somatic experiencing

107 articles
UP 28 IF 36 HW 18 NW 15 SC 10
UP addiction recovery

Alcohol Use Disorder: Integrative Treatment

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is the most prevalent substance use disorder worldwide, affecting approximately 283 million people globally according to WHO estimates. It is also among the most biochemically destructive addictions, damaging virtually every organ system — liver, gut, brain, pancreas,...

14 min · 33 concepts
UP addiction recovery

The Neurobiological Basis of Addiction

Addiction is among the most misunderstood conditions in modern medicine. For decades, it was framed as a moral failing or a simple lack of willpower.

14 min · 35 concepts
UP addiction recovery

Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy for Addiction

The use of psychedelic substances for treating addiction is simultaneously one of the oldest therapeutic practices in human history and one of the most promising frontiers of modern psychiatry. Indigenous cultures have used ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, and psilocybin mushrooms for healing addiction...

18 min · 2 researchers · 41 concepts
UP addiction recovery

Trauma-Informed Addiction Recovery

The relationship between trauma and addiction is not correlational — it is causal, bidirectional, and deeply embedded in neurobiology. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study, conducted by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda with over 17,000 participants, demonstrated a dose-response...

17 min · 7 researchers · 36 concepts
IF breathwork science

Respiratory Physiology and Consciousness: The Bridge Between Worlds

There is a peculiar fact about human physiology that has been hiding in plain sight for as long as humans have been breathing — which is to say, forever. Of all the autonomic functions that sustain your life — heartbeat, digestion, blood pressure regulation, hormone secretion, immune...

11 min · 4 researchers · 23 concepts
UP case studies

Case Study: Seven Medications and a Score of Seven — Childhood Trauma, Autoimmune Disease, and the Path from Broken to Whole

Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case

33 min · 38 concepts
UP case studies

Case Study: The Woman Who Was "Fine" — Chronic Fatigue, Hashimoto's, and the Cost of People-Pleasing

Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case

26 min · 31 concepts
UP case studies

Case Study: The Gut That Held the Secret — IBS, Panic Disorder, and the Bidirectional Gut-Brain Axis

Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case

32 min · 1 researchers · 38 concepts
UP case studies

Case Study: The Body That Kept the Score — PCOS, Insulin Resistance, and Childhood Emotional Neglect

Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case

29 min · 29 concepts
UP case studies

Case Study: The Woman Whose Pain Was Real — Fibromyalgia, Central Sensitization, and Thirty Years of Unshed Tears

Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case

38 min · 42 concepts
UP case studies

Case Study: The Warrior's Return — PTSD, Intergenerational Trauma, and the Four Directions of Healing

Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case

32 min · 1 researchers · 44 concepts
HW chronic disease

Autoimmune Disease: A Functional Medicine Approach

Autoimmune diseases represent one of the most significant and rapidly growing categories of chronic illness worldwide, affecting an estimated 24 million Americans and up to 8% of the global population. These conditions — ranging from Hashimoto's thyroiditis and rheumatoid arthritis to lupus,...

14 min · 1 researchers · 25 concepts
HW chronic disease

Chronic Pain: Integrative Management Beyond Medication

Chronic pain — defined as pain persisting beyond the normal tissue healing time of 3-6 months — affects an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide and is the leading cause of disability globally. In the United States alone, chronic pain costs over $635 billion annually in medical treatment and...

16 min · 2 researchers · 32 concepts
NW conflict resolution

Restorative Justice Principles

Restorative justice represents a fundamental paradigm shift in how societies understand and respond to harm. Rather than asking "What law was broken?

15 min · 12 concepts
IF contemplative neuroscience

Interoception: The Hidden Sense That Connects Body Awareness to Consciousness

You were taught five senses in school: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. This taxonomy, inherited from Aristotle, is wrong.

