Managing vs. Allowing

In somatic therapy, you’re not trying to “manage” your experience so that you feel better. Somatics is not about controlling your thoughts and emotions to avoid getting triggered or figuring out hacks to optimize your nervous system. These are all “top-down” approaches, where you’re relying on your goal-oriented cognitive brain to produce results.

Instead, somatics is a “bottom-up” approach. Here, you’re learning how to “listen” to your present-moment experience—your sensations, movements, emotions, images, impulses. Alongside a trained professional, you explore attuning to the “waves” of your nervous system. And you practice letting your nervous system regulate itself. In the process, you let it discharge any stuck survival energy and develop flexibility so that it doesn’t get stuck in protective states like fight, flight, and freeze.

Wild animals are great at “clearing out” their nervous systems. After they survive a dangerous event, like getting chased by a predator, they make sure to give the nervous system a chance to “release” the experience. They take the time to feel the survival energy that’s left over from the dangerous event, and they let that energy discharge by allowing the body to spontaneously vibrate, shake, convulse, yawn, or stretch.

But we humans tend to get stuck in our survival states. Our big brains get in the way of the discharging process. The “charge” lives on in our bodies. It’s as if the nervous system doesn’t really get the message that the danger is over now.

This is where somatic therapy can be so transformative. Again, in somatics, we’re not focusing on managing the outside world by controlling other people or orchestrating situations so they don’t trigger us. And we’re not focusing on managing the inside world through active stress-relieving techniques like deep breathing or yoga or mental affirmations.

These strategies can be useful, of course. They can be very helpful habits! But they’re not arising from our innate self-regulating instincts. In somatics, we’re putting aside our strategies and letting our innate healing intelligence take over.

For thousands of years, Daoists have pointed at this practice of “inner listening” and “allowing.” Inner listening is known in Chinese as 聽 ting. It’s the act of letting your attention soak into your body and just being open and receptive to what arises.

Then there’s the Daoist term 無為 wu wei, which is typically translated as “non-doing,” but might be better rendered “not controlling” or “not managing” or “not getting in the way.” Wu wei is the practice of allowing our natural, innate self-regulating capacities to do their thing. It’s about getting out of our own way so that we can thrive, instead of being stuck in painful protective states.

When we simply listen (ting) and allow (wu wei), we flourish. We grow, we evolve, we thrive. Like a plant flourishing in the right conditions, we flourish through though attuning inwardly and letting our nervous system regulate itself.

My role in our somatic sessions is to support this process. I provide guidance so that your nervous system starts to “remember” how let go of old stresses instead of clutching onto them. So that you can digest and metabolize traumatic experiences. So that you can start living in the fresh unfolding of the present moment.