Somatic Experiencing

Day 16 of 21 days sharing drawings from my book, I AM ALIVE: Creating Resilience and Healing Trauma with Art published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam.

Text: Charred on top: no life

Underneath: burnt, raw, pulsating, alive

In the depths of my suffering at the time, returning to life was something I never had imagined could be possible.

This image was drawn after sessions of somatic experiencing (see Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger).

I had been disassociated from my body for over a year, and part of the process of somatic experiencing therapy was to ever so gently, with tiny steps (so as to not overwhelm) enter into the sensations of my body which had been intensely radiated.

This is what I discovered: underneath the skin felt burnt, raw yet pulsating and alive. The top of my skin felt charred like a forest fire.

Although there was a sense of pulsating life in the body, my mind was in such a state of shell shock, that I did not really believe or know that I would get better. In retrospect, I find it fascinating that when I found the safe space to sit in curiosity about how my body felt, I associated my body to the forest fires I knew from my childhood in Australia: what looked like charred devastation always had a life force underneath… life would return in time. The innate wisdom of my body knew that it would return to life.

It was extraordinary to experience first hand, how this human body did return to life. It took years, and lots of attention, therapy, love, meditation, prayer, connecting with nature… but it did happen.