In This Body

A Map of Somatic Therapy Approaches with Ailey Jolie

• Ailey Jolie • Season 3 • Episode 64

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0:00 | 52:22

What if somatic work is not failing you, but simply not the right approach for your body?

In this solo episode, Ailey explores how somatics has become a catch all term for healing, and why that can lead to harm when practices are used without context. As a somatic psychologist, Ailey has seen how well meaning embodiment work can overwhelm the nervous system instead of supporting it.

Ailey offers a clear map of different somatic therapy approaches so you can better understand what you have tried and why it may or may not have worked. We look at expression based methods, as well as slower, more regulated approaches that prioritize safety, awareness, and integration.

The takeaway is simple and relieving. If somatic work has not helped, you are not broken. You may have been given the wrong tool for your history.

If you are navigating healing or trying to understand your nervous system, this conversation offers a more informed and compassionate path forward.

In this episode:

  • 0:00 Welcome And Why A Somatics Map
  • 3:48 When Somatic Work Makes You Worse
  • 8:38 Lineage: The Missing Context
  • 13:28 Soma Definition And Western Scope
  • 19:38 Catharsis Lineage And Its Risks
  • 32:03 Feldenkrais And Hakomi Slower Work
  • 40:38 Woodman And The Body’s Story
  • 46:38 Levine And Somatic Experiencing
  • 51:38 Choosing Tools

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

Welcome And Why A Somatics Map

Ailey Jolie

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the pulp power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Shalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life free from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a Love Letter to Embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared call? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Aile Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm Aile Jolie, and today is a solo episode, and it's been one I've been wanting to do for a long time. Today I want to talk to you about somatics. As many of you know, I'm a somatic psychologist, and that is a title that isn't, and that's a title that's not recognized by any ethical or legal credentialing body. It's a title that I use because in the United Kingdom I hold the registration of a chartered psychologist. I'm also a somatic experiencing practitioner. I have a master's in deaf psychology and somatic studies. I've trained in lots of other somatic modalities. So I call myself a somatic psychologist because I bring my education and training in somatics into my psychology practice. What this means is that every day I sit with people while their nervous systems reorganize in front of me. And over the past several years, something has shifted in who's walking through my door and what they're carrying when they arrive. More and more my clients come to me already shaped by somatic work in one way or another. They've seen it on Instagram, they've been to a breathwork class, they've done a weekend workshop with someone who used the word embodiment a lot. They've had a therapist who told them to drop into their body. Some of them have been doing this kind of work for years, and many of them are arriving into my space confused, or worse, destabilized. Not because the practitioners they worked with were harmful people. Most of them are absolutely well-intentioned, genuinely caring, doing their best, but they were using language and techniques that they didn't fully understand the origins of. They had the phrases, somatic release, nervous system regulations, store trauma, discharge, but they didn't have the map underneath those phrases. They didn't know when to apply what they were offering or to whom or why it might land beautifully for one nervous system and body and crack another one open in a way that nobody in the room knew how to hold. They trusted the facilitator. And they left that session more fragmented than they had been in years. They came back to my office shaking, not in the way the facilitator intended, shaking because the nervous system had been overwhelmed and nobody had known how to bring her back into her body. This person had thought they had failed, that their body was too broken for this kind of work, that they were the problem. And they weren't the problem. The problem in this scenario that I'm describing, that I've seen again and again more recently, is that the facilitator was working from a philosophy of catharsis, a belief that the body heals by expressing what was suppressed, that you need to move the energy, let it out, push through. And that philosophy has a name, a history, a lineage, a set of assumptions about what trauma is and what the body needs to heal. And for this person's particular nervous system in that particular moment, that philosophy was not what was needed. That doesn't make it wrong universally, but it doesn't change the fact that it wasn't right for them. The approach that they were using was designed for a different kind of body carrying a different kind of history. And nobody in the room knew how to read the difference. I'll tell you another client story of someone I sat with who spent two years in somatic therapy where the approach was gentle, exploratory, and slow, and it helped until it didn't. In this space, the therapist was treating their resistance as sacred, which sounds beautiful. And sometimes resistance is so sacred and not to be pushed on, and we need to work so slow. But for this person, in that moment in their life, the nervous system did not need more reverence for the resistance. For this person, they needed someone who could help them take the next step forward. They didn't need more permission to stay where they were. They needed someone to go somewhere they couldn't go alone. The client in the situation thought they were stuck, believed that the therapy didn't work for them, but they weren't stuck. They were in the wrong lineage for what they needed. They needed a little bit more of maybe the catharsis