When working with trauma patients, Peter Levine found that one of the most effective ways to help them was to allow their body and psyche to drop into a trance, find the motions that wanted to occur, and spontaneously complete those motions.

To oversimplify the idea behind this: intense events have a tendency to “get stuck” in your body; if you’re unable to physically “shake off” the event right after it happens, that intense energy just stays in your nervous system, keeping you locked and tense in a specific pattern. We can see this from the way that animals who shake/jump/sprint after an intense event don’t seem to be traumatized by the event, while animals (or humans) who are restrained, unable to shake it off, do tend to exhibit later trauma responses.

Trauma isn’t the only thing that moves energy through our body, or the only thing that gets it stuck. When you start moving deeper into dream return (and especially after developing a degree of somatic resonance), you’ll find that inner images are often very closely connected to patterns of energy/activation in the body.

Some of these activations do seem to be connected to intense past events or patterns of events, whether we call those traumatic or not. Something from our past got stuck in the system, and we need to release it.

Other activations seem to be more future-facing. They’re less about getting rid of an old obstruction, and more about growing in a new direction.

If that sounds abstract, I can describe how some of these movements feel in the moment:

• Sometimes they feel like screaming into a pillow
• Sometimes they feel like shouting from the mountaintops

That’s one of the spectrums at play here — huge energetic release, either getting rid of old crap, or stepping into new possibilities.

For most people, the former will be more common towards the beginning, but the latter will become more common as you go.

“Activations”?

So what do I actually mean by things like “activations,” or “patterns of energy” or the title of the page, “intuitive soma-kinetics”?

There are times when you feel something subtly intense in your body, and you feel an urge to move somehow. If you’re alone or in a comfortable situation, you probably move automatically (dare I say intuitively?) without giving it a second thought.

You’re familiar with at least a few of the more common versions of this:

• A shiver runs up your spine, you automatically let your shoulders shake a little bit and maybe vocalize a little shudder to release the sensation.
• You slam your thumb in a cupboard, and before you can even think about it, you’re shaking your whole hand and then pressing on the thumb, maybe yelping out a few choice words along the way.
• Your favorite team scores a goal, and you automatically leap to your feet, shout for joy, and do some automatic arm-pumping motions. (You might continue a little victory dance after that as well, but that first part is what we’re talking about here — the part where a wave of energy jolts through your body, and without thinking you automatically start moving.)

Everyone has a few of their own examples, whether from mosh pits at their favorite concerts, or automatic cringing while watching an embarrassing situation, or a full-body chill while singing in unison with a group.

<aside> 📝 A helpful metaphor for the feel and function of these activations is “emotional peristalsis.”

Peristalsis is the involuntary movement of muscles in the digestive tract. Without thinking or trying, your body knows how to move food through you, digest what’s useful, and expel what isn’t.

In the same way, allowing yourself to get into a near-involuntary state of following intuitive somatic activations has a similar effect of moving stagnant emotional energy through you, metabolizing what’s nutritious, and expelling what isn’t.

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