somatics and ritual are the same thing.

Something I’ve been fascinated with for awhile is that mainstream “somatics” and ritual practice both have a 3 stage model for how they move through time. I think they are not disconnected.

In fact, I think they are the same thing.

Before we get started: my notorious disagreement with mainstream “somatics” is why the “somatics” is in quotation marks in some places here.

Somatic practices are and have always been embodied practices that are embedded in our ancestral lineages for thousands of years, and are -currently present- in many Afro-indigenous, non-white, and otherwise indigenous practices, and that are being re-packaged and regurgitated to us in a medicalized ‘formula’ called “somatics”.

much of what is now being repackaged and given to us as “somatics” is also directly stolen from long-standing Buddhist, Vedic, and explicitly indigenous traditions, without being cited. that said, I am trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, which is stated as being rooted in Yogic tradition, and I am holding the wisdom that it contains with this very clear commitment to continue to study and name the actual lineages.

Definitions:

somatics: means ‘of or having to do with the body’ and is from the Greek root word “soma.”

tangibly, we practice somatics by bringing our focus to our body/ies: sensations (ie. heat/cold/tension/expansion), gestures, instincts, habits and relationships. as we focus on our body, this opens up a field of awareness, impressions, imprints that also holds/is held by the land, ancestors, spirits, and other than human kin.

ritual: practices done repeatedly and with intention, often spiritual in nature. from the Latin ritualis, “relating to religious rites.” (etymology.com)

i.e. scrolling on your phone can be a ritual (no judgment, just noting), so can lighting candles for an ancestor. what are you practicing repeatedly and with intention?

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In many current mainstream “somatics” modalities (Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Hakomi, Kathy Kain’s touch work, and I think also NARM), the training emphasizes what they call a “stage-based approach to trauma treatment.” Now, as I said, I am notorious for changing anything, and while I won’t change anything here, I will add something: in my experience, their stages aren’t quite linear.

Their stages are roughly: 1. stabilization. 2. trauma processing. 3. integration. (I would also probably re name these… probably to something like 1. support 2. reconnection + processing work 3. integration).

A reason why I love this is because in ritual work, we also have 3 stages (as I’ve learned from Lara Veleda Vesta and Malidome Patrice Some).

They are roughly 1. Initiation. 2. Liminality. 3. Integration. In my opinion, these are actually the same thing?!?! This is why I say somatics is ritual. When we are doing somatic practice, we are also doing ritual practice, inherently.

This also connects with one of my favorite essays that I incessantly return to from my mentor Susan Raffo, the 3 stranded cord that she holds of what Healing Justice means for her: 1. Stop the violence (both externally, the white supremacist violence and the ways we enact that internally on ourselves) 2. Come into connection 3. create the container for deep healing.

Lastly, and I’m less well versed in this as of yet and still learning about it, and invite reflections from those who know more: this reminds me of the ancestral technology of the 3 cauldrons from Irish folklore and magic practice. I will not do them justice at explaining them very well since I am still a beginning learner on this and still determining which sources are trustworthy (a whole thing in Irish folklore), so I defer to those who might know better and trustworthy sources.

3 is a sacred number. As a nonbinary person, I also love the transcendence of binary inherent in 3. The first tarot card I worked with for an extensive amount of time was the 3 of Cups (what a gorgeous card - *glimmer eyes*). One of the things I found in studying 3 of Cups was the inherent way it transcends the binary of 2, especially in relational binaries, and brings in another way. In my first deck, the card was called Celebration. Apt.

In current mainstream “somatics” modalities, that first phase - support (and/or Initiation, bringing ritual in) - is emphasized as absolutely necessary and absolutely the very first thing you must do.

Why?

When we experience repeated relational trauma (which is in essence what developmental or complex trauma is - intensity repeated across time that is often relational, not always, but mostly) or repeated trauma in general, our nervous systems are inflamed because of the unpredictability.

We are running fully on survival instinct, which is all in the limbic system, the earliest part of our brain: the part of us that feels a hot stove under our hand and is going to yank the hand away without consciously even thinking about it.

(by the way, our instinctual self does a lot more things than just trying to survive… and accessing our whole instinctual selves is one of my favorite/most beautiful/most powerful things about “somatics” work, to me - this is also where access desire, power, and where we feel what Audre Lorde calls “the erotic” in one of my most seminal, core “somatics” texts)

Fight, flight, freeze, appease power, submit - all of this happens below conscious thought and is our body, instinctual self, trying to survive.

In this space never know what is going to happen, and it is chaotic, terrifying, and overwhelming. Our bodies cannot get steady enough to digest anything that has happened to us, and we are, or feel like we are, going from disaster to disaster.