philosophy implemented into the somatic work they were doing with the therapist at the time. Both of the client stories that I've shared fall within the realm of somatic practice. And yet they couldn't be more different. The reason for the difference comes down to lineage. And that word, lineage, is a word that I'm going to use a lot today because it matters. Because what I want you to understand, what I wish someone had told me years ago, is that somatics is not one thing. It's not a single approach with a single theory of what's wrong with you and a single method for making it quote unquote right. It's a field. Somatics is an academic discipline with doctoral programs, peer-reviewed journals, credentialing bodies, and over a century of contested intellectual history. And within that field, there are people who disagree with each other, sometimes profoundly, sometimes quite furiously too. And they are disagreeing about what the body is, what has injured it, and what it needs to actually heal. And those disagreements, I want you to know, are not strictly or purely academic. They live in the world of somatics right now. They are alive in whether your practitioner asks you to breathe harder or slower, whether they press into your resistance or bow in deep reference to it. They're present in whether your symptom is treated as something to move through or something to listen to. Whether you leave the room feeling settled or cracked open all has to do with the lineage of your practitioner. The founders of this field are not ancient history. They are in the room with you. And if you do not know who they are and what these people who created the academic discipline of somatics are arguing about, you have no way of knowing whether the person sitting across from you that's offering somatic practice is offering the thing that you need. So today I want to give you a map, not so you can become a somatics scholar. I know not everyone is interested in studying somatics as an academic and intellectual discipline in the way that I have been interested in it. And the reason why I did study it in that way, so that I could find the right quote-unquote symbatic practices for my body to support my healing. So I really learned this map so that I could learn and find the places where the language was appropriate and the practice was appropriate for what my body needed to heal and for me to come home to my body. And so I'm sharing all this with you so that the next time someone tells you to drop into your body, you have a framework to ask which body, which theory, which lineage. And ultimately the most important question here is this the right one for me. Soma comes from the Greek word for the living body as experienced from within, not the body as object, the body as the site of first person felt existence. That distinction is everything. It is the difference between looking at your body in a mirror and feeling your body from the inside. The difference between monitoring yourself and inhabiting yourself. If you've listened to my episode on the closed loop, you already know how much I care about that distinction. It's the entire foundation of embodiment. Thomas Hanna, a philosophy professor, gave the field its name in the mid-1970s. He published The Field of Somatics in 1975 in a journal he co-founded with Eleanor Criswell at the Nevada Institute. And he spent his career building a rigorous intellectual framework for what it means to inhabit a body that society has been trying to manage since birth. But Hannah did not invent what he named. He gathered something that had already been building for decades through people who disagreed with each other, sometimes quite violently, and he gave it a single word. Before any of the figures I'm about to walk you through, there was Elsa Gildler, M. F. Alexander, Genevieve Stibbons, and the 19th century physical culture movement, lineages that seeded much of what followed. And Hannah's act of naming has itself been critiqued. Lindsay Drury's scholarship argues that his framework fabricated a Western philosophical genealogy for the field while obscuring the non-Western body-mind practices it actually drew from. And that matters because the argument I'm about to make that tools were extracted from their political and philosophical context applies to the naming of the field itself, not only to what came after. Before I go any further, I want to be really direct about something. The lineages I'm walking you through today are Western ones. And that is a deliberate scope decision, not a claim about what somatics actually is or isn't. Body-mind knowledge, the understanding that the body carries memory, that breath moves what words cannot, that healing happens in community and relationship with the land is not a Western invention. It is ancient and it is indigenous and it exists in traditions far older than Reich or Hannah or anyone else I'm about to mention. First Nations, indigenous, and aboriginal communities across the world have held somatic knowledge for millennia in ceremonial practice, in healing lineages, in ways of moving through grief and through land that Western psychology is only recently finding language for and often borrowing from without credit or permission. When you hear a somatic practitioner talk about intergenerational trauma, or about the body as a site of ancestral memory, or about community as a nervous system regulator, those ideas have roots that do not begin in a European clinical office. I'm not covering those lineages today because they deserve to have their own time and be brought to you with a degree of depth that I can't offer in this forum today. But I want you to know they exist, that they matter, and that the Western academic history I'm about to give you is only a partial story. It is in no way the whole story or the only story. Even though they aren't the whole story or the full story, I want to walk you through them today because they're responsible for many of the clinical choices being made in your somatic therapy session or your somatic practice right now. The first person I would like to introduce you to is William Reich. And he matters