Acknowledging the visible and invisible world
Chapter 4: Intuition & Somatic Memory
Somatic Memory or somatic intelligence is a body's independent intelligence. The body holds embedded memories just like the brain does, and somatic practice is the integration of awareness between the body's nonverbal communication system and the mind. Think of it like its own style of meditation. Somatic healing is about listening to the language of immediate experiences, without any verbal messages or any planned intentions, and giving them a voice.
We existed as wild creatures long before humans stood tall, or used tools, or formed languages. We could feel when the weather was turning on us, or danger lurked in the dark without hosting an incessant internal dialog about it. Your stomach might feel upset or legs feel twitchy because you know something bad is coming, but your brain doesn’t have a way to describe how it knows. Like being carsick inside your own skin. Your brain wants to take action to make the uneasy feeling stop, so it knee-jerk does whatever made the feeling stop last time based on its embedded memories. A simple example would be like having to pee. Or having to pee while sleeping. You don’t just pee the bed every night, and you don’t wake up and have a conversation about it with yourself either. Your body just gets up and goes to a bathroom. Crisis is averted, you feel better, and positive reinforcement is repeated with minimal effort. This might be a crass description of our mysterious and magical sixth sense, but it is one of our body’s intuitive responses, based on an embedded memory. The original memory of potty training no longer matters once the new learned behavior is locked in.
But not all learned behaviors are beneficial. A body that is in pain with tight muscles or limited flexibility is more likely to feel nervous and threatened, and read it’s surroundings as dangerous unnecessarily. And it’s more likely to look for outward sources to soothe itself quickly. It is significantly easier to become reliant on quick-fix coping mechanisms than it is to diagnose a problem we can’t put words to. It’s also easy to trust these quick-fixes too quickly and form disappointment loops when our body’s needs, and its huge expectations, are never actually fulfilled. Our body remembers the coping mechanism giving us relief, at least for a short time, so it tries it again and again and again and again frantically hunting for the cure. But small doses can become big doses hoping for bigger relief, and our somatic intelligence system can’t process why this isn’t working. And the longer it’s been ingrained, the harder it gets to change.
Somatic healing is not a quick-fix. But it is a real fix. It takes lots of repetition and patience with yourself, just like starting any other good habit. Digging new ruts feels awkward for a while. That’s ok. So start off by listening to the queues. What is your body seeing, feeling, remembering, or being triggered by? Give everything words. It can be a real description, or if the feelings are too vague still, give them each a placeholder nickname, like ‘weird air’, or ‘purple elephant’. It doesn’t really matter yet. Someday maybe you can give the purple elephant more words, but today we just need to acknowledge its existence. (Side note: to clarify here, I’m not trying to make anyone dig up repressed memories or re-live traumatic events. Even if those were the origin that kicked off the triggers, the goal here isn’t to write an autobiography of our pain, the goal is somatic or systemic healing.)
Once you’ve named a trigger, next name whatever symptoms go with it. Queasy, dizzy, shaking, sweating, rage…? There’s no wrong answer, we’re just giving names to feelings. When these symptoms start, what is your first reaction to do? Usually it’s some sort of: fight, flight, self-soothe, medicate or eat, smother, distract, etc… Don’t do it right now, just feel it. Name it. Our body (or rather our somatic intelligence system) follows this pattern: “when I’m triggered by <unknown elephant> and I feel <twitchy and scared> then I will <eat and binge watch tv> until the feeling stops.” /end. Your body is trying to avert a crisis for you, like not peeing the bed at night, but it can’t mentally process or reason anything more complicated than that. All it's got to work with is a series of muscle twitches and gut bacteria. This is the language of immediate experiences. And this is where the mind has to step in and help sometimes. Hence the need for somatic practice, to bridge the gap between the body’s nonverbal communication system and the mind when the reactions aren’t healthy.
So now that you’ve named a pattern, what do you hope to feel or accomplish by doing the action? Does your action rationally have anything to do with the original trigger or symptoms if you give yourself some time to reflect? Your body chose the action because it just wanted the uncomfortable part to go away, but what about you? What would be the perfect scenario? What would a better path be like? How do you get to that?
By giving our queues and triggers a real name, we slowly take away some of the fathomless dread they carry. If we can detach our symptom from it, we can release the body’s unnecessary danger signals, and reset its expectations to slowly help it heal and carve out new, healthier paths of our choosing.
I (like most people) am triggered by tons of things all day long. I am afraid of heights for example, and I don’t even have to be that far off the ground. I actually love being up high, looking out airplane windows, and I think being able to fly like a bird would be sheer bliss. I wasn’t always afraid of heights, I don’t want to be afraid of heights, but I’ve apparently fallen enough times in my life out of trees, off ladders, monkey bars, bleachers and hills, and sprained enough ankles that my body has created symptoms like extreme vertigo and sweating if I’m ever more than a foot off the ground. And my action is to freeze and very slowly lower my whole body back down to somewhere stable until the panic subsides. Where I can’t get hurt. Do my actions and symptoms have anything to do with being on a step stool? No. Going up 2 ft. of elevation doesn’t make people sweat or dizzy. So I can now relabel my trigger as not a fear of heights, but my body’s embedded memory of injury when the ground doesn’t look or feel stable. If someone else is flying the airplane I’m fine. My symptoms aren’t actual ailments that need treatment, they are a non-verbal communication of that fear of injury. And my action response to lay on the floor isn’t a reasonable solution since I’m going to need to use step stools and ladders for the foreseeable future. Could I avoid them forever? Maybe. I wish. Is that mentally a healthy lifestyle solution? Not really. So I ask myself what would be my perfect scenario here, and how do I get to that? How can I climb ladders and reassure my body that I won’t get hurt? Maybe larger steps and a handrail, or someone below the ladder for stability. Maybe I should do more root chakra exercises for muscular and joint stability if my body knows that something internally isn’t steady. The more I firm up my foundations and practice the new path I want to be on, someday the symptoms will ease and the fear pattern will end.
All of our muscles and nervous systems have to talk to each other to work correctly. When they’re scared and not functioning properly we have to slowly teach them how we want them to behave and communicate what’s expected from them. Like teaching a child. You wouldn’t just toss one in a job site or an office cubicle and expect them to know what to do. You need lots of practice to embed good memories and experiences to draw from first. The stretches this week are neck side bends. Are they repetitive? Yes. But that’s how we form good habits.
References this week from Jo Ann Staugaard-Jones "The Vital Psoas Muscle"
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