17 min · 2 researchers · 19 concepts
SC consciousness

Biological Computationalism: The Third Path to Consciousness

The philosophy of consciousness has been stuck in a binary trap for decades. On one side: functionalism (classical computationalism), which holds that consciousness is substrate-independent computation — that any system implementing the right algorithm, whether silicon or carbon, would be conscious.

17 min · 3 researchers · 16 concepts
SC consciousness

The Hidden Architecture of Suffering: Grof's COEX Systems

Imagine your psyche as a vast library. Not organized alphabetically or chronologically, but organized by feeling.

11 min · 4 researchers · 10 concepts
SC consciousness

Interoception The Science of Internal Sensing

Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we take your complex sources, the foundational research,

32 min · 1 researchers · 21 concepts
SC consciousness

Western Science Meets Indigenous Wisdom

Okay, let's unpack this. We are diving deep today into one of the most intellectually

29 min · 4 researchers · 33 concepts
IF creative arts healing

Dance/Movement Therapy

Dance/movement therapy (DMT) is the psychotherapeutic use of movement to promote emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration. Founded on the principle that body and mind are inseparable, DMT works with the fundamental human capacity for movement expression — the way we hold our...

15 min · 3 researchers · 20 concepts
SC consciousness

Yoga, Vedanta, and Neuroscience for Healing

Okay, let's get into it. The source material we have today is centered on this incredible learning module, Sivananda, integrating yoga, Vedanta, and neuroscience.

29 min · 29 concepts
IF dream work

Nightmares and Trauma Processing: Clinical Approaches to Disturbed Dreaming

Nightmares occupy a clinical territory that bridges sleep medicine, psychiatry, and trauma psychology. Far from being trivial nocturnal disturbances, chronic nightmares affect 4-8% of the general adult population and up to 80% of individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),...

17 min · 4 researchers · 25 concepts
IF dream work

Jungian Dream Analysis: The Collective Unconscious, Archetypes, and the Path of Individuation

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) developed the most comprehensive psychological framework for understanding dreams since Freud — and departed radically from Freud's model by proposing that dreams are not disguised wish fulfillments but authentic, purposive communications from the unconscious psyche,...

17 min · 1 researchers · 14 concepts
NW emotional healing

Co-Regulation and Attachment Healing: We Heal in Relationship

Before we can regulate ourselves, we must be regulated by another. This is not a therapeutic philosophy.

14 min · 1 researchers · 17 concepts
NW emotional healing

EMDR Protocol: Mechanism, Evidence, and Clinical Application

Category: Emotional Healing | Level: Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel

12 min · 1 researchers · 10 concepts
NW emotional healing

Emotional Body Mapping: Where Feelings Live in Your Flesh

In 2014, a research team led by Lauri Nummenmaa at Aalto University in Finland published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that visualized what poets, healers, and anyone who has ever felt a "broken heart" or "butterflies in the stomach" have always known:...

12 min · 3 researchers · 17 concepts
NW emotional healing

Emotional Intelligence: The Capacity That Changes Everything

Category: Emotional Healing | Level: Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel

13 min · 5 researchers · 20 concepts
NW emotional healing

Polyvagal Theory as Applied Healing Framework

Stephen Porges did not merely propose a theory of the autonomic nervous system. He overturned a century of physiological orthodoxy.

11 min · 6 researchers · 22 concepts
NW emotional healing

Somatic Experiencing: Healing Trauma Through the Body

In 1969, a young biophysicist and psychologist named Peter Levine was working with a client named Nancy. She suffered from severe anxiety, migraines, chronic pain, and agoraphobia.

11 min · 2 researchers · 12 concepts
NW emotional healing

Tremor Release Exercises (TRE): The Body's Built-In Shaking Medicine

David Berceli was working in war zones. Not in a research lab, not in a therapy office, but in bomb shelters in the Middle East and Africa.