because almost no one uses his ideas knows they're using them, including the person who may have recently asked you to breathe deeper and let it out. Reich was Freud's most brilliant and also his most dangerous student. A physician and psychoanalysis who, in the 1920s, did what Freud would never do. Reich touched his patients, but his real hearsay was not clinical. It was actually political. Reich argued that an authoritarian, sexually restrictive society lies at the roots of mental illness, that the body is not the site of a personal problem, but the record of a political one. His 1933 book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, argued that fascism itself was the product of sexual repression. The Nazis banned it, along with all literature on political psychology. He fled to Scandinavia, eventually arriving in New York in 1939. And then something happened that almost nobody in the wellness world knows about. In the decades that followed, both the fascist state and the American one found reasons to suppress him. The Nazis burned the broader category of work he belonged to, and in 1956, the US government, on FDA order, burned six tons of his publications, one of the only federally sanctioned book burnings in American history. He died in a federal penitentiary in 1957, serving a contempt of court case sentence. This was not a man doing wellness content at all. What Reich proposed was that chronic muscular tension, what he called character armor, and body armor formed in distinct segments throughout the body as a direct response to emotional suppression, and that this suppression is not accidental, it's structurally enforced by family, by culture, by political systems that need your aliveness contained. The jaw that never unclenches, the chest that never fully expands, the pelvis locked against its own aliveness. For Reich, these were not personal failures or individual nervous system events. They were the body's record of what society demanded be contained desire, anger, grief, aliveness. His method was confrontational. He worked segment by segment, pressing directly into what had calcified, using breath and physical interventions to break through the armor. Screaming, weeping, and shaking were not seen as side effects, they were in the mechanism. The point was catharsis. The point was to crack the armor open and let what was trapped inside finally move once again. And here's why this matters to you. If you've ever been in a session, breath work, body-based therapy, a movement class, Pilates even, where the instructor said to go bigger, breathe harder, let it out, shake it through. You were in Reich's lineage. Whether anyone in that room knew it or not, the belief that the body heals by expressing what was suppressed starts here. In a physician whose early work was grounded in Mark's analysis of bodily oppression, that theory was built for a specific understanding of what caused the body to close down. And it carries a specific set of risks. Because for a nervous system that is already fragmented, already chronically overwhelmed, already living in a state where the problem is too much activation rather than too little. That instruction, go bigger, can destabilize rather than resolve. Not because you did anything wrong, because the philosophy behind it was not built for your particular body in that particular moment. My client who left the breathwork session shaking and fragmented, she was in a Riking container. Nobody called that. Nobody called it that. Nobody mentioned Reich, but the method was his. The assumption that what is locked in the body needs to be pushed out was and is his. And for her nervous system, it was the wrong assumption. Alexander Loewen is the next person I'm going to spend some time exploring. And he was Reich's closest student. And he's the reason most of what you encounter in somatic wellness spaces looks the way it does today, even though you've probably never heard his name. Loewen kept the catharsis, he kept the character typology, the idea that different kinds of early environments produced different patterns of muscular holding in the body. And the Marxist politics fell away. Partly by choice, partly because mid-century American professional culture made explicit Marxism is untenable. Either way, the effect was the same. The Reikian approach became widely transmitted without its political origins. And Loan was how this happened. He built bioenergetic analysis. He established clear connections between physical posture and emotional states. He introduced the grounding exercises and stress positions still referenced across the field today. He proposed that all trauma is rooted in the musculature of the body, where restrictions become habitual over time, as they were always meant to prevent true feeling. Research in the International Body Psychotherapy Journal found significant positive outcomes for symptom reduction across anxiety, depression, and somatic disorders. This work does help people, and that's really important to say. But here's where all of this matters for you. The shake it out culture that permeates somatic coaching right now, the breathwork intensives that build toward cathartic peaks, the emphasis on expression over containment, the assumption that your body needs to move the stuck energy, all of that, and I mean all of it, directly descends from Loewen, usually without any attribution, usually without any awareness, and almost always without the clinical precision he himself brought to knowing when and for whom that approach was appropriate for. Because Loewen had a detailed theory of character, a sophisticated map of how different early environments produce different somatic structures, he never did the same thing with everybody. He had a clinical framework for meeting different structures differently. What circulates now is a technique without the map, the exhibit without the theory of why this person needs to exale and why this other person needs something else entirely. That precision is what gets lost in transmission. And the loss of that precision is what brings people into my office confused about why the somatic practice