Somatic and body-centred therapies offer shamanic work a deep knowledge of how the body holds what has happened to us, and how it lets go: through sensation, movement and, sometimes, trembling. They help explain why wounds from before we had words are best reached through the body, and why journeying, which can be very somatic, can reach some of the same places.
What are somatic and body-centred therapies? #
Therapies that work with the body as well as the mind. Irene Malone, in her guide to the field, explains that “somatic psychotherapy emphasises bodily sensations, movements, and physiological responses as essential pathways to understanding and resolving psychological distress.”1 She traces the field back to Wilhelm Reich‘s work on armouringArmouring. Wilhelm Reich’s term for the chronic muscular tension that locks unbearable feeling into the body. The body holds the truth of what has happened to us; healing is somatic, letting the held movement complete. Read the full answer, through his student Alexander Lowen, to more recent approaches such as Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing.
Paul Francis is himself a body-centred psychotherapist. He sees clients “enter a trance state when they have moved from talking about content” and “into being aware of their body, their feelings and their internal processes.”2 That observation is itself a bridge to shamanism: the body is a doorway into the same kind of state that journeying uses. See What is body armouring and what does Reichian work contribute?
What do they know about wounds from before we had words? #
That they are held in the body, and need to be reached there. Our earliest wounds are not easily reached by talking. “Working with pre-verbal material usually requires therapies that use imagery, such as art therapy, or therapies that focus more on sensations and movement, such as the various body-centred psychotherapies.” Shamanic journeying can work in the same territory, because it “is largely non-verbal, and can be very somatic, visceral and embodied.”3
Journeys can let a person feel, in the body, what secure attachment is like: “Because it is non-traumatic, somatic and sensory, doing this in journeys can begin to gently release the primary wounding patterns locked in the right hemisphere and the body.”4 Body-centred therapy and shamanic journeying here meet on the same ground.
What can they teach about how the body lets go? #
That it has its own way of doing it, and that animals know it. Peter Levine noticed that a wild animal that has frozen in the face of danger “moves out of it through trembling discharge. The incident is completed.”5 Humans, he says, often interrupt that process, and the unfinished response stays with us. He writes that “the very key to resolving trauma is being able to uncouple and separate the fear from the immobility.”6
Levine saw the same thing in traditional healing. Describing shamanic healing ceremonies, he writes that “the beneficiary of the healing almost always shakes and trembles as the event nears its conclusion”, which he compares with animals releasing bound-up energy.7 Body-centred therapy offers shamanic practitioners one way of understanding why. See How do embodiment, grounding and the nervous system support healing?
Why does sensation matter so much? #
Because it is the body’s own language. Levine writes that “Sensation is the language of the reptilian brain”, the oldest part of us, where our instincts live.8 Shamanic journeying needs that language too. Shapeshifting helps us know something “not just in a ‘head’ or intellectual way, but in a somatic and visceral way”.9 And shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer into your Soul “does not work if it is only done in your head. It must involve your physical body.”10 See What are Focusing and the felt sense, and how can they support shamanic work?
Is the evidence for these therapies settled? #
Not yet, though it is growing. In a 2015 paper describing Somatic Experiencing, Levine and his co-authors wrote that they were not aware of any published peer-reviewed studies of it at that point.11 Irene Malone describes research on somatic psychotherapy as “still emerging”, and reports that studies on Somatic Experiencing “have shown reductions in PTSD symptoms”.12 It is a field still building its evidence, and one many clients and practitioners already value. See What can shamanism offer somatic and body-centred therapy?
