Your Body Keeps The Score

Somatic therapy and why you might need it

Sep 30, 2024

Hey y’all,

A few weeks ago I was sitting at a teal blue marble table, sipping on a lavender-flavored, but somehow still teal blue-colored, cocktail in a teal blue ceramic cup about the size of my fist that cost me 17 euros. I was in a city on the coast of Portugal called Albufeira, a small beach town known for fresh seafood, scorching hot beaches, and clubs attracting the 15- to 20-year-old crowds. Its a place Nicki Minaj would definitely chastise you for not being able to spell. Not me though, because the Portuguese hotel staff, all dressed in printed teal blue uniforms, pronounced it for what seems like 100 times over the course of my stay.

Nothing but bougie Europeans surround me. The spicy whites. The “do you think that guy is MAGA—oh, never mind, he definitely doesn’t even speak English” whites. I’ve been clocked for my “MARAIS” H&M shirt that looks like a Balmain knockoff, but I didn’t care when I bought it because “who will notice in Oakland?” Alas, I’ve been caught slipping and have been clocked for it SEVERAL times here in this teal blue oasis. I’ve never seen so many disgusted Parisian once-overs in my life.

It is a privilege to be here, though. I’m with my guy to meet his extended family for the first time, as 30 of us have traveled from the UK and US to celebrate his aunt’s 60th birthday. In a sea of teal blue and white, you’ll find a group of jovial Nigerians clinking glasses of Stella Artois and red wine, cracking jokes, and thanking God for a life where we can share these experiences with each other.

This Week’s Story

As someone who has been to talk therapy many times, the idea of leaning into how my body feels versus what my busy mind is saying is intriguing to me. I tend to therapize myself, so being able to just let go and feel my feels seems freeing. But looks like I’m already on the right path because who knew indulging in activities like dance and mediation contributed to somatic literacy. Danver Chandler, this week’s writer, shares how feeling our way though it can provide a completely different experience on the journey of healing.

Take care,

Anayo Awuzie
EIC of Carefree Mag

How Somatic Therapy Helped Me Cultivate a Holistic Relationship With My Body

by Danver Chandler

While wisdom is mostly spoken of as a knowing from the mind, there is wisdom bursting forth from our bodies. Tuning into these physical sensations, and heeding what our bodies have to say can guide us in ways we’ve not yet imagined.

The tales of losing agency of mind and body aren’t the totality of the stories of our recent ancestors. I’m drawn to Kellie Carter Jackson’s new book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, through the beauty of the book’s cover and the words refuse and resistance. A Black woman in a cream colored dress, perhaps of the Regency Era, holds a ready rifle downwards. Her crown consists of giant earthy-brown locs that arch above her head.

I shared the book cover with friends and family when I first stumbled upon it because I appreciate tales of Black resistance to slavery. Stories of resistance are reminders and imprints of courage, for which I have not been overly exposed.

One poignant and unique tale of Black resistance surfaced after I’d spent a number of years doing somatic therapy work with a therapist. Somatic therapy is body-centered therapy that focuses on the body’s connection to the mind. It’s different from traditional forms of talk therapy because it requires you to bring your attention and awareness into your body to uncover its wisdom. And it also helps you attune to your nervous system.

The act of feeling and listening to my body felt like getting a brand new friend, one capable of guiding me through my own body’s signals.

So, I wish I hadn’t been so surprised when I learned how enslaved Black women had used the wisdom of their bodies in Stephanie Camp’s 2002 article, The Pleasures of Resistance. I laughed out loud at Camp’s description of outlaw parties, where enslaved Black women and men reclaimed their bodies from slavery by attending secret dance parties on plantations. I laughed, not as a mockery, but as a joy.

Camp describes that rather than conserve their energy for field work, Black women and men found a way to escape into themselves. They took agency and drove their bodies to dress up, and play and dance into the wee hours of the night deep in the woods. Their body’s calling to pleasure was wise. It was a beautiful, delightful, indulgent act of resistance.

While revolts and uprisings required a conscious martyrdom of the body, they were not the sole methods of resistance. This is what fascinates me about our ancestors’ attunement to bodily wisdom, and it begets the question today. How are we tuning into our own bodily wisdom?

Growing up in the American South and attuning to the pains, aches, twitches, and stomach butterflies as a child had no significance when shared with the adults I was privy to. The sensations were chalked up to the random sensations and aches that come with having a body. With this limited understanding and guidance, an underdeveloped relationship with my body and its wise sensations was established.

It’s unclear how many generations my family’s lineage has been cut from this valuable relationship — especially when early human life, sans technology, required it to thrive.

