curious about this work, I’m here to support you as you walk yourself home.