Intersect: How My Summer Vacation Became My Somatic Awakening

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information,

you are fundamentally at war with yourself…

The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know.

That takes an enormous amount of courage.”

~Bessel van der Kolk, M.D

My body began spasming and shaking. Sweat beading up everywhere. Panic, panic, panic attack attacking me. Breathe. Aimee Takaya (my friend, yoga instructor, and Hanna Somatic Educator) kept her hands on my shoulders, letting me know I was safe. I was not being attacked. I was being held. A terrifying feeling after running away from love for 8.5 years. The only person who had held me during that time was a friend who also pushed me away. It left me in a state of unrest—terrified of being loved. Hypervigilant. (Or maybe I just needed someone to be the one to push me.) Possibly searched for the one. (Maybe I found exactly who I wanted.) Now I wasn’t just trying to escape pain and loss, I was ready to leave my skin behind.

But let’s rewind a bit. I moved to the mountains to heal. My friend Aimee and I met at a local coffee shop for hot cocoa and avocado brownies, to discuss future somatic plans. Then a blizzard hit. I spent weeks shoveling for extra cash and plotting my escape to the Valley—to teach and read at the Association of Writers & Writing Program event, in Washington. After the blizzard, I picked up extra sub jobs and drove five to six hours through Pearblossom and Angeles Forest highways—three days a week—to teach art. I was determined to work myself out of financial stress, due to what the mountain folks proclaimed a Snowmageddon. Sometimes on my way home, I stopped to take photos and went on a few hikes in Devil’s Punchbowl and the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve. I made stops in desert shops and got crafted candies and soda. It wasn’t all apocalyptical. It was heaven too. I watched the sunrise and set—on my drives to and from home. I chased rainbows. I stopped to play in the rivers. I didn’t watch my tears tumble on the rocks. I made wishes and set intentions. As the school term ended and summer warmed the mountain, I tottered into bed—barely able to pull the covers over my body. 

Aside from the occasional hobble to the toilet to throw up—I could barely walk. Hives pushed their way to the surface of my skin, covering my face. I thought all the shoveling from the Crestline blizzard and four hours of driving a day caught up to me, but it was all of my trauma screaming at me through flashbacks. It was psychosomatic. My body felt like it was eating itself—like I was being devoured by fear. My ribs clung to my lungs, pressing down on my heart. My muscles squeezed and shivered as my legs kicked furiously—not nervously. I wasn’t sure if I had had a seizure or not.

My therapist said that Eye Movement Desensitization (EMDR) has caused seizures, in rare cases, but I had been doing EMDR on and off for three years now. Plus, my therapist uses the hand held mechanism that uses vibrations instead of the eye movements. She also felt that since the seizures stopped that she would trust that I was okay. (This was only a concern because I had a skull fracture with a concussion at the age of one, which may have resulted in a Traumatic Brain Injury. And experienced fainting from dissociation, since I was 13. I also had seizures due to psychotropic treatments in the past.) I realized that my trauma was causing my symptoms and had done years of research on plant medicines, which brought me to the conclusion that now was the time to use all of my resources. I did guided plant medicine and the daily vomiting and convulsions stopped. My cat, Mama Berry, did her best to heal me with her mighty purrs, and I finally had a couple of hours of somewhat restful sleep. And even though Mama Berry has powerful purrs, I finally called Aimee and told her I was ready to start my somatic education.

Although somatic bodywork and therapies are just now becoming a new craze, the practice has been around since the 1970s. The Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training, which was founded in 1975 by Thomas Hanna and Eleanor Criswell Hanna, Ed.D., describes their commitment to providing somatic theory, research, and practice to aid others in “reawakening the mind’s control of movement, flexibility, and health” online through their Somatics Educational Resources page, where you can find books, magazines, and CDs. I had first heard about somatics in massage school in 2003, from my massage teacher, Marlene Schwartz. Marlene even had a business called Soma Therapy—I worked there for a little over a year. This form of somatic therapy fascinated me. But, my medical plan didn’t cover it. I wondered how I could find this practice or even afford treatment. Now, over  20 years later, I still couldn’t afford treatment. Aimee and I came up with a plan, and I got a loan from school. I made a huge leap and committed myself to 10 weeks of somatic bodywork, while doing 10 weeks of EMDR, a form of somatic psychotherapy that has been around since the 1980s and is now covered by many medical plans. I mapped out a plan with all of my healing tools. I had my Native American flute, cello, art, poetry, my yoga and massage education, and 11 weeks off of work and plant medicine.

