NOTE: Hey! It’s my birthday! I’m 30 years old, which is wild because I thought the pandemic was at least 20 years long.
This post is a little different because a couple of people asked me to summarize somatics briefly. I failed at the brief part, but I hope it’s helpful.
It’s also something I wrote because the first COMPLETE episode of Working 2050 is out now, with sound design by Katie In.
Katie In is a phenomenal musician, teacher, trainer, artist, and my friend. I am thrilled that she is working on Working 2050, and excited to work on the next six episodes with her. Her sound design gave me chills!
Anyway — somatics.
A large part of Working 2050, at least the fictional 2050 part, is about exploring how healing collective trauma and pain could make the world look in 30 years.
Even if the next 30 years are… really, really, hard.
One event in the show’s speculative history is The Horrors, an undefined amount of time when climate change, pandemics, and capitalism made for a lot of suffering and death around the world distributed inequitably.
In my mind, The Horrors could be charted in a lot of different ways: from 2020–2045, from 2010 to 2049, from 1492 all the way to 2050 and beyond.
As much better science fiction writers* than I have said, dystopia and utopia are way more about who you are then what year it is.
Somatics and Science Fiction
What I find interesting is imagining a future where it is common for people to practicing healing and resilience, no matter what is happening.
People like adrienne maree brown, a science-fiction writer and somatics fan, as well as many other organizers and activists, are incorporating healing and trauma work into their theory of change.
This is partially because trauma healing is wild — in terms of practice, science, and knowledge, and practices that are gaining popular traction are kind of science fiction-y on their own. All of these tools and practices are related to the body. Which, if you’re hip, you may know keeps the score.
Why I Care About Somatics
If we’re gonna start with science fiction, I should say that for years, I walked around astral projecting without noticing.
When I say astral projecting, I mean I was living outside of my body. It was hard for me to tell what I was feeling both physically and emotionally.
It made me not fun to be around and wildly anxious even when I didn’t realize it.
In retrospect, they were clues that this was related to my body: I‘ve never been good at describing what I am feeling, though I love to intellectualize about potential feelings other people might have ad nauseum. I am also a trans man with a variety of weird stomach, mental health, and addiction issues.
At work, I found it hard to be patient with other people, or to move my projects forward without getting suddenly inexplicably emotional. A lot of the people I worked with were in a similar boat: very focused on tasks, very focused on our next stop, not necessarily super aware of how we felt in the day today. I think many people would say this is normal.
They certainly weren’t unusual — but they were all affecting how I lived my life and how I wanted to be.
When I first looked up somatics, my immediate goal was to better understand and make fun of adrienne maree brown’s book emergent strategy. It didn’t happen overnight, but what I learned through this practice was way more valuable than emergent strategy jokes.
Somatics help me figure out when I am being my best self and when I am doing things that I’m not proud of. They help me notice my patterns of fragility, when and why I treat people badly, and be more comfortable as myself.
I am still absolutely astral projecting and keeping up all of my bad habits some days. Still, it has been astonishing to me how so many of the problems I was trying to solve in social justice work and my own life make more sense, feel easier to deal with, and make me more aware of my own self defeating bullshit when I practice somatic exercises.
How do you learn more about somatics?
The reason I wanted to write this is because for me, trying to learn about somatics over the last year has been difficult. For every useful tool I found, I read 4 IG posts where people are talking about the vagus nerve then inviting you to be part of their exclusive ecourse for $370.
Some of the tools I now use on a daily basis at first made me feel me the way I felt about snapping instead of clapping at social justice open mics — with background and context, I appreciate it. But the first time I saw it I was VERY DISTRACTED by its connotations, and used the people I didn’t like who were doing it as an excuse to not engage further.
So while you could just go + search #somatics on IG, I don’t recommend this!
Part of this is political: ecofascism, QAnon, TERFs, and just general white Buddhist/appropriation shit is all over somatics + adjacent to the #Wellness world. There’s also a ton of misinformation + bad faith money-making out there.
But maybe just as importantly, I find most somatics’ social media, online tools, marketing (which I think can all be tools for political education) really hard to understand without accompanying practice. So that’s what I’m going to share today.