they tried made them feel worse, not better. And if you want to see what happens when that cathartic lineage loses all clinical precision entirely, you arrive at Arthur Janov. Janov was not a somatic practitioner. He was a psychologist, but his work, Primal Scream Therapy, sits squarely inside the cathartic tradition that descends from Reich, and it became enormously influential in the 1970s. His 1970 book, The Primal Scream, sold millions of copies. John Lennon even did it, and it entered the culture as an idea that felt intuitively true. You're in pain because you have repressed pain. And if you can access that original wound, feel it fully, scream it out of your body, you'll be healed and no longer be in pain. The theory was that neurosis is caused by accumulated pain. The theory was that neurosis is caused by accumulated pain of unmet childhood needs, that this pain is stored in the body and the nervous system, and that the cure is to re-experience it fully, to go all the way back to the original wound, the primal scream, and let the body do what it was never allowed to do at the time. Scream, sob, rage, collapse into the full weight of what happened. This is Reich's cathartic model taken to its most extreme conclusion and stripped of everything that made Reich's original work rigorous. Reich had a detailed theory of the body. He understood muscular segments. He had a map. Loen had a character typology. Danov had intensity. The therapy was a three-week intensive, sometimes involving sleep deprivation, isolation, and deliberate overwhelm, designed to break through defenses and produce what Shinov called the primal, the big moment, the full body reliving of the original wound. And here is why I'm telling you this: primal scream therapy has been largely discredited. There are no randomized control trials supporting it. The American Psychological Association has never endorsed it. Multiple clinicians and researchers have raised concerns about the potential for re-traumatization, destabilization, and the reinforcement of distress rather than the resolution of it by engaging in cathartic practices. But the idea of the primal scream did not die. The idea that what your body needs is to go all the way into the pain, scream it out, have the big cathartic moment that finally releases what's been stored, is alive and well in the wellness world. Recently, I came across a primal scream group. Group for women here in London. And my mind was totally boggled, absolutely boggled, mostly knowing the history that I know right now. And also because I just felt this deep sadness that this history isn't known. And therefore, these practices that have been shown to be re-traumatizing and destabilizing are being marketed as fun wellness things to do in pastel colors. It was all very confusing. And I understand from a capitalist perspective how this can happen and put no fault on the people who are putting it out there in the world. But there does become a point that if we are going to offer things that have somatic roots and origins, that we learn the lineages that they're from. So we understand both the benefits but also the harms, there is wisdom in history. Not knowing this history is why the primal scream or cathartic work lives in breathwork intensives where people are encouraged to push past their limits. It's also in workshops where emotional catharsis is treated as evidence that something is working. And it's really present in somatic spaces where the biggest reaction in the room is treated as the deepest healing. It is the logical endpoint of a lineage that started with a specific clinical theory and through decades of decontextualization became a vibe. The vibe is you need to let it out, you need to feel it fully. The bigger the release, the deeper the healing. And for some nervous systems in some moments, a degree of emotional expression is exactly what is needed. I hope that you don't hear me dismissing catharsis entirely. I'm saying that catharsis without clinical precision, without knowing history, without a map of who this person is, what their nervous system can hold, what what their history has been, and what kind of support they need on the other side is not therapeutic healing or wellness. It's a performance of healing and wellness that can leave people in greater states of distress and unease than before they engaged in the practice. If you've ever been in a space where the instruction was to go deeper, scream louder, feel more, and you felt nothing and you left feeling gutted rather than relieved, hollow rather than healed, you were probably on the far edge of this lineage. And your nervous system was telling you something that the facilitator couldn't hear or didn't know to listen for. Now that I've given you some background, I want to take you somewhere maybe a little bit different. Because if you're listening to this and thinking, I've tried the cathartic stuff and it didn't help me. I've tried the expressive process and I left feeling more dysregulated, not less. I need you to know there's an entire somatic tradition that does not ask you to release anything, that does not ask you to express anything, that doesn't even use the word trauma at all. I'm gonna start by talking about Feldenkrais, who was a physicist, a judo black belt, an engineer. I mean, what a combination. He experienced a knee and injury and refused surgery and therefore was unable to use his knee for the rest of his life. Instead, he reverse engineered his own nervous system until he could walk again. And what emerged was not a therapy at all. It was an educational methodology grounded in neuroplasticity decades before neuroscience had language to describe it. The principles Feldenkrais taught were radical for their time, and they're still pretty radical today. He taught that the nervous system changes most readily when intention is present and movement is slow, that variation, not repetition, produces learning, that even the smallest movement in one part of the body involves the whole, and that you do not need to go through anything. You only need to notice what's already there. For Faldenkrais, the body is not a wounded soldier carrying the armor of oppression. It's a learning system that has been poorly organized, often through entirely benign processes of habit formation that became over time limiting. There is no catharsis in Feldenkrais, no political theory of suppression, no spiritual framework, no instruction to go bigger or breathe harder or let it all out. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses in peer-reviewed medical journals have found significant positive effects for balance, pain reduction, and functional improvement through the Feldenkrais method. A 2024 systematic review found emerging evidence for his potential in psychiatric care, noting that enhanced body awareness and introsphood may support emotional regulation and psychological well-being. The evidence base is real and it's growing every day. This matters to you because it means there's an entire somatic tradition that asks you to notice slowly with curiosity what is already there and trust that the nervous system will reorganize itself when given the conditions for learning rather than the conditions for catharsis. If you found body-based approaches overwhelming, if intensity has not helped you, if you've tried the expressive work and left feeling more fragmented, Feldenkrais is not a softer version of the same thing. It's a fundamentally different theory of what your body needs. And that difference exists because Feldenkrais started from a fundamentally different understanding of what went wrong in the first place. Not oppression, not suppression, not trauma. Disorganized learning. And the solution to disorganized learning is not catharsis from this perspective. It's attention. Next, I want to speak about someone who has a very special place in my heart, and that is Ron Kurtz, who's the founder of Hakomi. Hakomi is actually my psychotherapy home. It's the orientation that I completed my master's accounseling psychology. At the end, you have to write an exam. I wrote the exam from the perspective of Hakomi. And so I need to acknowledge I have a lot of bias towards Ron and his work because I've been as fitted so deeply from this approach and it aligns with my value system so well. It's a great honor to spend some time talking about Ron Kurtz with you today. So Ron Kurtz arrived at the body through a completely different door than anyone we've spoken about so far. And he's the founder of Hakomi, which carries yet another set of implications for what you might be looking for and whether you're finding it. Kurtz was a yoga practitioner since about 1959, and he was steeped in Buddhism and Taoism, but he built Hakomi on explicitly spiritual foundations that are not metaphorical. Its five core principles are mindfulness, nonviolence, organicity, unity, and mind-body holism and loving presence. The quality of attention the therapist brings is described not as a clinical stance, but a spiritual one. In Hakomi, defenses are not obstacles to dismantle. They are the client's best available strategies for managing emotional experience, and they are approached with reverence rather than force. The body is seen as a window into the unconscious core material, held with the care one brings to something sacred. I want you to hear what this means in practice because it's the direct philosophical inversion of Reich. Where Reich cornered the armor, Kurtz bowed to it. Where Reich pressed through, Kurtz waited. Where Reich said your resistance is the enemy, Kurtz said your resistance is wise. Again, I really want to make it quite clear that I personally did not have a hierarchy of which approach is better or not better. I have been someone who has been fortunate enough to experience and to have been met at different times in my life from different somatic practices that met me where I was at. There was a time in my life where there was so much resistance that Reich's like complete kind of force through, or maybe even more of that primal scream, forcing through was what I needed. Was it the only thing that I would ever need? Absolutely not. So I think it's so important when we think about somatic practice to also have that awareness. When we think about somatic practice or when we want to engage in a somatic practice, to start in that moment and to ask, how does my body feel? Before we go find a practitioner, before we go find a practice, before we go look up a therapist, like what do I feel in my body? Do I feel nothing? Do I feel everything? Even that question is such an important one to have because it will help you understand which lineage to find yourself in so that you receive the healing that you're so worthy of. While we're on this topic of discerning what is the best one for you, I want to name that if you've ever been in a somatic container where you felt pushed, there's also a lineage that holds something else entirely. So we've gone through the lineages that see resistance as something to push through and seeing resistance as something to soften and be reverent to. And then there's another lineage that does not come for politics or biology or education or mindfulness. It comes from the unconscious, from the deep psyche, from the archetypal. Marion Woodman was a Youngan analyst, and she may be the most important figure in somatic work that nobody in the somatic wellness world ever mentions. Woodman trained at the C.G. Young Institute in Zurich and spent decades working at the intersection of the body and the unconscious, particularly in women. Her work was rooted in Young's understanding that the psyche speaks in images and symbols in the language of dreams and myth. What Woodman did was extend that understanding into the body. She argued that the body is not just carrying repressed emotion or incomplete survival responses. The body is carrying the soul's unlived life, the images that never got expressed, the feminine that was never allowed to take up space, the parts of the self that were exiled not just by trauma, but by the cultured refusal to make room for what those parts represented. This is a very different claim from anything we've talked about so far. Reich said the body holds political suppression. Levine said