11 min · 1 researchers · 13 concepts
UP energy medicine

Pranic Healing and Subtle Anatomy: Mapping the Energy Body

Across cultures and millennia, healing traditions have described a vital life force that animates living beings and whose balanced flow determines health and disease. In Sanskrit it is called prana, in Chinese qi (chi), in Japanese ki, in Hawaiian mana, in Tibetan lung, and in ancient Greek pneuma.

15 min · 1 researchers · 29 concepts
IF float tank sensory deprivation

Theta States and the Float Tank: One Hour to What Takes Years of Meditation

Every state of consciousness has a brainwave signature. Ordinary waking awareness — the state in which you read, plan, worry, and navigate the social world — is characterized by beta waves (13-30 Hz): fast, low-amplitude oscillations associated with focused attention, analytical thinking, and...

11 min · 1 researchers · 19 concepts
HW food as medicine

Gut Healing Foods and Fermentation: Rebuilding the Inner Ecosystem

The gastrointestinal tract is not merely a digestive tube — it is the body's largest immune organ (housing 70-80% of immune cells), its primary neurotransmitter production facility (producing 95% of serotonin and 50% of dopamine), and the habitat for a microbial ecosystem of 38 trillion...

16 min · 19 concepts
UP grief death

Anticipatory Grief and Terminal Illness

Anticipatory grief — the mourning that begins before a death has occurred — is one of the most psychologically complex and clinically underrecognized forms of bereavement. First described by Erich Lindemann in 1944, anticipatory grief encompasses the emotional, cognitive, and somatic responses...

14 min · 22 concepts
UP grief death

Childhood Grief and Developmental Impact

When a child loses a parent, sibling, or other primary attachment figure, the impact reverberates across every dimension of development — cognitive, emotional, social, physiological, and spiritual. Children do not grieve less than adults; they grieve differently, filtered through developmental...

15 min · 1 researchers · 21 concepts
UP grief death

Complicated Grief and Prolonged Grief Disorder

Most bereaved individuals, despite the intensity of their suffering, gradually adapt to loss through a natural process of oscillation between grief and restoration. For approximately 7-10% of bereaved adults, however, grief becomes a chronic, debilitating condition that does not follow the...

15 min · 27 concepts
UP grief death

Cultural Death Practices and Healing

Every human culture has developed elaborate rituals, beliefs, and practices surrounding death — not as mere superstition, but as sophisticated psychosocial technologies for processing loss, maintaining community cohesion, and addressing the existential crisis that death presents. These...

13 min · 13 concepts
UP grief death

Disenfranchised Grief

Not all grief receives social recognition. When a society defines certain losses as insignificant, certain relationships as illegitimate, or certain grievers as undeserving of sympathy, the result is disenfranchised grief — mourning that is real, intense, and psychologically valid but that the...

16 min · 10 concepts
UP grief death

The Neuroscience of Grief

Grief is among the most disruptive neurobiological events a human being can experience. Far from being merely an emotional reaction, bereavement activates and reorganizes neural circuits spanning the prefrontal cortex, limbic system, brainstem autonomic centers, and reward pathways.

14 min · 1 researchers · 38 concepts
UP grief death

Somatic Grief and Body-Based Healing

Grief does not reside only in the mind. It lodges in the chest as a physical ache, tightens the throat until swallowing becomes difficult, clenches the gut into chronic nausea, collapses the posture into the protective curl of a wounded animal.

15 min · 5 researchers · 33 concepts
UP indigenous science systems

Shamanic Cartography: How Ancient Consciousness Maps Encode Neurological Reality

Every civilization creates maps. The question is: maps of what?

16 min · 28 concepts
HW functional medicine

Chronic Pain: Rewiring the Pain System

Acute pain is a gift. It tells you to pull your hand from the fire, to stop walking on a broken ankle, to rest after surgery.

16 min · 4 researchers · 38 concepts
HW functional medicine

Emotional Eating & Food Addiction: The Neuroscience & Functional Approach

A heroin addict and a binge eater sit in the same brain scanner. Nora Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse slides the images side by side.

