As I was lying on the conference room floor in a hotel in Canada in late October of 2013, I was not thinking about somatic intelligence. I had no idea of personal intelligences at all. There I was, feeling my body shake most amazingly, knowing that I had self-induced it, and there was nothing woo woo about it. I can say that I was starting my life over.
I started learning somatic intelligence without any idea of what it was. That came in retrospect to reading and study, and the practice of using autonomic tremoring to heal trauma. Somatic intelligence is one of six personal intelligences I came to define relative to healing trauma, and for me (and imo), where any trauma healing is most beneficially started.
There were stages of progression as it were, and so in this definition. The process starts with feeling the external body, then the internal body, and then moving into an integrated body, in which I move and have my being, directly experiencing the world around me.
When an infant is born, we know it won’t speak for roughly 18 months. When it does, it doesn’t recite the Gettysburg Address. It doesn’t suddenly say, “Whew. I’ve had all these thoughts and words and I was just waiting for that Broca Area to come on line.” The reality is that the child has no words, no particular thoughts. What it has are sensations. Physical sensations and some of those revolve around needs - mostly eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom. If those needs are not met, how does the infant respond? That’s right - it cries, it fusses. Now imagine if they philosophy of the day was to put the child in the crib in the bedroom and close the door, and let it cry until it went to sleep, and stayed there until YOU decided it was time to get changed or fed again.
Welcome to my world.
An infant is not resilient, so they easily get overwhelmed by these physical sensation needs which can be neglected. Infants and children also want to be held. That doesn’t happen in the crib, either. The first disconnect then is from the infants own body because we are wired to protect from overwhelm. Just like a circuit breaker. As an infant, if we experienced neglect and/or abuse, disconnection (dissociation) from the body is to a large extent our only choice, so the healing path can start with the body. For infants, there are no words, no memories in words. In my experience of healing with tremoring, there were no words either. At least the “let’s talk about your trauma” kind. My story was still important, I own it, now I can talk about it freely, but I started here, with my body tremors, allowing them to do what they were evolved to accomplish - complete and discharge, and hence heal.
In healing then, this can become the first re-connect. This sort of foundation isn’t psychological at all, it’s all physiological. In the ideal world, a child gets to develop this secure attachment and attunement in a place of safety and pleasure with it’s own body because of the love of the caregivers, and the physical nurturing that goes along with love. Even if it doesn’t happen, those neural networks and attachment/attunement needs that usually happen in “ideal” development can be created and met after the fact, according to Dr. Seigel and Dr. Heller. That’s what healing can do.
My first experience on that conference room floor was feeling my body in space and time, what’s called proprioception. I become more aware of where my body is, and I felt parts of my body in tremoring that I’d never considered before. I was beginning to experience a re-embodiment, a “coming home.” That started with just being aware of my own hands, feet, legs, pelvis, back, chest and abdomen, and in tremoring I get to feel parts I can’t see. And when the tremor is really a vibration, as they are in my face mostly, I get to feel my face. Not as with my hands, because that’s touching my face. I get to FEEL my face, as a face. I feel the muscles underneath the skin as they move, not just the skin, and hair, and bony structure.
The second stage is interoception. That is being able to read the body’s signals to the brain. Which are quite numerous, and for the most part, under the radar. Until we reach a certain threshold and then we become hungry, or thirsty (often confused with hunger), or the need for sleep, or using the bathroom. The body is always trying to maintain idiodynamicy, and intake, nutrition and hydration, and waste output are all important parts of that. Between the in and out, is where production happens, so being at our best means we need to be aware of these signals and honor them. The body presents it’s own rewards for that. I can’t say I’ll ever feel my liver, or my spleen, or kidneys unless I get stones. But that would be way past earlier messages warning about this. For example, I eat a breakfast of some hash browns, eggs, and some rib eye steak. My stomach gets upset. I will repeat that a couple more times, and if the result is the same, as it was, I decide to try eating something else in the morning. That does the trick. Until I hear my body asking for the protein it wants, in what meat form, and how well done, and yes, it has been that precise for me. So some water first and if that feeling/taste combo sticks around, I do as it says. I have also consumed small heads of romaine lettuce exactly that way.
Unknowingly at first, but then certain words began popping into my consciousness, and chief among them was embodiment. The great discussion of mind/body connection, which can be expanded to mind-thoughts-emotions-spirituality/body connection. Those stages above start the integrated embodiment experience. What does that mean? That means for starters, that I first gain a new level of knowledge and experience being in my own body. Even if I start this adventure at 58 years of age. Then as the healing process continues, the other personal intelligences come on line and integrate into and with the somatic intelligence because there is less separation between them than we currently acknowledge. For a guy my age then, I went through the opening of the proprioception, and that still unfolds; the interoception came on line, and that is refining, and then I began to hear the signals of my body wanting better health. Simply put, it wants that idiodynamicy and if my nutrition and lack of movement are hindering that, I’ll get signals. Of course, I know that some of the eating habits I acquired and the fact my body wasn’t in motion much is partly cultural, and partly because of the trauma I experienced. So there is this movement in the organism that first starts with perceiving, and then as that unfolds it begins to take into account movement. Again, we are talking about idiodynamicy which has as it’s legacy the genetic expression of hundreds of thousands of years which was mostly spent moving as the hunter-gatherers we are.
One aspect of integrated embodiment is the beginnings of living in first person - direct experience. I spent most of my life living third person, as if I was watching a movie of myself. Integrating allowed for direct experience of first person living in this woefully neglected almost 60 year old body! What a delight though, as I now I felt I had the power to actually do something about it.
I was a volunteer firefighter/EMT/rescue operator for 16 years. And as such we had the availability of a little bit of exercise equipment in some of the stations in small workout rooms. Every once in a while I’d go in and hit the treadmill, or eliptical to do some cardio, and think I was getting in shape. Which was partly right, partly delusion. When it came to any kind of lifting though? Oh, the headaches. And because I didn’t have awareness of my own body, that process of starting and stopping happened two or three times a year for a few years. Once I decided I’d do all this stuff at home, and found a program called Insanity, which was an HIIT program using just the body. Perfect! Except it wasn’t. I wasn’t capable of the range of motion or the endurance of activity, and I injured myself. Start and stop yet again. Life shifted, and walking became the thing, and that was about the time I started to heal my trauma with tremoring. One fateful night, while I was out single handedly saving the world from evil in my civil servant hero role, I broke a foot. Okay, not really. What actually occurred was I was feeding the worms, which sounds far, far less inglorious. I slipped on a piece of metal, and torqued a small bone in my foot beyond it’s ability. I was on crutches with a boot. I was trying, and going backwards, well, actually movement had led to immobility. My body was still a tool, and I wasn’t hearing it all that well. I finally made a plea with the universe to just let me walk again. No more macho guy stuff. No more of this “my body is a tool” stuff. My body is me and I’m going to listen to it. What I didn’t know then was that somatic intelligence and coming into the place of functional fitness at 60 plus years of age requires the same sort of self-regulation as the experience with using the body tremors to heal trauma does. There is no gung-ho in either case.
Simply put, somatic intelligence is learning to know and live within your own body. It involves learning to breathe fully, and to move freely. As we focus on this emerging intelligence, and learn the breathing, and the moving, and the perceptions, we can move into full integrated living. Tremoring is the perfect process to experience somatic intelligence, because from the inside out, it can not only develop that intelligence if we pay attention, it will complete and discharge obstructions, and it will help restore idiodynamicy unlike anything that any motor control conscious activity ever will. Somatic intelligence is the foundation of all the others, it is the foundation of coming home.