it holds unfinished survival responses. Feldenkrais said it holds disorganized learning. Woodman said it holds the unconscious itself, that the body is a vessel for archetypal material, for the deep psychic patterns that shape how we become who we are and who we fail to become to. Her work with women was extraordinary and specific and has deeply influenced all of my writing today, but also my understanding of the body, of the unconscious embodiment. My understanding of embodiment is so woven into women, I couldn't even tell you all the ways it's influenced me. And this is because she wrote extensively about eating disorders, addiction, and the ways women's bodies become the battleground for a culture that cannot tolerate the full force of the feminine. In the books like The Owl was a Baker's Daughter, Addiction to Perfection, which I highly, highly recommend, and The Pregnant Virgin, she traced how women's symptoms, the restricting, the binging, the compulsive perfectionism, the numbness are not pathologies. They are the body's attempt to hold what the psyche cannot yet integrate, the unlived life pressing against the walls of a body that was never given permission to be fully itself. Woodman developed what she called body-soul rhythms, a practice that brought together dream work, movement, voice, and breath in a container that was explicitly about the relationship between body and soul, not body and brain, not body and nervous system, body and soul. The approach trusts that the body has its own symbolic intelligence, that the way you hold your shoulders or clench your jaw or cannot take a full breath is not just muscular. It's imaginal. It's the psyche speaking through flesh. If you've ever felt your body is trying to tell you something that it's not just about safety or survival or habit, something deeper, something that feels mythic or ancient or connected to parts of yourself, you've never been allowed to live. Woodman's work speaks to that. It says your body is not just keeping the score, it's keeping the story, the whole story, including the chapters you were never given permission to write. And its absence matters. The wellness world has flattened somatics into nervous system language. Everything is regulation and dysregulation, activating and settling, sympathetic and parasympathetic. And that language is useful. I use it every day in my clinical work, but it's not the only language the body speaks. Some of what lives in the body is not a trauma response. It's not an unfinished survival cycle. It's not a habit that needs reorganizing. It's a calling, a grief, a rage that belongs not just to your personal history, but to something larger. The body of a woman who spent her life making herself smaller is not dysregulated. She is also in Woodman's framework carrying an unlived feminine that is pressing to be born. And you cannot regulate your way into that. You have to meet it with the imagination, with symbol, with the willingness to ask your body not just what happened to you, but what is trying to happen through you. That is what we would understand to be a Youngian perspective on somatics. And its absence from the mainstream conversation is part of what makes the conversation so thin. Peter Levine, who probably most of you have heard about, or maybe is the person who led you to the realm of somatics, arrived at the body through biology. And what he built is perhaps the most important lineage to understand if you're trying to make sense of why somatic work has helped you and some has not. Levine came to this through observation, not theory. In the 1970s, he noticed something that would reorganize trauma treatment. Animals in the wild, despite regularly facing life-threatening situations, rarely develop trauma symptoms. They shake, they discharge, they return to grazing, they do not develop PTSD. What he proposed was that human trauma is not a disorder, it's an incompletion, a survival response that was mobilized and never allowed to finish, the fight that was not fought, the flight that was not fled, the energy that was summoned by the nervous system to save your life, and then got trapped when the threat ended before the response could. Somatic experiencing is the method he built from this. It's not explicitly cathartic. I need you to hear that. It's not cathartic. Rather than forcing the armor open, which Lamine argued could re-traumatize, somatic experiences uses what he called pendulation, moving between sensation and resource between activation and settling, between the edge of the difficult thing and the ground of something safe, until the nervous system finds enough safety to complete what it started. The discharge that results, trembling heat, a spontaneous deep breath, tears that seem to come from nowhere, is not emotional expression. It's biological completion. The nervous system finally finishing what it couldn't finish at the time, not because someone pushed it to, because it was finally safe enough. The evidence base is promising, but it's not yet settled. The framework of somatic experiencing is ethological and neurobiological. There's no Buddhism in somatic experiencing, no politics, no spirituality, no archetypal imagination. Body is an animal nervous system that needs, above all, to feel safe enough to finish what it started. And this is why the instruction in SE is not to go bigger but to go slower. And why that instruction is not interchangeable with the Reikkian one or the Youngian one or the Feldenkrais one. They are based on different theories of what is happening in your body and what it requires. Using the wrong one is not a personal failure. It's a mismatch between a method and the specific body history and nervous system that it's being applied to. Now I want to say something plainly, because I think you need to hear it, and I think no one is saying it clearly enough. These are not variations on a theme. They are not different styles of the same healing. They are competing theories of what your body is, what injured it, and what it needs to heal. Reich said your anxiety is political, the body's record of what an authoritarian system demanded you