Settle Your Nervous System Using Somatic Experiencing®

Day 1 of the course will orient you to the modality of Somatic Experiencing ® (SE) developed by Dr. Peter Levine, as a technique designed to heal trauma and release nervous system responses such as the fight, flight, and freeze responses, that were previously stuck in the body. This module describes how this course is not designed to work with trauma specifically since the teachings are brief and introductory in nature, but its purpose is to teach you the fundamental skills for regulating your nervous system, which can also be helpful as a foundation if you pursue more in-depth SE ® work in the future.

Day 2 of the course guides you through the SE ® skills of grounding and resourcing. In this module, you will learn to feel centered and at peace in your body, making connection with the support provided by your physical environment. You will also learn how to draw from both external resources - positive people, places, things, in your environment, and internal resources - positive sensations, memories, images, thoughts, and emotions that arise in your consciousness, and truly experience savoring these resources so that they register in your nervous system in a deeper way.

In Day 3, you will build off of the skills learned in the previous module by learning to visually orient and draw upon resources that you can see visually in your environment, to then feel the benefits of the pleasant sensations that emerge in your nervous system. From there, you will learn how to track such pleasant sensations in your body, using the rich vocabulary of sensation-based language to become more in tune with the positive physical sensations that your body is capable of feeling.

Day 4 provides an overview of some of the main tools used in Somatic Experiencing ®, pendulation and titration. I will walk you how to “pendulate,” or alternate, between pleasant and unpleasant sensations, so that you can start to modulate your own nervous system states with control. At the same time, we will learn how to “titrate,” or keep the unpleasant sensations, thoughts, or memories, at a manageable level so that we can reasonably work with them instead of become overwhelmed or flooded by them. With these skills, you may start to experience influence and mastery over your own nervous system states.

Our final day of the course will focus on learning what it feels like to physically establish boundaries in our physical space with the use of our bodies in a simple movement exercise. We will also explore using vocal tones to engage the fight response and the ventral vagal nervous system response in a healthy, playful way to deepen our connection with both ourselves and others in our lives.