11 min · 2 researchers · 32 concepts
HW functional medicine

GLP-1 Agonists (Ozempic/Wegovy): Functional Medicine Support During Use

Semaglutide — marketed as Ozempic for diabetes, Wegovy for weight loss, and tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound) combining GLP-1 and GIP activity — has become the most consequential pharmaceutical development in obesity treatment in decades. The weight loss is real: 15-20% of body weight in clinical...

10 min · 16 concepts
HW functional medicine

Graves' Disease: The Functional Approach to Hyperthyroidism

If Hashimoto's is a slow siege, Graves' disease is an inferno. The immune system produces thyroid-stimulating immunoglobulin (TSI) — an antibody that mimics TSH and locks onto the TSH receptor, forcing the thyroid to produce hormone relentlessly.

10 min · 1 researchers · 27 concepts
HW functional medicine

Obesity & Weight Resistance: The Functional Medicine Approach

The conventional weight loss paradigm is brutally simple: eat less, move more. Calories in, calories out.

9 min · 21 concepts
HW functional medicine

TMJ Dysfunction: The Whole-Body Connection

The temporomandibular joint is the most used joint in the human body. You activate it every time you speak, chew, swallow, yawn, or clench.

12 min · 1 researchers · 16 concepts
HW functional medicine

The Low-Histamine Diet: Complete Clinical Guide

A patient presents with a collection of symptoms that seem unrelated and unpredictable. Migraines that come and go without obvious pattern.

9 min · 11 concepts
HW functional medicine

Eating Disorders: The Functional Medicine Perspective

Eating disorders are the deadliest psychiatric conditions. Anorexia nervosa carries a mortality rate of 5-10% — higher than depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia.

10 min · 26 concepts
HW functional medicine

PTSD & Trauma: The Functional Medicine Approach

Trauma is not a psychological event. It is a full-body recalibration — a rewiring of the nervous system that changes how you breathe, digest, sleep, and relate to other humans.

10 min · 5 researchers · 44 concepts
HW functional medicine

Frequency-Specific Microcurrent (FSM): Resonance as Medicine

Every cell in the human body is a battery. The transmembrane potential — the voltage difference between the inside and outside of a cell — runs at negative 70 to negative 90 millivolts in healthy tissue.

12 min · 14 concepts
HW functional medicine

How Stress Makes You Sick: The Mind-Body Connection

Your stress response is 200 million years old. It was engineered for one scenario: something is trying to kill you right now.

17 min · 3 researchers · 49 concepts
HW functional medicine

Pediatric Behavioral & Mood Issues: The Functional Medicine Approach

A child who can't sit still is not necessarily ADHD. A child who melts down at dinner is not necessarily oppositional.

15 min · 33 concepts
HW functional medicine

Case Management: Sequencing Treatment in Functional Medicine

A patient arrives with twenty symptoms across eight body systems. Labs reveal gut dysbiosis, elevated mercury, suboptimal thyroid, cortisol dysregulation, vitamin D deficiency, insulin resistance, and three food sensitivities.

14 min · 1 researchers · 30 concepts
HW functional medicine

Sleep, Circadian Rhythm, and Nervous System Reset Protocol

Sleep. Circadian rhythm.

17 min · 2 researchers · 41 concepts
HW functional medicine

Pelvic Health: UTIs, Interstitial Cystitis, Vulvodynia & Vaginal Health

The pelvis is a territory most of medicine ignores until something is visibly broken. It houses the bladder, uterus, ovaries, rectum, a dense network of nerves, a muscular hammock (the pelvic floor), and a microbiome ecosystem as complex and consequential as the gut.

15 min · 13 concepts
UP intuition somatic intelligence

Cultivating Intuition: Practical Protocols for Upgrading the Intuitive Antenna

You already have intuition. You have always had it.

