“The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today — at least in the industrialized world — are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways.”
― Gabor Maté, physician, trauma, addiction and autoimmune specialist, and author
We cannot have mind and spirit without body and vice versa. It is perhaps this arena I have the most first-hand knowledge but have chosen to keep it lean here for now. The embodiment of this truth will be deeply focused on within the pages of weREWILD and within this community and its enrichment programs. There are highly regarded thinkers, researchers, health practitioners, and healers currently and throughout the ages trying to convey this to us – that we are mind, body, and spirit; that there are few things more potent to our bodies than our thoughts and feelings; that we cannot compartmentalize our individual health.
We’ll talk a bit about The Somatic Experiencing® method here within this community – a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma, other stress disorders, and fixated physiological states. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine, resulting from his multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application. The SE approach releases trauma and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma that can live destructively in the body causing disease.
We’ll also talk to people – including myself, Micha – who have manifested physiological disease through trauma, loss, crisis, or chronic stress and begun to remediate it through Eastern and Western practices. Ultimately, all humans and even mammals somaticize our experiences and our unconscious and conscious thoughts. Similarly, our body is often the first to “know” something, before our brains or emotions have registered new knowledge. We can not isolate our mind and spirit from body in our quest to be more whole and more content.
“Regardless of how we view ourselves, in the most basic sense we literally are human animals. The fundamental challenges we face today have come about relatively quickly, but our nervous systems have been much slower to change. It is no coincidence that people who are more in touch with their natural selves tend to fare better when it comes to trauma. Without easy access to the resources of this primitive, instinctual self, humans alienate their bodies from their souls. Most of us don’t think of or experience ourselves as animals. Yet, by not living through our instincts and natural reactions, we aren’t fully human either.”
– Peter Levine, clinical psychologist, stress and trauma expert, founder of Somatic Experiencing