suppress. Loewen said it's frozen energy that needs to be moved and expressed. Janov said it's repressed primal pain that needs to be screened out of the body. Feldenkrais said it's a learning problem, a nervous system that needs better organization. Kurtz said it's a soul language and must be met with reverence. Woodman said it's an unlived life of the deep psyche pressing against a body that was never given permission to be fully itself. Levine said it's an animal's unfinished survival response and needs safety more than anything else. Those are obviously simplified versions of what they said, but nonetheless, you get the point. These positions are not complementary in the moment of clinical decision making. They are competing. The practitioner who holds a cathartic model and the practitioner trained in somatic experiencing are not doing the same thing with a different name. The analyst working with archetypal material and the Feldenkrais practitioner working with movement education are not doing the same thing with a different name. They are all operating from fundamentally different assumptions about human physiology, psyche, trauma, and what change actually requires of you. And the practitioner you're sitting across from may not know which lineage they're working in. That is not an insult to them. It is a failure of how this field is currently being transmitted. The techniques have traveled without the theory. The tools have been circulated without the map. And the person facilitating your breath work class may have learned a set of exercises from someone who learned them from someone who learned them from a training that descends from Lohan, who descended from Reich, who was writing about fascism and the body as a site of political oppression. And none of that intellectual history made it through the train of transmission. What did make it through was the instruction, though. Without the theory of when that instruction is appropriate, for whom and why. Which means that if you've tried somatic practice and it didn't help or you left worse, the question worth asking is not whether you were too broken for body-based approaches. It's whether you were in the right lineage for your nervous system. Whether the container you were in understood your symptom as the expression of something intelligent or a malfunction requiring connection. These are the questions the wellness market is asking on your behalf. These are not the questions the wellness market is asking on your behalf, but they are questions you now have the framework to ask yourself. And the lineage question goes even deeper than clinical safety. It goes to the most fundamental question in this field. Is your symptom something wrong with you or something intelligent in you? Because the framework your practitioner holds determines the answer. A cathartic model treats your body holding an obstacle. A primal model treats it as a repressed pain to be excavated. A Feldenkrais model treats it as habit. A Hakomi model treats it as protection. A Younging model treats it as a psyche symbolic speech. A somatic experiencing model treats it as an incomplete survival response. Each of these reads your body differently. Each arrives at a different conclusion about what you need, and you are the one sitting in the room, trusting the person across from you has the right map for you. That what I have named is not a small difference. It's a difference between a model that pathologizes your response and one that reads it as information. Neither one is better than the other. They're just different, and at different times for different people, can be equally helpful. There's a person's name that needs to be added into this conversation. And this is Rezma, who wrote My Grandmother's Hands. I want to super highlight their work because they forced the structural argument to come back into the contemporary somatic conversation. They argued that individual decontextualized trauma can start to look like personality in a family like family traits and in a people like culture. They were not inventing a new idea. They were restoring Reich's foundational argument through the lens of racialized trauma, making visible a thread that the professionalization and commodification, and I would argue the capitalist motives behind the professionalization and commodification of the field had found inconvenient to name. And that brings me to the part that I think matters most, the part underneath all of it. What the wellness industry did was extract tools from the argument and then sold them to you without them. The people who built this field were not doing content, they were not selling courses. They were writing about fascism and sexual liberation and racialized trauma, and the body is the primary site of political oppression. They were arguing that your individual symptoms are not individual, that the reasons you can't breathe fully are. Unclench your jaw or feel your palmus is not because something went wrong in your personal development. It's because the culture you were raised in required specific parts of your aliveness to be shut down and your body complied and your compliance was not optional. Marion Woodman was arguing that the feminine itself had been exiled from the body, that the symptoms women carry are the soul's protest against a culture that has no room for the full force of what women are. That is not a wellness claim. That is a depth psychological and political claim. That is analysis, and it has been stripped from the tools that were built to serve it. Reich died in a federal penitentiary. His books were burned. Woodman spent her career insisting that the body is a vessel for the soul and that women's symptoms are sacred intelligence, not pathology. The field they help build is now being sold as Instagram content by practitioners who have never read character analysis or the pregnant virgin and maybe have never even been told that these books exist. This, I would argue, is not incidental. This is what depoliticalization looks like. This is what desouling looks like, and what it costs is the understanding that explains why you need the tools in the first