23 min · 4 researchers · 21 concepts
UP intuition somatic intelligence

Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis: Why Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does

In the neuropsychological literature, he is known as Elliot. Before his surgery, he was a successful businessman — intelligent, articulate, socially adept, with a loving family and a respected career.

16 min · 1 researchers · 11 concepts
UP intuition somatic intelligence

Developing Somatic Intelligence: A Step-by-Step Protocol for Building the Body as a Consciousness Instrument

You spent twelve or more years in school learning to read, write, and calculate. You learned to analyze arguments, construct essays, and solve equations.

18 min · 4 researchers · 26 concepts
UP intuition somatic intelligence

Polyvagal Theory and Neuroception: How Your Nervous System Reads People Before Your Mind Does

You walk into a room. There are twenty people present.

14 min · 2 researchers · 19 concepts
IF martial arts

Breathwork in Combat Traditions: From Warrior's Shout to Tactical Breathing

Every martial tradition on Earth discovered, independently, that the breath is the master key to combat performance. This convergence is not coincidental — it reflects fundamental physiological truths about the relationship between respiratory patterns, autonomic nervous system regulation,...

17 min · 5 researchers · 24 concepts
IF martial arts

Capoeira, Aikido, and Embodied Philosophy: Liberation, Harmony, and Mutual Benefit

Among the world's martial arts, several traditions stand out not primarily for their combat effectiveness — though they can be devastatingly effective — but for the philosophical depth they embody through movement. Capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian art born from slave resistance, expresses liberation...

17 min · 1 researchers · 11 concepts
IF martial arts

Martial Arts as Moving Meditation: Flow, Embodied Cognition, and the Warrior's Inner Practice

The image of the martial artist in silent, focused practice — repeating a form with total absorption, striking a heavy bag with meditative rhythm, or engaging in sparring with a calm intensity that defies the chaos of combat — points to something neuroscience is only now beginning to articulate:...

15 min · 4 researchers · 34 concepts
IF martial arts

Vietnamese Martial Arts: Vovinam Viet Vo Dao

Vovinam Viet Vo Dao stands as Vietnam's most internationally recognized martial art, a comprehensive fighting system founded in 1938 by Grand Master Nguyen Loc in Hanoi. Born from a young man's determination to synthesize Vietnam's fragmented regional fighting traditions into a unified national...

15 min · 9 concepts
UP prenatal perinatal consciousness

Birth Trauma and the Nervous System Imprint: How Birth Method Programs the First Software Install

Every computer comes with an initial software installation — the operating system, the drivers, the default settings that determine how the machine interacts with the world from the moment it is first powered on. The quality of this initial installation matters profoundly.

16 min · 2 researchers · 22 concepts
SC psychedelics

Ayahuasca: Traditional and Clinical Perspectives

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive botanical preparation originating from the Amazon basin, traditionally brewed from two primary plants: the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, which contains beta-carboline alkaloids (harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine) that act as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), and...

14 min · 34 concepts
SC psychedelics

Ketamine and Dissociative Therapy

Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic developed in 1962 by Calvin Stevens at Parke-Davis and first used clinically in 1970, has undergone a remarkable transformation from battlefield anesthetic to the first truly novel antidepressant mechanism in over half a century. Its rapid-acting...

13 min · 22 concepts
SC psychedelics

MDMA-Assisted Therapy

MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), commonly known as ecstasy or molly in recreational contexts, occupies a unique position in the psychedelic therapy landscape. Pharmacologically classified as an entactogen or empathogen rather than a classic psychedelic, MDMA produces its therapeutic...

14 min · 3 researchers · 32 concepts
SC psychedelics

The Neuroscience of Psychedelics

The scientific study of psychedelic compounds has undergone a remarkable renaissance since the early 2010s, producing some of the most significant advances in our understanding of consciousness, neural connectivity, and brain plasticity in modern neuroscience. Classic psychedelics — psilocybin,...