(I say “feel like we are” to highlight how this can replay if we are actually out of the space where disaster is happening, but our body is still replaying it on a nervous system level and has not remembered yet that disaster is not happening)

A lot of common CPTSD/developmental trauma responses (or symptoms - I just hate medicalized language) come from trying to manage chaotic and overwhelming situations or relationships, or our body’s memory of them that is replaying when familiar situations come up again and again.

In order to support our body to be able to actually process relational or repeated trauma, alchemize it, and digest it, our body has to be able to find support to do so. The disaster has to have passed, and crucially - our body or instinctual self has to feel like it has passed. Often, in repeated trauma, we have found moments of support and then had that pulled away. So, in order to be able to digest, we need -not just support- but -consistent and reliable support.-

In other words, we need something predictable and relationally stable across time that we not only cognitively notice, but that our body and nervous system can sense from that instinctual place.

Aka, stop the violence.

(side note that is actually a main note: do you see how collective and how necessary it is that we do this on a collective and politicized level?? how imperialism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy is making this work much harder to establish this inherent processing that is actually our birthright?)

(side note main note 2.0 - this is actually still possible in pockets to connect and work towards deep healing BECAUSE we are able to stop the violence in smaller iterations. when we do so, that stopping the violence ripples out into our communities and creates more pockets of places where healing can happen. so I do want to emphasize that it is possible to heal while also very fiercely holding the collective necessity of collective stopping the violence… and I will just add on that like Klee Benally, I like hope that burns cop cars and sometimes our healing comes from actual, literal, and visceral stopping the violence)

That is what the first phase of somatic trauma work does: it establishes consistent, reliable relational support over time. This is also why I deeply emphasize building relationship with my clients: it helps to rebuild your internal pattern of what to expect from relationships.

So in this first phase, a lot of what we are doing is just helping body to find consistency and stability and resource over time: noticing how your body is already protecting you, noticing how your body is already working to support you and enhancing it, noticing the land. We might also notice boundaries you might need in our relationship and when you might want to say no, yes, or maybe to me and how that feels in your body. We do this over and over, until your body and instinctual self starts to get the idea that they can trust it.

In ritual, we have initiation of the ritual, which is setting the space, evoking and invoking ancestors and spirits and land and energy to the liminal space we are about to go into. We call in those spirits, ancestors, and land, and set an environment that will support us as we go into the ritual. We may say specific words or phrases that mark the beginning of this phase.

And then in ritual, we travel into the liminal, which I believe is a place outside time. There we receive messages, have ecstatic experiences, trance out, etc, whatever the spirits and ancestors have for us in that space.

In “somatics”TM, it’s my experience that the second and third phase arise of their own volition. That is, once your body and instinctual self feels how it can trust resources and support over time, trauma comes up to be resolved -on its own-. I’ve seen this happen over and over again in relationships I build with clients. Some time after we have begun (maybe a few months, maybe a few years, it depends on the person/body), we move from just letting body and instinctual self find support, which has a big impact all on its own - to processing.

I believe that trauma processing is also outside time. I notice that when we move into ‘processing’ in somatics, we are also moving “outside time.” We might be moving back in time to re inhabit a time or space in which you experienced an intense event, holding it together to allow it to digest. Then what I notice is, as we hold it together, it’s as if that piece integrates both in consensus time and in non-linear time, on its own.

Just like how in ritual, we leave linear time, receive messages from spirits, ancestors, and other than human kin in liminal and non linear time, and then return to consensus time while integrating what we have received outside of time.

As we integrate, trauma/intensity is able to digest, and we have expanded access to our instinctual selves, which inherently can feel into connection, can feel into the whole, can feel into both consensus time and non-linear time at the same time. Not just cognitively, but feeling from inside, around, with body. We are connected, deeply, viscerally. Integrated. Re-membered. Whole.

Stop the violence. Come into connection. Build the conditions for deep healing. Do you see how this builds?

This is true collectively as well as personally. As Raffo says: stopping the violence ALSO means stopping the violence of genocide, police brutality, long Covid, etc, etc etc.

The second phase, processing (or liminality, in ritual), is also where I notice it start to become less linear and more like looping or spirallic. Now that your body and instinctual self feels that there is sufficient support from a felt level, it can sort of weave in and out of pulling in trauma or intensity threads that need some support, so then we can process and integrate. Sometimes the integrating becomes further support, and hence the cycle continues.

Wholeness builds on wholeness. We are woven back in.

so with that - we are in a global moment of ever-increasing violence. where violence has ripped us from the threads of connection, across our communities, interpersonally, and also collectively.

I’ve noticed how we are all struggling to find support in this time. from this post, in honor of this ritual structure, in honor of stopping the violence and letting it ripple outward, I invite you to answer the following questions here, in your journal, and with your communities:

what rituals evoke support, for you?

how can you stop the violence, both personally and collectively? (be mindful that this is the internet and decide what you want to say here!)

is there a person, place on the land, animal, spirit that you feel supported by, however small?