Uniqueness, Somatics, & Trauma | 5/9

Congratulations on reaching the halfway point in our Shaking Medicine classes! This insightful follow-up talk reviews Classes 1 & 2 while diving deeper into what makes every shaking session infinitely unique – your body intelligently unraveling exactly what needs release in the moment.

Explore powerful somatic lenses for understanding trauma, suppressed emotions, stress, and mental health as "charges" in the nervous system. Learn how therapeutic trembling gently discharges them layer by layer – like peeling a trauma onion sustainably.

Discover key tools for safe, profound healing:
- Titration & pendulation to stay within your window of tolerance
- Staying in feeling vs. thinking
- The beauty of cyclical activation-relaxation
- Building sensitivity + resilience simultaneously

Whether you're shedding old layers or awakening your full potential, this talk empowers your journey with patience, trust, and balance.

Transcript

Hey,

Well done on completing class two.

That's halfway through the classes.

Today I wanted to talk a bit about the uniqueness of each practice and go into somatics and ways to look into trauma and mental health and suppressed emotions when we start getting into some of the deeper stuff.

I want to give you a lens through which to look at that,

All of that,

With your neurogenic therapeutic tremor mechanism.

First,

Let's do a review of class one and two.

Let's get into it.

So for class one,

Our first class,

It was really about experiencing our therapeutic tremor mechanism and learning some of the fundamentals for starting to access your spontaneous shake.

We looked at the basics of grounding and keeping it safe by stopping and starting early on in shaking medicine.

We work a lot with the legs to clear our roots so that we can ground.

We understand that this is fundamentally a practice of letting go of control and surrendering to this tremor mechanism.

We have the discovery phase where we use some strategy to find a shaken station,

And then we go into the surrendering phase where we hang out and listen to the shaken station and let it move us how it wants to move us.

This radio analogy for tuning in with one of our most fundamental strategies,

Which is the slow,

Moving,

Relaxed moving meditation.

It's the radio analogy of slowly turning the knob on that old analog radio so that we can find the stations.

We want to find our shaken station.

We did a little bit of the tiring strad and some of the slightly stronger shakes,

Which we did a lot more of in class two.

We basically looked at this was a balanced class of yin and yang,

Not too strong,

Not too soft,

And of course within that everything is relative.

Here's our flow,

More or less,

A little outline of our flow.

We looked at a bunch of different foundational shapes,

Tilted our pelvis around,

Did spinal breathing,

A beautiful warm-up for the spine,

And shaking medicine is a practice of the nervous system.

It's nervous system hygiene,

So working with the spine,

Which is the central nervous system,

That in the brain,

Is really powerful.

For class two,

This was a more yang expression of a shaking medicine journey.

Even though this overall is a yin modality,

I'd say it's much more emphasizes the softness,

The letting go,

The surrender,

But of course within everything it can relatively be more yang or more yin.

This was a stronger class.

Sometimes people just need stronger shapes to get the shaking going so they can start to feel what it is to allow spontaneous shaking and learn to trust it,

And then so they can access it in softer and softer shapes.

Sometimes now people straight away,

They get the softer shapes more easily straight away.

It's,

I don't know,

It's about 50-50 or so in my experience.

So there's something in here for everyone,

And then there's strong parts in your life,

Whether you're doing a workout at the gym,

A strong yoga class,

Or anything strong in life.

Now when your muscles start to quake and vibrate and pulse because they're fatiguing,

Know that that's the start of something beautiful,

Something really profound.

It's an amazing fine-tuning,

And that's in a way,

In my opinion,

That's where the workout begins.

If you really want to go deep,

You're fine-tuning on a deep level at that point.

Now shaking medicine,

Even though that's an important branch of all this,

Early on,

Especially in this beginner stuff,

It's much more about letting go of the control,

Which so much of us in our culture do in a lot of excess.

Very little,

Actually,

Is about letting go of control.

Generally,

In our Western culture,

We're controlling almost every aspect of our life.

So this class,

Yeah,

We looked at micro-moving,

So it's like the range of motion strategy,

But think really subtle,

Like if you think of the pelvis,

It can go in many directions,

Like little micro-moves in three dimensions are a great way to just kind of get the right exact angle to get it going.

