Hey all, Below is an excerpt from a longform piece I wrote called, The Body Remembers: A Layman’s Guide to Somatic Healing. If you are interested, you can read the full thing over on Substack. This section was interesting enough, I thought I'd share it here. Cheers! Dissociation: The Lights Are On, but Nobody’s Home Somatic work is, at its core, about getting out of the mind and into the body. That’s where the deeper work begins. When we engage the body, we access deeper layers of memory and...

I am a chronic rusher, chronically urgent, chronically in a hurry. And let me tell you, this takes a toll on the nervous system. For almost five years, I worked for a wilderness therapy program in Alaska. We spent our days canoeing on the ocean and hiking through mountains, teaching young people how to live, move, and survive in the wild. The work demanded precision. We had to be off the water by dark, camp set up before nightfall. If you missed your time frames, things got difficult fast. On...

For years, really from the time I was 14 until my late twenties, I did everything I could to avoid what was going on inside of me. I didn’t know it then, but my body was carrying so much shame that it felt nearly intolerable to be present to it. The way I coped was through numbness, dissociation, freeze states, and substances that amplified my disconnection. At the time, I thought I was just moving through life. In reality, I had little to no idea what was happening inside me. It wasn’t until...