As a person who has spent 24 years in therapy and wrote research on traumatic responses, I knew I would need a team to help me assimilate all the information my body was trying to process. Francine Shapiro, PhD, describes EMDR in Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy as a way of “targeting the unprocessed memories that contain the negative emotions, sensations and beliefs. By activating the brain’s information processing system.” She explains that “old memories can then be “digested.” Meaning what is useful is learned, what’s useless is discarded, and the memory is now stored in a way that is no longer damaging.” I was still processing stories that my family members casually told me about what they had done to me—as if they were cute, funny, and even endearing. How does a person process trauma when abusers try to normalize their abuse? All I could say is that’s not normal. Everything in my body told me it wasn’t okay, but I didn’t understand how to process what they said or what I remembered—until my body forced me to. 

Crawling and dragging my way towards healing has been a long journey. I have made choices in romantic partners that led to furthering my physical, emotional, and mental abuse, and I have learned from them. As Francine Shapiro explains, “The past affects the present even without our being aware of it.” I will not be ashamed by my decisions (conscious or unconscious) but acknowledge that those choices were made because of childhood conditioning and my desire to be loved by adult figures who could only love me in the way they knew how. Somatic bodywork didn’t feel like it would be enough to heal me from the past I was raised in and the paths I had chosen—I needed a team.

I teach youth empathy, introspection, and community building for trauma recovery. My ultimate goal is suicide prevention. I do this because I have been through enough and had years of education and self-discovery to share, but the journey doesn’t just end. I know I’m not just going to sprout wings and fly just because I want to. But as I recently told students I mentor in juvenile hall, we have to start with a dream.   

My dreams started with wishes to heal others, but my memories were gaslit and my nightmares were flashbacks. My body was ready to let go of things I wasn’t willing to admit to myself were real. My biggest struggle was believing my own memories because of gaslighting and brainwashing since I was a small child. I wet the bed and had night terrors until I left my parents’ house—pregnant and married—at 19. I entered an unhealthy marriage. Then separated by 26. I came out of the closet after a suicide attempt at 27. I wrote my past self letters, burnt them, and turned them into mulch. I told my massage clients that we don’t let go until we’re ready, but I didn’t know how much truth there was to that statement until I began to let go. My body was ready since the first time I passed out in the science lab, at 13. I was diagnosed with neuro-cardiogenic syncope by 22, which is now seen as a symptom of trauma. Only as a teen, doctors thought these fainting episodes were panic attacks. Recently, I have been told they are symptoms of my head trauma and dissociation. Now, I could barely rise up by noon. Aimee told me, “You look like you’re holding yourself up. And your body is leaning forward like you’re going into battle.”

She was right. I was in battle. And I was holding myself up—like a marionette. It was hard to lift my feet. I kept tripping on myself. Instead of my brain and body acting as one–my body was my avatar. My mind wouldn’t allow me to let go, because I had to come to terms with the truth. Every time Aimee held a limb to aid me in movement—I spasmed—forced to face the truth. What was worse is that I really needed to be held, but I was repelled by touch and hypervigilant. We did breath work every time fear stopped me from moving forward. We moved to points just before pain shocked me, and often that meant tiny micro movements until I let go.

My friend Aimee held me with patience, understanding, and knowledge. She held me without judgment and allowed me to be present for myself without scrutiny. She is the first person I have ever known who was capable of holding space like that. To feel safe enough to show my ugliest parts. She created a sacred space in my living room and in a studio with her ability to witness. I am positive that location had less to do with my healing than the space within us both. I had finally found the inner space I had been searching for.

Suddenly, I could pick up a cup again. Suddenly, I could sleep. Suddenly, I could sit. Suddenly, she could hold a limb without me jumping and shivering and sweating and crying. So I went to therapy and did EMDR and suddenly, I started to remember. Suddenly, I started writing poetry. Suddenly, I started to smile. Suddenly, my eyes followed. Suddenly, my face stopped scowling. Suddenly, I could walk again. Suddenly, I was me. Suddenly, I was a version of myself I had never got to know. I was awake for the first time.

I still have to keep up with my somatics and sometimes I regress a little, but only to wake up to more realizations about myself. It isn’t as hard to overcome mental, emotional, and physical hurdles as it once was. I think the biggest lesson was in learning that most of my pain was psychosomatic. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. Just the opposite. My injuries were very real, both physical and psychological trauma caused them. Trauma from physical and psychological abuse that caused rashes, hair loss, sprains, tendon damage, a skull fracture, endometriosis, depression, panic disorder, suicidal ideations, seizures, dissociation, etc. It was and is all real. I let go and once I was ready to believe—I never thought I would say this–it was easy.