We did a lot more of the tiring out strategy,

And we looked at it in the squeezing strategy,

Where it's like the range of motion,

Except you're squeezing the muscles online and then relaxing them.

And as we,

If you progress with me onto the intermediate course and beyond,

We evolved the squeezing strategy into the next,

Its next evolution,

Which is actually another powerful instinctive mechanism called pendiculation,

And I've done some cool work in progressing that and coining these terms of spontaneous pendiculation and voluntary pendiculation,

Kind of mimicking the voluntary shaking and involuntary spontaneous shaking.

So yeah,

Practice of the nervous system,

And this theme of this class,

This is also about activating our potential.

Mostly at first,

It's helping us shed the layers that don't serve us anymore,

So early on it's generally more about that,

But then it awakens a power within us and ultimately awakens our human potential and can help us cultivate what we love to do and our crafts and such,

And just gather more energy,

Life force,

So we can do the things we love.

You are like a beautiful instrument,

And a nice way to think about it is,

As we're in a shaking station,

We're fine-tuning the instrument of our mind-body complex,

This beautiful vessel,

Into harmony,

Into resonances,

And different frequencies.

That's a beautiful analogy.

So balancing,

Balance is always a key word to keep in mind.

Anything we do in life,

I feel,

Needs to be in the right balance.

Often things aren't so good or bad or whatever.

That's duality.

Often it's the right balance is where the sweet spot is,

And often things that seem bad can be good in another context and vice versa.

So often it's about finding the right balance,

Especially in shaking medicine.

In an active class like this,

We want to use this thing called wu-wei,

Or effortless effort.

So even in a strong shape or doing something strong,

It's like even in a shape that we're using a bit of energy,

How can we minimize the energy to have this sense of effortless effort?

So here's a little outline of our flow from this class.

We looked at a bunch of new shapes and movements.

The kangaroo jump,

Which is a tribute to Australia,

And how this modality took birth in Australia.

So to get into semantics and how this practice is very unique is this part of the outline.

So each time you do this,

It's infinitely unique.

Every time I've trimmered,

Every time I've taught a class,

And every time you tune into it,

The idea is that the trimmering will move you how you need to be moved in this moment.

Whatever layer of tension or trauma or emotion is unraveling,

It kind of can search your body inside and out.

Find that tension,

That charge,

That density,

And just start to move it.

And basically it gets a new layer time and time again.

Over time,

As you do this,

It'll get easier.

It should get significantly easier and very quickly to move it through your body,

To turn it on,

And for it to travel to new places.

Note that on different days,

We'll often need different things.

We're on a new part of our trauma onion,

Which I'll talk more about.

It's dissolving another layer of that onion.

Each time we do it,

It gets into a new piece,

We could say.

Sometimes the practice energizes us,

Sometimes it calms us down,

And everything in between.

It gives us what we need in the moment.

Often that's deep rest.

So many of us actually need to just slow down and rest.

It's fairly common early on for it to make you feel kind of like you want to just lay down and have a nap.

And that's beautiful because it's moved you in parasympathetic rest and digest,

Where the body can beautifully and optimally rest.

Other times it'll kind of clear out the gunk,

So we're clear and we're into a kind of flow state where we're on point.

Our brainwaves are harmonizing synchronistically,

Like that beautiful harmonious instrument that we are.

And it's just like in this state of wu-wei or effortless effort,

Where we're just getting things done and doing the tasks we need to do in our life.

Everything in shaking medicine is cyclical,

It's more of a circle.

And this is something I got from the Kalahari Bushmen and reading about them through Dr.

Bradford Keeney's work.

They talk about this.

See,

Us in the West often see things as like a line.

They see nature and everything more as a circle.

So in shaky medicine I like to think of things more circularly than like linearly.

One of the cyclical aspects is this activation and relaxation cycle that we'll bounce between.

So we do this in a class.

One of the most important ways to keep it safe is to tune into the tremorine,

Which is kind of like an ecstatic expression of it,

Even if it's small or big.

And then what we do is we turn it off and we move into meditative stillness and process and integrate that layer that we've unraveled.