As the years passed, and the challenges that have accompanied us on our life’s journey began to appear, the therapist I thought I’d meticulously chosen, revealed a layer of our therapy work together I hadn’t anticipated. To my surprise, she was a practitioner of somatics.

During our sessions, she often asked, “Can you listen in and uncover what your body’s communicating to you? What’s it saying? Take your time.”

She guided me to resist the cognitive attempt to think through her question. She asked me to feel, instead. When I attempted to answer the question, I recognized how much I’d used my body, felt its aches, pains, and tingles, but I didn’t know what was being communicated. I sat in silence, felt the tingle in my legs, and wondered what on Earth was being communicated. I also realized that while I hadn’t been doing much to uncover the wise messages that my body wished to reveal, there was a path to becoming more aware: body literacy.

Body literacy, felt sense, and sensation literacy are terms that share the sentiment of body sensation literacy. This is both somatic awareness, or the mindful attention to the body, and the cultivation of understanding for what the body is communicating.

But, everyone I knew growing up lacked body sensation literacy. My family and community were somatically illiterate, thus unable to interpret or even fully disclose how I might use my body’s signals to brave a world with shrapnels of historical trauma, and ongoing systemic oppression that attempt to chisel away at our livelihood each day.

Somatic work has helped me cultivate a holistic relationship with my body, and perhaps when we can all reclaim access to the precious wisdom of our body—wisdom that’s been hidden away for far too long, we empower ourselves and our community to claim and sustain agency over our bodies.

There are multiple paths to becoming body literate, but I want to outline four that you might be able to incorporate into your life to either address trauma, uncover your innate wisdom, or to have a more holistic relationship with yourself.

#1 Somatic Experiencing via Therapy or Coaching

Find a trained somatic experiencing therapist or coach to help you tune into your body, and understand the messages it wants to reveal. Some will employ a somatic inquiry, body scans, or other techniques to help you build your awareness and uncover what your body is saying.

Therapy Lists:

A broad range of therapists with expertise that stretches beyond the traditional with MAPS
Therapy for Black women and girls through The Loveland Foundation
Free therapy sessions with the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation

#2 Focusing

In the 1970s philosopher and founder of The Focus Institute, now the International Focusing Institute, Eugene Gendlin brought forward the term, ‘felt sense’, an intuitive feel within the body. He noticed that clients who accessed their body’s non-verbal sensations for personal development experienced real positive changes in their lives. He developed a six-step method for exploring what your body is saying. You can visit the 6 Classic Steps or dig deeper in his book, Focusing.

#3 Feminine Embodiment

There are a number of practitioners, coaches and courses that can help to guide you into a practice of embodying all of who you are in an integrative way. Practices such as these help bring your psyche, physical, spiritual and emotional bodies together. Generally, a coach can help you focus on allowing your body to lead the way.

The Non-Linear Movement Method® (NLMM), developed by Michaela Boehm asks that you spend time moving your body in a non-linear way. No choreography. No specific dance moves or steps. Pure, multi-directional, unrehearsed movement of the body each day. This is a reminder to go ahead and twerk, wiggle, roll, swirl!

#4 Somatic Awareness Journaling

While journaling may not intuitively come across as a somatic practice, it can supplement your journey into your body’s wisdom. Some suggestions for getting into writing are to consider a few yoga asanas, dances, or other body movements to shift the energy before writing. Then follow it up with a series of questions to yourself to guide you:

How does your body feel in this moment? Scan your body for tightness, ease, pain, relaxation, etc.
What emotions are you experiencing right now? Where do you physically feel those feelings in your body?
What nourishment does your body crave right now? Food, sleep, touch, movement, nature?
What physical sensations arise when you think about a stressful event coming up?
How have you shown kindness and care towards your body recently?

Body sensation literacy is a great gift that I hope we hold dear to ourselves, but that we also pass down and across to our family and friends. A mobile app that helps to initiate sensation literacy in adults and youth is How We Feel. It’s a free mobile app based on research from Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence. I can attest to the benefits of using Dr. Marc Brackett and team’s Mood Meter when I was a teacher. While the app focuses on the overall feeling, and isn’t as body-centric, it is a great start to developing body literacy.

The mobile app offers opportunities to check-in multiple times a day. To expand on developing body-literacy, adults and youth can note the part of the body where they feel the sensation and use the guidance of the app’s pleasantness and energy scale to uncover what their body may be saying. After a time, the depth of the relationship between body and mind may be so attuned that one graduates from the app, or finds it a wonderful way to record what’s being communicated over time.

Without body sensation literacy, we risk leaving behind a legacy of living a half-wise life. We dwell in a super suit, full of ancestral wisdom. There is no better time than right now to cultivate and expand that power back into the body and our shared communities.