16 min · 5 researchers · 41 concepts
SC psychedelics

Psychedelic Integration and Ethics

The psychedelic experience itself — however profound, healing, or transformative — is only the beginning. Integration is the process by which the insights, emotions, bodily sensations, and shifts in perspective catalyzed during a psychedelic session are woven into the fabric of daily life,...

16 min · 1 researchers · 28 concepts
NW relationships

Attachment Theory in Adult Relationships

Attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth to understand infant-caregiver bonds, has become one of the most empirically validated frameworks for understanding adult romantic relationships. The central insight is deceptively simple and profoundly consequential: the...

16 min · 26 concepts
NW relationships

Codependency and Enmeshment

Codependency is one of the most widely used and most poorly defined terms in popular psychology. At its worst, the label is weaponized — used to pathologize empathy, caregiving, and relational sensitivity.

16 min · 1 researchers · 15 concepts
NW relationships

Conflict Resolution in Relationships

Conflict in intimate relationships is not a sign of failure — it is an inevitability. Two separate nervous systems, shaped by different attachment histories, cultural backgrounds, family patterns, and personal wounds, attempting to build a shared life will inevitably encounter friction.

16 min · 16 concepts
NW relationships

Family Systems and Intergenerational Patterns

Every person who walks into a therapist's office carries with them, invisibly, the accumulated emotional legacy of their entire family system — patterns of relating, coping, and surviving that were established generations before they were born. A man's difficulty with emotional intimacy may...

18 min · 1 researchers · 15 concepts
NW relationships

Grief, Loss, and Relationship Transitions

Grief is the most universal human experience and the least adequately understood. Every life includes loss — the death of loved ones, the ending of relationships, the dissolution of marriages, the departure of children, the loss of health, identity, homeland, and dreams.

17 min · 23 concepts
NW relationships

Healthy Boundaries and Self-Differentiation

Boundaries are among the most discussed and most poorly understood concepts in popular psychology. The term has been co-opted by self-help culture to mean everything from "telling people what to do" to "cutting off anyone who makes me uncomfortable." In clinical reality, boundaries are something...

18 min · 18 concepts
NW relationships

Sexual Health and Intimacy

Sexuality is among the most powerful forces in human experience — and among the most misunderstood, shamed, and inadequately addressed in healthcare. Sexual health, as defined by the World Health Organization, is "a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to...

16 min · 20 concepts
IF sexuality consciousness

The Cervical-Vagus Nerve Orgasm: A Direct Consciousness Channel That Bypasses the Spinal Cord

In the early 1990s, a woman with a complete spinal cord injury at the T10 level walked into Barry Komisaruk's laboratory at Rutgers University and told him something that the textbooks said was impossible: she could still experience orgasm.

16 min · 3 researchers · 26 concepts
IF sexuality consciousness

Sexual Energy Transmutation: What Science Actually Says About Semen Retention, Brahmacharya, and Jing Conservation

There is a conversation happening in the quiet spaces between science and spirituality — in Taoist monasteries, in yogic ashrams, in online forums dedicated to "NoFap" and "semen retention," in the coaching practices of high-performance athletes — about whether sexual energy can be consciously...

16 min · 4 researchers · 21 concepts
IF somatic therapy

Breathwork as Somatic Therapy: From Pranayama to Polyvagal Regulation

Category: Somatic Therapy / Breathwork | Level: Serpent (South) to Eagle (East) — Medicine Wheel

20 min · 5 researchers · 41 concepts
IF somatic therapy

EMDR Beyond PTSD: Pain, Phobias, Addiction, Grief, and Performance

Category: Somatic Therapy / EMDR | Level: Serpent (South) to Hummingbird (North) — Medicine Wheel

19 min · 1 researchers · 16 concepts
IF somatic therapy

EMDR for Complex Trauma: Modified Protocols for Dissociation, Developmental Wounds, and the Fragmented Self

Category: Somatic Therapy / EMDR | Level: Jaguar (West) to Hummingbird (North) — Medicine Wheel