place. Here is what I hope you take from our time together today. The next time someone tells you to drop into your body, you know that the instruction lives in an argument. An argument about what your body is and what it's been through and what it needs. You can ask which tradition they're working from. You can ask what their theory of change is, you can ask whether the approach is cathartic or titrated. You can ask whether your resistance will be met with force or curiosity. You can ask whether the space has room for your body's intelligence, not just its desregulation, but its imagination, its symbolic life, its knowing. And if you've been doing somatic practice and it's not been working, if you've been breathing and shaking and releasing and you still feel untouched or worse, more destabilized, I want you to consider the possibility that you are not the problem, that your body is not too broken, too resistant, too defended, that maybe just maybe you were handed the wrong tool, not because anyone meant to harm you, because the field that produced that tool has been so thoroughly decontextualized that the people offering it no longer know who the tools are built for. Your body is intelligent. It has always been intelligent. The question is not whether your body knows what it needs. The question is whether the person sitting across from you has the training, the lineage, and the map to hear what your body is saying. I keep coming back in my mind to something one of my clients has said to me. She's been doing somatic work with someone else for over a year. And she came to her first session with me. And I asked her to tell me about what she's been doing in therapy, what's been going on, what does her somatic practice is, she look like. And she described the practices, the breath work, the body scan, the exercise. And then she said something, I still haven't been able to feel my body. And what I wanted to tell her, what I did tell her eventually, gently over time, when we built up a relationship, was that the reason she could not feel her body was not a failure of effort or something being wrong with her. It was a mismatch of method. Her nervous system needed slowness, not catharsis, curiosity, not intensity, permission to notice without being asked to change what she found. And the approach she had been in was asking her to do the opposite of what her body was asking for. So her body did what any intelligent system would do when it's asked to do the wrong thing, when it's asked to do something that's not so helpful, is stop cooperating. That's not dysfunction, that's wisdom. In a world that's so overwhelming and consuming with so much stimulus, I deeply understand the desire to go into experiences where you just get to shake it all out and screen it all out and force yourself through things because there's so much resistance that you're experiencing every day because the world is overwhelming and the body's trying to cocoon and protect itself. I understand the draw to just follow that momentum into more catharsis, more release, more overwhelm, because there can even become quite a disassociative quality to that. But I would invite you, in our present moment environment and cultural context and everything going on in the globe right now, do you actually need to force your body any more than you already are? Then your body is already being forced by the systems around it to produce, survive, and create. Or does your body need that resistance honored? And that's why if you picked up any of a subtle leaning towards me, being closer to the maybe quote unquote softer or gentler or approaches that see resistance as something to have reverence for, it's because of the environmental context that we're in right now. And when we look at the environment, we're forced to go past the wisdom of our body so often. We're pushed past our resistance so often on a daily basis. And that's why I'm I'm a bit hesitant as to how much more resistance our systems need in our specific cultural and political climate right now. All this to say, I really want you to know your body is not a problem to be solved. It's not a trend to participate in. It's not a nervous system to be regulated into compliance. Your resistance isn't always something to be forced through. Your body is holding a record of what you survived, of what you adapted to, of what you're presently adapted to, of what you've had to hold, of what has hurt, of what you've loved, and what you've lost. And I also want you to think of maybe Woodman, because I think she understood it better than anyone. Your body is a vessel for everything you have not been allowed to become. The tradition that meets your body best is the one that reads all of that with precision and the respect it deserves. Thank you for being here. Thank you for continuing to be on this process of returning to your body and for letting me be a part of that process with you. If today's episode resonated with you, I would love for you to check out Embody, my course for embodied living. You can find out more at embodymethod.com. In the course, we have a little bit of everything. I honor all of the different somatic lineages and have practices that come from each of them. So there's a little bit of everything in there for you to try and explore. If you're interested to read more of my work, you can go to Substack. And this is where I write more about the things I'm still trying to figure out, paid or free. I would love to have you there. It's alijolie.substack.com. I will also be hosting a retreat in Costa Rica this November, November 21st to the 28th. It is a retreat where we will spend seven days coming home to the body. Again, we will be informed by a lot of the things that I shared with you today. We will be following the themes that are presented in the In Body course. Lastly, if this episode meant something to you, please share it with someone whose body might need it or leave a review. It really does help people more find us. I hope to be a part of your process of coming home to your body again. Thanks for being here. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your various bodies.