And even this resting cycle will become more automatic as we tune in.

Ultimately this is a self-regulation mechanism that as we're learning it essentially we're regulating the self-regulation mechanism and we want to basically do that until it becomes second nature and it all just regulates itself.

And we use it easily and intuitively.

So as we surrender,

If you ever go deeper into your tremor by letting go of more control and surrendering more,

That's where it's at.

That's a good sign that you're doing it well.

And bit by bit the more you can trust this mechanism within you,

The easier and easier that'll be.

To the point where just by relaxing mentally and using your willpower,

That'll eventually become enough to access it.

And we look at that in class three a bit.

I cue that and we explore that a bit,

But that's maybe kind of advanced because that's usually a fairly deep relationship with your mechanism before that becomes easy.

Well,

I say that all at the same time.

No limitations.

I never want to put any limitations.

It's just a general sense of what I've seen through many people.

And no limitations because ultimately this is something that we're all born with.

So some of us will get to that point a lot easier and some will take a bit longer,

But we can all get there.

So somatics and trauma.

Let's talk about somatics because this is a somatic modality which is body-based.

It's a body-based modality.

The mind and body are connected and the idea is we can use the body somatically to heal both the mind and the body.

We don't only have to take medications or only do top therapy.

There's a whole realm to discover through somatic modalities and it's very powerful.

It's actually shaking medicine and some other somatic modalities I feel are an absolutely massive and huge missing piece of the health and well-being puzzle,

Especially when it comes to mental health and any issues which are probably most of them caused by chronic stress,

Anxiety,

Suppressed emotions and trauma.

There's an analogy I like to use.

I call it the charges analogy.

I think I came up with this.

I don't remember learning it from anywhere,

But anyway I learned so much it's possible.

I think I kind of,

This came through me and I've just been using it ever since.

Anyway the charges analogy is basically that to our somatic tremor mechanism,

All the stuff that our logical head mind calls stress,

Anxiety,

Some anger,

Sadness,

Whatever emotion,

Trauma,

Mental health disorders and such are physically aches,

Pains,

Tension,

Energetically things like stress,

Anxiety,

Insomnia,

Maybe emotionally suppressed emotions,

Trauma.

All that stuff to this somatic mechanism is like a,

It's like a unique condensation of charge stuck in the body and what this hygiene for our nervous system does,

This mechanism,

Is it just trickles through,

It finds a charge,

Usually the charge that needs to be discharged in the moment.

Because if you learn about the immune system for example,

The immune system targets what needs to be targeted.

It has an intelligence to kind of do things in the right order.

So does this.

It'll get the thing that's most surface level that needs to be charged to pave the way to bit by bit get to the deeper and deeper stuff.

So to this mechanism,

All that tension,

Trauma,

Everything that we have a fancy name for with our logical mind is kind of a very similar thing.

It's a unique condensation of energy that it just knows how to find and feel and then dissipate that pent-up charge and discharge it,

Right.

So we need to get out of the head for this practice,

Out of the labeling and the thinking and move into feeling,

Into our instinctive intelligence.

There's this thing called sensory motor amnesia in somatics and basically this is,

This is things like aches,

Pains,

Tension,

Numbness,

Limited motion,

Disconnection,

Could be like fatigue or patterns or imbalances,

Other energies,

Stress,

Emotional stuff.

Basically how I see it is it's our one way to look at it,

At least some of this stuff is to,

It's like these charges that I was just talking about,

They get,

They come into our nervous system from whatever experience we've had,

Usually it puts us in a sympathetic fight,

Flight or freeze mode and then what happens is that charge,

If we don't discharge it,

Which is what wild animals do basically as soon as they're safe and it's what we should be doing too as soon as we're safe,

But we tend to lock up and hold and not express and all sorts of things,

Not tremor,

And so this charge goes into our system,

It freezes up,

I like to say it goes in the freeze response and then it quickly,

Or maybe not so quickly,

But eventually it goes,

It goes numb and it goes into what in somatics we might call SMA,

Sensory motor amnesia.