19 min · 3 researchers · 26 concepts
IF somatic therapy

EMDR and the Neuroscience of Bilateral Stimulation: How Eye Movements Rewire Trauma

Category: Somatic Therapy / EMDR | Level: Serpent (South) to Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel

21 min · 4 researchers · 25 concepts
IF somatic therapy

IFS Clinical Protocol: The 6 F's, Unburdening, and the Art of Self-Led Healing

Category: Somatic Therapy / IFS | Level: Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel

18 min · 1 researchers · 10 concepts
IF somatic therapy

Internal Family Systems: The Neuroscience of Parts, Self, and the Multiplicity of Mind

Category: Somatic Therapy / IFS | Level: Jaguar (West) to Eagle (East) — Medicine Wheel

17 min · 4 researchers · 22 concepts
IF somatic therapy

IFS for Complex Trauma, Addiction, and Eating Disorders: When Firefighters Run the System

Category: Somatic Therapy / IFS | Level: Jaguar (West) to Serpent (South) — Medicine Wheel

18 min · 1 researchers · 21 concepts
IF somatic therapy

Polyvagal Theory: The Unifying Framework for All Somatic Therapies

Category: Somatic Therapy / Polyvagal Theory | Level: Serpent (South) to Eagle (East) — Medicine Wheel

18 min · 1 researchers · 33 concepts
IF somatic therapy

Somatic Experiencing Clinical Protocols: Session Structure, Techniques, and the Art of Tracking the Nervous System

Category: Somatic Therapy / SE | Level: Serpent (South) to Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel

17 min · 1 researchers · 26 concepts
IF somatic therapy

Somatic Therapies and Functional Medicine: Resolving the Root of the Stress-Disease Cascade

Category: Somatic Therapy / Integrative | Level: Serpent (South) to Hummingbird (North) — Medicine Wheel

16 min · 2 researchers · 45 concepts
IF somatic therapy

Somatic Experiencing: Peter Levine's Body-Based Trauma Resolution

Category: Somatic Therapy / SE | Level: Serpent (South) — Medicine Wheel

17 min · 2 researchers · 16 concepts
IF somatic therapy

Trauma Stored in the Body: Fascia, Connective Tissue, and the Somatic Memory System

Category: Somatic Therapy / Integrative | Level: Serpent (South) — Medicine Wheel

17 min · 3 researchers · 18 concepts
UP spiritual emergency

Depersonalization vs. Awakening: When "I Am Not Real" Is Terror or Liberation

Two people sit across from a clinician. Both say the same thing: "I don't feel real.

16 min · 15 concepts
UP spiritual emergency

The Safe Container for Awakening: A Functional Medicine Protocol for Consciousness Transformation

The preceding articles in this series have documented what can go wrong during the awakening process: kundalini syndrome, the dark night, meditation-related adverse effects, depersonalization, psychotic-like episodes, spiritual bypassing, and the full spectrum of spiritual emergency. This final...

17 min · 1 researchers · 49 concepts
UP spiritual emergency

Spiritual Bypassing: When Awakening Becomes a Defense Against Being Human

The most insidious obstacle on the spiritual path is not materialism, not doubt, not laziness, and not even the dark night. It is spiritual bypassing — the systematic use of spiritual concepts and practices to avoid confronting unresolved psychological wounds, developmental deficits, and...

15 min · 5 researchers · 22 concepts
UP spiritual practice

Sacred Sexuality: Tantra, Taoist Alchemy, and the Healing Power of Erotic Energy

The energy that creates a human being — that sparks consciousness into matter, that drives the most powerful desire most people will ever feel — has been treated by most religious traditions with a confusing mixture of reverence and terror. Sexuality is simultaneously the most natural human...

15 min · 1 researchers · 15 concepts
IF trauma neuroscience

EMDR: How Rapid Eye Movements Reprogram Traumatic Memory

In 1987, Francine Shapiro, a psychology doctoral student at the Professional School of Psychology in San Francisco, was walking through a park when she noticed something peculiar about her own mind. She had been ruminating on disturbing thoughts — the kind of repetitive, intrusive cognitions...

