I recently finished the book Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine. In it, Levine, a psychotherapist, relates an animal’s trauma experience to the human body. Here’s how: Imagine an impala is being chased by a cheetah. Naturally, impalas herd as a group in order to escape attack or death. Imagine though one impala trips and falls. The animal is therefore keenly aware that it may not survive the chase. So rather than scare or flee, the impala freezes. Immobility, an involuntary response of an overworked nervous system, gives the animal two choices. One, it allows the impala to dissociate and not feel the full affect of its imminent death. Or, should the cheetah make a lapse in judgement, gives the impala a split second to come back to life and run away unscathed. Now picture a deer eating in a meadow. The doe hears a sudden noise and freezes. She scans the tree line and field before her. Deciding there’s no imminent danger, her body shakes to discharge the accumulated energy due to fright and returns back to grazing. We are no different than the impala or deer. When faced with trauma, we can fight, flee or freeze. The last option, however, doesn’t allow the nervous system to dispel the energy it absorbed when threat surfaces. As such, the body absorbs it and trauma symptoms can soon ensue. The more energy we gather without discharging it, the more hyper aroused we are, the more chronic our behaviour is and we can’t reset. Thus the felt sense. The body is ripe with sensations. Dull, sharp, heavy, tense, big, small, warm, cool. Anything and everything is sensed in and on the body. When we are traumatized, naturally, our body reacts. Our breath and heart rates quicken. We sweat. Our throats close. In short, we feel it. However, we don’t always allow the body to cycle through its sensations fully, and thus, hold onto traumatic energy. According to Levine, we must move through immobility to successful escape as a means of empowerment and to release trauma in the body. When a threat is sensed, our nervous system unconsciously puts us in a hyper aroused state. It is here that we often dissociate to self-protect from further escalation and build up tension in the body (as a false sense of defense) through constriction. In the end, we walk blindly into immobility, and hence helplessness, and so the cycle repeats. Only in feeling the sensations of the body and letting them run their course, often only in minutes, can we discharge the energy we captured at the time of threat. “It is essential that the unresolved activation locked in the nervous system be discharged. This transformation [renegotiation] has nothing to do with memory. It has to do with the process of complete our survival instincts.” Through conscious awareness, the felt sense in the body can provide a gentle energetic release, or as Levine calls it, renegotiation. If not, we fall into the trap of avoidance. It’s here we stay when fear and terror overwhelm us; while active escape (fight or flight) is exhilarating and a pathway to acceptance of personal authority. To this point, finding, knowing or understanding the source of arousal isn’t important. Rather, focus on the felt sense and allow the body to feel into the moment without emoting, rationalizing or condemning its bodily sensations. A must read for healers and meditators who want to better understand the correlation between trauma, body sensations and a pathway to healing.