So the reason we want to have a sense of what this is is because when we're discharging layer by layer,

These charges,

What's going to happen is stuff that's long frozen within us are numb,

It's going to start to discharge and unravel and we're going to start to feel things that may have been long lost or forgotten,

Maybe forgotten,

Maybe not,

It could be still present as well,

But things,

The point is things will start to surface and we'll feel that old ache in the shoulder sometimes,

Either that trapped emotion that's coming free and that's not a bad thing,

I want to emphasize like this one doesn't happen the majority of the time,

It's a very minority of the time generally,

But sometimes that will happen and I want you to,

I invite you to see that as a positive thing because often to come into full integration,

Full processing,

Full healing,

We need to feel it to heal it and as we start to feel it,

It's an opportunity to to basically discharge that charge and fully process it,

Whereas before we bottled it up,

Now we're unbottling and this in this unbottling process,

We sometimes feel things that aren't so comfortable and so so even trauma,

Yeah,

It's a kind of,

All this stuff is a kind of charge to the mind,

Body,

Complex,

The nervous system and this mechanism can discharge these charges,

You know,

In top therapy it's helpful to have a logical concept around the difference of a stress and a trauma etc,

But even a a thousand stresses built on top of each other might add up to be just as bad as that really big trauma that gave someone PTSD,

So keep that in mind because to the nervous system,

It's a charge and it's building,

Right?

So as all this happens,

As your shaken medicine journey unravels you,

There's some key somatic tools we like to use,

So one is we want to do our best to stay in feeling and stay with our senses,

To be interoceptive,

That means to feel within us,

To keep the awareness within us and do our best to stay in a witness state of consciousness and maybe a bit proprioceptive too,

Which is aware of our environment and this mechanism we're embodying,

It makes us more sensitive,

Well because it's a tool we're embodying and it simultaneously makes us much more resilient,

So this idea of somatic idea of titration is important,

So as one of those charges is unraveling,

As that SMA,

That sensory motor amnesia comes through,

You start feeling something uncomfortable,

What we want to do is feel it for a bit and not just not go too far,

Too quick,

Too fast,

Basically titrate into it,

Feel it for a bit,

Allow the shaking to shake it to process and then back off,

Back out of it,

Go to another shape or rest and integrate,

Especially for anything that's intense and just by bit by bit going in and out,

In and out,

We stay within our window of tolerance to keep it sustainable essentially and if you go in a bit,

Discharge some of it and back off,

Integrate and then do some more bit by bit,

Eventually you'll safely unravel that trauma or heal that old injury,

So think small,

Take it in small pieces,

Every little bit of of progress,

No matter how seemingly small,

Is massive when it comes to our health and well-being journey,

So enjoy that,

This idea of pendulation is,

It's kind of similar to titration,

We go into the extreme experience or the uncomfortable experience and then we back off and we go to our safe place to help us ground and integrate and process and so essentially the idea of pendulation is oscillating between the distress and calm,

To help us find the calm we could do something called resourcing which is like,

One thing is to have a reference state of like a time that you,

A time and place,

A moment that you felt really safe or maybe people you're with and you go there,

Calm and ground or it could be in more of a qigong style,

Like bring your awareness to your feet and ground the energy,

Like make the earth your safe place and then that's also cool because it helps ground all the energy down and move it to the earth,

So one last thing here,

The beautiful trauma onion analogy,

So all these charges that get pent up over a lifetime,

Possibly many thousands of them,

Maybe just tens or hundreds or whatever,

Everyone's unique,

But they stack layer by layer in all different sorts of unique configurations and condensations of charges and basically this mechanism,

A nice way to look at it,

It finds the outer layer,

The intelligence of it,

Especially as we progress and can surrender to it more,

We find that outer layer,

It vibrates it free,

It shakes it and then that layer peels away and that,

Honestly,

If you do one layer a class or a day or every few days,

You're making massive progress,

We want to integrate,

Ground and sustainably keep going and maybe the next day or a few days later do the next layer,

Basically just don't over shake,

Just take it one layer at a time and before you know it,

That sustainable cultivation and practice of this will bring you closer and closer to the core,

The truth of it all and you'll be moving towards balance and harmony sustainably and consistently.