16 min · 2 researchers · 16 concepts
IF trauma neuroscience

Neuroplasticity and Trauma Recovery: How the Brain Rewires After Devastation

For most of the twentieth century, neuroscience operated under a doctrine that now seems almost comically wrong: the adult brain was fixed. After a critical period in childhood, the brain was believed to be hardwired — its circuits set, its structure finalized, its capacity for change...

16 min · 2 researchers · 45 concepts
IF trauma neuroscience

Somatic Experiencing: Peter Levine and the Wisdom of the Animal Body

In the African savanna, an impala is chased by a cheetah. The impala runs.

18 min · 3 researchers · 16 concepts
IF trauma neuroscience

Trauma Resolution: The Complete Medicine Protocol for Consciousness Restoration

After decades of research — from van der Kolk's neuroimaging to Porges' polyvagal theory, from Levine's somatic observations to Yehuda's epigenetics — a comprehensive picture of trauma has emerged that transcends any single theoretical framework. Trauma is not primarily a psychological problem,...

18 min · 5 researchers · 49 concepts
IF yoga

The Chakra System as Psychophysiological Map

The seven-chakra system has been diluted by decades of pop-culture appropriation into vague references about "opening your heart chakra" and "balancing your energy." This dilution obscures something genuinely useful: the chakra system is a psychophysiological map that correlates remarkably well...

12 min · 1 researchers · 35 concepts
IF yoga

Hip Openers: The Psoas, Trauma Storage, and Somatic Release

Every bodyworker knows it. Every yoga teacher has witnessed it.

9 min · 1 researchers · 14 concepts
IF yoga

Kundalini Energy: Neuroscience, Awakening, and Safety

Kundalini — from the Sanskrit "kundal," meaning "coiled" — is described in tantric literature as a dormant energy resting at the base of the spine, coiled three and a half times around the Muladhara chakra. When awakened through practice, grace, or sometimes spontaneously, this energy is said to...

12 min · 1 researchers · 38 concepts
IF yoga

Restorative Yoga as Nervous System Reset

Restorative yoga is the practice of supported stillness — holding passive postures for extended periods (5-20 minutes per pose) using props (bolsters, blankets, blocks, straps, eye pillows) to eliminate muscular effort entirely. The practitioner does nothing.

15 min · 3 researchers · 31 concepts
IF yoga

Twisting Postures, Spinal Health, and the Detoxification Question

The human spine is not a rigid column but a dynamic, segmented structure of 33 vertebrae — 7 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, 5 fused sacral, and 4 fused coccygeal — connected by 23 intervertebral discs, 72 facet joints, and a dense network of ligaments, muscles, and fascia. It houses the spinal...

15 min · 1 researchers · 14 concepts
IF yoga

Yoga for Depression: The GABA Hypothesis and Mechanisms of Action

Depression is not sadness. It is a systemic condition that affects every organ system — brain, gut, immune, endocrine, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular — through interconnected pathways of inflammation, autonomic dysregulation, neurotransmitter imbalance, and hormonal disruption.

13 min · 2 researchers · 40 concepts
IF yoga

Yoga Nidra: Clinical Protocols and Applications

Yoga Nidra — literally "yogic sleep" — is a systematic method of inducing complete physical, mental, and emotional relaxation while maintaining conscious awareness. The practitioner lies in Shavasana (Corpse Pose) and follows a guided protocol that moves awareness through the body, breath,...

15 min · 2 researchers · 35 concepts
IF yoga

Yoga for PTSD: The Trauma-Sensitive Approach

Post-traumatic stress disorder is, at its core, a disorder of the body. The traumatic event may be over — sometimes decades in the past — but the body continues to respond as if it is still happening.

13 min · 3 researchers · 27 concepts