Note: I am NOT a therapist, yoga instructor, community healer, breath worker, et al. I took one anatomy class in high school and dropped it before the first test. My only credential is that I read a LOT of books in order to avoid having to talk to anyone about my problems in real life.
Your mileage may vary with any of these practices, and if any of this feels unsafe for you, take a break!
OK, for real, what are somatics?
Somatics literally just means: “the body.” More specifically, it is a way of thinking about the body as a living system with information that can help us better understand our world, connect with others, and you know, keep us alive.
If you dig a little deeper there is a whole field called “embodiment” that encompasses a LOT — martial arts, meditation, yoga, Qi Gong, facilitation, life coaching, Jungian shadow work, regular therapy. For people doing social justice work, organizing, activism, etc, somatics is often discussed as part of addressing societal healing (from all of our fucked up systems) or in interpersonal work.
In a lot of ways, somatics is a buzzword, but it’s also a umbrella term. It unifies a lot of practices that have existed for millennia that are only fairly recently in conversation with each other.
**Trauma trauma trauma tra-meleonnnn
Somatics and embodiment have crept into broader discourse because of their relationship to trauma.
Trauma! Everybody has it!
More importantly, right now in the zeitgeist, everybody likes to talk about it!
Trauma doesn’t necessarily indicate a specific mode of practice, but there are some key core concepts that unify most approaches to trauma + embodiment + somatics right now. If you want, you can skip this part and watch Steven Universe: The Future to get the basic ideas. (But you’ll probably cry a lot more).
Trauma is a nervous system response.
Trauma is technically defined as a nervous system reaction. As Tayla Shanaye writes in Nourishing the Nervous System, it is a physiological response to a stressful situation.
A very quick mediocre paraphrase of her book:
For those focused on treating trauma, particularly practitioners using Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing model, nervous system activation is relevant because you can be “stuck” in a reaction from an experience that you, or even your parents or grandparents had, that was not resolved. When we talk about fight, flight, freeze, fawn reactions — these are all different ways of describing hyper or hypoarousal of the ANS, which… VERY loosely defined, is in our lizard brain, and controls our automatic reflex responses.
So — When you have a “stuck” or incomplete moment of activation, it can live on in your body, or in the body of your children and grandchildren.
Science fiction, right?
NOT having Trauma is… “unlikely.”
People love to make jokes about trauma. I love to make jokes about trauma!
Cordelia Chase in the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is like, “what’s your childhood trauma?” and it’s a really sick burn (maybe Joss Whedon’s last good joke). The idea behind that joke, and a lot of jokes, is that it is rare.
A lot of media depictions of trauma tend to perpetuate that, focusing on PTSD from a specific catastrophic event as it might apply to law enforcement, soldiers, or people who have survived war or genocide.
It is also because conversations about trauma are uncomfortable, Because we are uncomfortable with trauma, we don’t like to talk about it, and often shame ourselves and people around us so that we don’t have to talk about it. That further perpetuates the idea that trauma is rare.
But one thing about all of the research and practice happening right now is that… It’s probably more rare to not be impacted by trauma, which again, is unresolved nervous system activation. It’s extremely common.
HEALING trauma + dealing with it requires the body.
When we talk about somatics, whether or not we are talking about trauma, we are talking about increasing our ability to access our window of tolerance and build resilience. It is focusing on building our window of tolerance, no matter what happens, instead of being in a hyper or hypo state of activation where it is way harder to relate to others, listen, or do anything but react, our survival mode.
Where Should I Start?
If you’re interested in this and learn best through reading, I think the first and best book to start with is My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem — this is what my therapist (who practices somatic experiencing) recommended to me in 2015, a recommendation I ignored until literally six months ago. I wish I hadn’t!
Menakem is not an abolitionist + he writes extensively abt “police bodies” which can be rough, but his summary of trauma, resilence, and the extremely actionable exercises are unparalleled. The first chapter, a short overview of policing and white supremacy, is so good + based in action that I know some high school teachers use it for teaching history. But again, he also writes abt race in a kind of implicit black/white binary that is not great.
