What is Somatic Experiencing?

There’s much ado right now about meditation. A CDC report in 2017 noted that more than 14% of Americans had practiced some form of meditation—up from just 4% in 2012. Given such a steep increase in just one year, it’s not hard to imagine an even greater increase of Americans are meditating in 2022. 

This explosion of meditation means there’s an increased need to understand how meditation can support nervous systems impacted by traumatic stress. It also means understanding other forms of contemplative medicines that are uniquely suited for transforming suffering—like somatic experiencing. Here, I’ll be sharing some of the benefits of these two streams of thought meeting. 

The Origins of Mindfulness and Traumatic Stress

The traditions that secular mindfulness stems from are quite familiar with the idea of traumatic stress. When it first came to the west, a lot of the mindfulness instruction was embedded within a Buddhist framework. Many sects of Buddhist practice include a relational aspect of working with a teacher, often for refining and individualizing instruction, alongside additional teaching elements that work as a system to provide balance and support. 

In a traditional context, practicing mindfulness would involve being a part of a community. There are many contemporary examples of such communities, such as Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village and the Tibetan exile communities—both of which have fielded and transformed enormous amounts of traumatic stress. Additionally, in traditional Buddhist communities, alternative practices are available to practitioners including devotional practices and the brahmaviharas, or divine abodes (which include loving-kindness practice, compassion practice, sympathetic joy practice, and equanimity practice). 

All of these practices help to orient mindfulness practitioners toward common humanity, wisdom, and warmth in a way that can be very psychologically and interpersonally supportive. They also help meditators be more aware of sensations in their bodies. Increasingly, these sorts of practices are making their way into other secular formats, like the Mindful Self-Compassion training program, among others.

The Transformation of Mindfulness

For most westerners practicing mindfulness meditation these days, their mindfulness practice is taking place outside of a community, or within a temporary community—like a class or through an app. This makes sense, and these methods allow for an unprecedented number of people to access these supportive practices. Secular mindfulness and contemplative practice can radically impact both the amount of stress we have and, importantly, our relationship to stress. However, practicing mindfulness without the benefit of a community can also leave mindfulness practitioners with no guidance for how to work through the impacts of their traumatic stress. 

Peter Levine developed somatic experiencing (SE) to help address the ways traumatic stress disrupts the functioning of our nervous system. SE dovetails quite well with a mindfulness practice. Depending on how they’re being practiced, both prioritize the felt sense of the body. For SE, the felt sense is where our implicit memory lives, and it’s often the most suitable path for walking the nervous system back to regulation.

Some of the practices and insights of somatic experiencing may sound counter to initial impressions of how mindfulness is “supposed to” look. But in fact, the practices and approach are very compatible.

How Mindfulness Differs from Somatic Experiencing

Sometimes during meditation, people will notice fluctuations in their temperature, uncomfortable physical sensations that contain emotion (like a lump in the throat or nausea), or trembling and shaking. SE empowers people to work constructively with these experiences, and offers a framework for validating them rather than pushing them away. For example, people often feel they’re doing something wrong if they feel any kind of shaking or trembling during their mindfulness practice. But from an SE standpoint, this is one of the ways that stress discharges from the nervous system, especially when there’s been a freeze response overlaying a fight or flight response. 

Trembling is well-documented in animals as they move out of a freeze response to imminent danger. Traditional mindfulness frameworks might suggest that suppressing our body’s quivering is required to be successfully mindful. But this framework doesn’t account for the fact that we don’t need to suppress that experience—if we can be comfortable enough to allow it. 

We can bring kind awareness to that experience of trembling and allow ourselves to feel it fully, so that our nervous system can rediscover a balanced and relatively related state. This, in turn, can support our mindfulness practice by allowing our body and mind to collect and recover, which in time deepens and enriches our lives. 

In a similar vein, if we’re practicing with very general mindfulness instructions, we may assume that closing our eyes is a requirement. From an SE standpoint, one of the ways that our nervous system can assess safety (or threat) is to allow our eyes and our necks to move around our space and help us determine that we are in fact safe. 

You could imagine a deer in a forest that hears a twig crack. The deer would likely lift their head by moving their neck, pointing their ears, and orient their head towards the origin of the sound. If they’re able to confirm that there’s no threat, their attention returns to the activity they were engaged in, and their nervous system settles. So a common SE modification to mindfulness instructions is to let your nervous system orient wherever is needed. We can, after all, maintain continuity of mindful awareness with our eyes open.

The Benefits of Somatic Experiencing

For the most part, people engaged in a meditation practice are generally safe from external threats, and we can attune to that safety by allowing ourselves to orient visually. However, it’s also not uncommon for people to encounter thoughts, bodily sensations, or emotions that they find threatening. And we know that thoughts can produce similar threat responses to external reality. For example, if you imagine biting into a lemon vividly enough, you might notice your mouth salivate. 

When people are allowed and encouraged to moderate their exposure to internal threats—and to meet these threats with a curious and kind awareness—their confidence in dealing with those threats grows. In other words, we tap into a sense of “I can” by providing the nervous system with doable challenges. Then, with time, bringing this kind awareness to sensations allows larger shifts to occur. New responses and feelings of safety emerge. 

These moments occur differently whether one is working with an SE therapist or doing practice on their own, and the two contexts have different strengths and weaknesses. However, they can both inform each other. Mindfulness practice deeply supports us in seeing the shifting nature of our nervous system through moment-to-moment awareness, and provides the perfect tool for noticing the full cycle of the activation and deactivation of our nervous system. This awareness of the cycle of our nervous system is the basis for choice and agency. Mindfulness also helps us name what’s occurring—for example, identifying an image, memory, or thought as such, and in so doing empowering us. In other words, if you can name it, you can tame it.

In turn, SE supports us in seeing the aspects of these cycles and how they connect to our physiological response. It also provides us guidance for how to work through those responses, so our nervous systems can rediscover equilibrium. 

The principles of SE like orienting, pendulating, moderating, and validating bodily processes can provide important counterpoints to overly general instructions in mindfulness—like sitting still, being quiet, and keeping your eyes closed. 

By integrating SE insights into the broader growth of contemplative practice, we can further help our clients and ourselves heal from our adverse and traumatic experiences—creating a more balanced, compassionate, and responsive society. 

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