Reclaiming the Power of Somatic Intelligence
How Feminine Body Wisdom Can Help Us Feel Sane and Gain Important Perspectives
As I hang up the phone with another distraught friend, I hear the echoes of women’s voices in my head.
“I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“My partner doesn’t ever validate my experiences, and what I say doesn’t seem to matter to him.”
“I feel like there’s a gap between my boyfriend’s intellectual capacity and my ability to meet him in our conversations. It makes me feel stupid.”
“I started having panic attacks in the car. It’s so scary!”
“I feel I’m at the bottom of the social rung. After the divorce, it feels like society does not value any of the contributions that I gave to my family.”
These are some of the many comments I’ve heard from my female friends over the past few months.
Confronting the Domestication of Women
I’m struck by the realization that the “domestication” of women has had some very real consequences for us, and it’s time to shine a spotlight on this issue so that we can heal, reclaim, and value our innate wisdom and worth.
After feeling into this whole idea, I feel an immense amount of grief and undiluted rage.
My whole life, I’ve diminished, dismissed, and undervalued my body-knowing.
I can recall countless conversations with all sorts of people where I started feeling things in my body – it could be heat, cold, nausea, a pulling back sensation, unease in my stomach, energy in my head, a swirling feeling – and my reaction toward myself was “How do I stop this?” “What’s wrong with me?” “I have to work on myself more!” and on and on. I’d demand of myself: Control whatever this is. Suppress it. Make it GO AWAY. Because I believed my body wasn’t significant, my mind was.
For many years, not once did it occur to me to stop and ask, “What is my body trying to tell me right now?”
I just thought there was something deeply wrong with me.
Why I Disregarded My Body's Wisdom
That said, it’s not a coincidence that I misread my body’s signals. Now, I finally understand why I reacted this way. It’s due to many factors.
Here are a few reasons why I disregarded my body’s signals:
Since I was a child I was systematically trained by my father not to share my truth or I would have consequences. When I felt a strong feeling in my body that he wasn’t right in his assessment, I’d have to push it down in fear of punishment.
Like in so many other places, the educational system I participated in was entirely created around the central idea that the mind is superior to the body and that producing a pre-meditated answer or solution would give me the biggest reward. Sitting at my desk for hours studying was the norm, and I had to make my body conform to this reality.
While Sweden, at the time when I grew up, was a very secular country, the historical religious background of denying the flesh and that the body was sinful still lingered in the “ethers.” I remember getting a letter from my paternal grandmother where she shared that she, too, used to love to dance as a young girl but that she often had to repent since dancing was “a sin.”
In my family and the culture at large, intellectuals were held in high esteem, and I idolized intelligent and eloquent people from an early age.
I was taught that having a thin body was superior and that I should use my mind to dominate it through diets and exercise.
I learned through media and other cultural messaging that smart people end up on top and get social status. I wanted to be one of them.
Basically, intellectual people are superior. Period.
Once I realized I needed good grades to have the freedom to get into the University program I wanted, I applied myself to school and graduated top of my class. Still, I struggled with things like debating and arguing for a specific cause, and I never could “pick a side.” I knew I was smart, but something still felt wrong, but I didn’t know what. This was my reality for YEARS. I struggled with my worth and thought I needed to be smarter, thinner, funnier, more interesting, something else.
My first “adult” relationship was with a guy from Cambridge. He was highly articulate and intellectual. And anything he said with his British accent automatically sounded waaaaay smarter. I was so turned on every time he opened his mouth that it was hard for me to keep my hands off him. Never mind that he was self-absorbed and always right. Somewhere inside, I wanted to procreate with this man to assert my offspring’s status and survival. It was primal. When he dumped me I thought I would die. I felt some deep shame that somehow, while I had tried to “keep up with him,” I hadn't been enough, making me question my worth.
I desperately did everything I could to live my life from my head, like a good girl, but something wasn’t working.
Finding My Oases
My quest to appear successful and put together enough to have a right to exist and belong was endless. It mostly showed up as people pleasing, codependence, dieting, over-exercising, self-hatred, and led to a constant underlying vague feeling of being a fraud.
But, thankfully, I had a few places that gave me reprieve.
💃🏾 The dance floor. Never did I feel more free and like myself as when I was dancing.
🌳 Nature. Being in water, woods, and the sun always brought me peace and solace.
📚 Books. When consumed by stories, I could forget everything and journey in my mind.
👩🏽🚀 And above all else, WOMEN. I would sit across a woman and share my confusion, experiences, and feelings – I’d meander all over the place in a conversation and ask, “Am I even making sense?” Only to be met with an enthusiastic nod and her saying, yes, yes, YES! You make sense to me. You are good, and you help me feel sane too. Keep going.
The Power of Body Intelligence
Before I dive into my discovery, I want to highlight the distinction between temporary feelings and emotions arising/”triggers” and the various physical sensations we experience in response to a specific situation. In this article, I am talking about the latter – the wisdom and communication that comes from our bodies.
After years on the path of healing my wounds, trauma, and pain, and having integrated more and more of my soul and frozen energy/compartmentalized trauma, something curious started happening. I began realizing that the experiences I was having inside my body weren’t a sign of me being a raving lunatic. As it turned out, I slowed down and learned to listen to my body. I found a truth more powerful than anything I could have fathomed before:
MY BODY WAS COMMUNICATING WITH ME!
She was telling me things about the interactions I was having with others…
Sometimes, she showed me where I had a boo-boo that needed tending, a.k.a. I got “triggered” or “activated.”
Other times, she showed me something going on with the other person.
Now, for a very long time, I would not allow myself to believe this. I was so traumatized I didn’t consider that it might not be me who was the problem. I must be the problem – this was a critical childhood survival tool I had adopted. I also could not bear thinking I knew something about another person because I believed this was a spiritual flaw – I would be “projecting” on them.