If you’re more interested in somatics re: collective and movement healing, Prentiss Hemphill, a somatics teacher, has a podcast + practice that focuses on black healing + trauma that has great guests + again, makes all of this a little less abstract.
If you’re like, I trust that this stuff works and I want to dive into practicing it, check out “Nourishing the Nervous System,” by Tayla Shanaye (@amesinthehouse). She writes a little bit about nervous system regulation, but primarily focuses on practice, and I found her book to be one of the better ways for me to start trying somatics as a regular habit.
Then there are the big white dudes + dudettes re: trauma/embodiment (Peter Levine, Bessel Van Der Volk, Tara Brach, Mark Walsh) — they all have podcasts, talks, whatever. Some of them I enjoy, esp bc their brand means they’re very focused on consistent, iterative personal practice. Mark Walsh specifically has a podcast (and a conference) I enjoy for the same reason I like Brene Brown — I can imagine people who would NEVER engage w/ somatics otherwise listening to him.
He is also irreverent about the field in a way I find refreshing — as he says, “I really don’t give a damn if you can touch your toes, as long as you’re learning to stop dissociating.”
He also did an episode about BDSM + nervous system activation I did not hate! So right on, Mark Walsh. Your mileage, as always, may vary.
Intergenerational Trauma, Societal Trauma, + More
Look — I thought I had engaged with all of this somatics + trauma overview as deeply as I could. Then I started reading more in depth about intergenerational trauma (just in time for Halloween).
I don’t think I am equipped to talk about this in depth because my lit review has just started. Again, My Grandmother’s Hands is a good overview of this, particularly in explaining how white fragility, which is also kind of a buzzword, is also a collective lack of regulation and resilience among white people when it comes to race that needs to be addressed. Or in short: white people, grow up.
I’m also reading ‘It Didn’t Start With You,” which is pretty helpful too. It’s… haunting, literally. To crib from Katie In who is reading Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, it feels like ghost sociology.
I still have a lot to learn and process about this but it’s big, it’s real, and I find myself with less of a window of tolerance around it than I expected.
—
How Do I Practice?
So far, this has all been background.
But Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds style — “You know how you get to Carnegie Hall, don’t you?”
The coolest thing about somatics is that it is all about actionable, habitual practice.
You don’t have to read a bunch of books or do a Jungian Shadow Work Retreat or cry in a sauna or buy a foam roller.
You can just practice being in your body.
“Just” is a bit of a misnomer here.
One reason why #somatics can sound strange and unparsable is that it uses a LOT of esoteric words to describe something everyone KNOWS they should do, but can FEEL impossible.
Feel your feelings. Trust your gut. Notice your body.
No thank you!
I don’t ever want to do any of those things in practice, no matter how I feel about them in theory. Even with a lot of resources, support, power and years of therapy to help me to do it.
It reminds me of that Maria Bamford joke where she describes why “do what you love” as such dumb advice. “I didn’t want to do this show, tonight.” she says.
We’re all dissociating for a reason, man. Our personal trauma, our current political moment, addiction, the day to day bullshit of ableism, sizeism, capitalism, white supremacy — and not just our day to day, but how it shows up in the world’s day to day and in the day to day of our ancestors.
Who the hell wants to feel that in their body?!
No one WANTS to do somatics, probably, who needs to.
But, if you’ve seen Midsommar, you know if you don’t feel your feelings, you could end up in a building on fire trapped in a bear suit. Or, more eloquently, as Resmaa Menakem puts it “ if you want to transform the world, we must tolerate the discomfort of transformation… by settling our bodies.”
Somatics are exercises to help make feeling your feelings and your body more bearable.
—
AAI — Awareness, Acceptance, Intention
So, here’s a practice to try — (safely, + with as much self compassion as you can muster.)
It’s from dudely Mark Walsh’s book, and its called AAI, a mnemonic.
You can take as much or as little time as you need with it.
If it helps, set a timer (even better, a timer not on your phone) for as much time as you feel comfortable trying it for.
When I tried it out while writing this, I set mine for 5 minutes.
AAI stands for awareness, acceptance, intention. Here’s what you do.
Awareness- what’s happening in your body?
This is a question that sounds simple, but it might feel completely impossible (if this feels very easy to you, Ernestina Perez and any other Tauruses, then just keep reading).
Start by picking a spot in your body that you can feel. maybe it’s your feet, or your hands, or something else. Maybe there is a specific feeling, like hungry or annoyed or bored that you can identify. maybe it’s something that feels really painful, difficult, or hard. That is OK: you don’t have to do anything with that beyond notice it, and it’s OK to move away from it if that’s what you’re noticing.
Maybe, and this happens a lot, you can’t identify anything. If you’re struggling, just focus on your hands or your feet. What do you feel there? notice it, whatever it is.
Spend as much time on this as feels good to you.
Acceptance — This part sucks.
Especially if you are self-critical, perfectionistic, very very busy, avoiding something, chronically ill, or you know… a human being living through a pandemic.
Again, it can sound easy, but it’s hard. whatever you notice… accept it.
Don’t feel anything? OK, that’s fine.
Feel something really unpleasant? OK, that’s fine.
Feeling annoyed that H is making you do this exercise in a stupid email newsletter? That is also fine.
Don’t try to change it just…
Sit with it as long as you can.
Intention- Think about how you want to be.
Simple but impossible.
Imagine what it would feel like in your body to be a specific emotion: to feel brave if you’re anxious, or energized if you’re tired.
That can be complicated if you don’t necessarily know what that feels like in your body, so I think it’s also good to just… Take whatever you just accepted, and think about how you want it to be.
Can’t feel your hands?
What if your hands felt warm?
Your feet can’t stop tapping?
What if your feet felt relaxed?
You don’t need to force yourself to feel brave or your feet to feel relaxed.
That isn’t the point.
It’s just taking the time to imagine your intention. And to imagine what it would feel like to change what you feel.
Reflect
OK! How was that?
No matter what, I think this is an exercise that gets better with practice.
It doesn’t have to take longer than a few seconds, but every time you do it, you get more information about what’s happening with you.
Over time, you can start to see patterns in your sensations, experiences, reactions.
When Should I Do This?
AAI is good to do when you’re anxious about something, not sure why you feel off, or even when you’re just tired and grumpy and have to sit through another Zoom call before you can watch Avatar the Last Airbender.
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A Few More Caveats:
I am again, not a therapist, somatics expert, meditation teacher, or even particularly well-versed in this field. I’ve tried to cite the people I have learned from as much as possible here, especially BIPOC practitioners.
Embodiment is a big umbrella, and that umbrella has a lot of Western White yoga industry influence + white people as Inventors and Discoverers of The Body, especially as you move out of somatics in social justice towards personal practice.
Shockingly: white people did not discover the body, and the HEAL YOURSELF brand is influenced by the general weirdness capitalism creates around everything good.
Kay Barrett has written some great stuff about this here.
That said, this is a practice that has helped me + many others a lot.
Finally. if you’re like “whatever H, I’m gonna google this on my own,” I recommend looking up the Strozzi Institute, Rooted (for abolitionist somatics), Building Belonging, and for practitioners to work with, Somatic Experiencing.
I have a bias towards skepticism, so I’ve also tried to cite people who have been doing this for a long time and take access seriously (most of the people I’ve shared here have tools and resources that are free and “safe “to practice solo).
—
So yeah, that’s somatics!
I know it’s big, but it’s really exciting. It’s something that makes me feel more hopeful about the world and collective healing then anything else I’ve engaged with in a long time.
Imagining what the world could look like if this became a standard practice, something we did like washing our hands or brushing our teeth.
It could change a lot, and make a more hopeful future possible — that’s part of why it’s such a big theme in Working 2050.
I might do a couple more posts like this, specifically focused on other actionable tools and exercises like grounding, different breathing, and some on martial arts. Either way, I hope this is helpful.
Let me know what you think, especially if there are things that you think I’ve misrepresented, or things you wanna know more about.
- H
Other Notes:
*ha ha you guys NK Jemisen won a MacArthur it rules
**This is not my joke, I saw it on Twitter
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If you’re like wait I want to read the sci fi! Check out Working 2050 (audio here) or the transcript of the first episode here.