(Now, obviously, projection is a very real thing, but it wasn’t what I was doing in the instances I am describing.)
In addition, I was desperately seeking parental figures and teachers whom I put on pedestals so that I could project my unresolved daddy and mommy issues on and, fingers crossed, simultaneously get some real answers about the meaning of existence. PLUS, they might help me advance in the status/money game, and BOY, was this trauma-induced cocktail a recipe for serious drama, trauma-bonding, and relationship shitstorms.
Maybe I Wasn’t the Problem After All…
Anyway, back to the dawn of me realizing that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t always the problem. Maybe other people had their own unresolved shit that they were suppressing that I could pick up on…
Once I had progressed on my healing journey, started taking responsibility for my own peace, and learned about codependent and narcissistic survival patterns, things began to change.
As I built a healthy ego, started asserting my boundaries, and began to request that the people around me treat me with kindness and respect, I also realized that I’d been sitting on – or more actually – sitting IN the most reliable mother fucking ally this WHOLE TIME!!!!
MY BODY.
That time I got cold when my business partner minimized my experience. My body knew!
That time I got nauseous when that guy I was doing business with told me, “Karna, this is what love looks like,” when he belittled me and refused to pay his bill. My body knew!
That time I felt a prickle on the back of my neck, and I didn’t go down that alleyway. My body knew!
All the thousands of times I felt sensations inside, my beautiful body had communicated something to me.
And all those other times when making love, holding a friend, dancing in quiet ecstasy, sitting next to the old Spanish man, feeling a gentle warmth in my belly – she was talking to me.
The times in business, where I made people money and created systems and designs people loved and crafted words that sang the truth, it wasn’t only because I was so bright, but because I FELT MY WAY through the projects.
"A somatically-informed approach to life encourages an ongoing process of self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-care." - Martha Eddy
Embracing Our Innate Somatic Guide
Having had this realization, I opened my eyes and looked around at the women in my life who are big feelers, who know things, who sense things, and saw:
Women everywhere have been deceived.
Robbed.
Gaslighted.
Minimized.
Made to feel less than and crazy.
If this resonates with your experience, I’m here to tell you:
You are NOT crazy.
There’s nothing wrong with you.
Your body is giving you vital information.
Your body-knowing matters.
It’s OK to slow down and listen to yourself.
Maybe your body is telling you something about you.
Maybe your body is telling you about the other person.
Maybe she’s telling you something about God or existence itself.
It’s your job to slow down and listen. Get curious. Take notes.
And you don’t have to get it right. You’re learning a new language. And while it’s your mother tongue, you might not been speaking it in a while, or other people/the culture have said that this language is inferior and makes no sense.
What matters is that we learn how to value this part of our feminine legacy, expression, and truth OURSELVES.
Once we embody this truth fully, begin advocating for it, and stop diminishing it in ourselves and others, then we will begin reshaping the culture, and the people around us can get with the program and begin trusting this part of themselves, no matter their gender.
Everyone Wins When We Embrace Somatic Intelligence
The systemic disregard for women's body knowledge is not just an individual struggle; it echoes across the fabric of society as a whole, eating away at the foundation of our collective well-being.
When the intuitive wisdom encoded within our bodies is silenced, we all suffer from the resulting lack of awareness. This dismissal perpetuates a cycle where the holistic understanding of health, both mental and physical, is fragmented, and the richness of our diverse, embodied perspectives is lost.
It creates a culture where the potential for innovation and empathetic leadership is stifled (hi, corporate America!) and where the very essence of what it means to be fully human is limited. The path forward requires a shift in how we value and integrate the vital body knowledge that women inherently possess, acknowledging it as a compass toward a more holistic, enlightened, and inclusive society.
And we are the ones who have to lead the way by beginning to notice, value, and advocate for our body-knowing – our somatic intelligence.
With love,
Karna 💜
P.S. Want to join an online village where we discuss topics like this and women support one another? Check out the Alignment Sanctuary here.
P.P.S. People of all genders can have this experience. I am simply writing about mine.
Resources:
Authorities on Somatic Intelligence and Psychology from ChatGPT:
Peter Levine - Creator of Somatic Experiencing, a therapeutic approach that addresses trauma and stress disorders.
Bessel van der Kolk - A psychiatrist known for his work on post-traumatic stress and its connection to the body, author of "The Body Keeps the Score."
Pat Ogden - A pioneer in somatic psychology and the founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, which incorporates the body into traditional psychotherapy.
Thomas Hanna - The founder of Hanna Somatic Education, a method of re-educating the body to improve mobility and reduce pain.
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen - The developer of Body-Mind Centering, an integrated approach to transformative experience through movement reeducation and hands-on re-patterning.
Eugene Gendlin - The philosopher and psychologist who developed Focusing, a technique of inner bodily attention for psychotherapy and personal growth.
Dan Siegel - A clinical professor of psychiatry who extensively explores mindfulness and interpersonal neurobiology, focusing on the concept of "mindsight" and the mind's role in bodily regulation, emotional balance, and well-being.
Martha Eddy - A movement therapist, dance educator, and researcher who has contributed to the field of somatic movement therapy and education
Chen Lizra - A TED Speaker, award-winning social entrepreneur, Somatic Intelligence life coach, best-selling author, and professional dancer. (Added by me.)
Further Oppression of Women’s Bodies – AI Edition
As I was writing this article, I decided to play with ChatGPT’s image generator DALL-E 3.
First I asked some general questions to generate a group of women whose bodies were oppressed with an emphasis on their brains.
I got this:
Lots of naked thin women with firm boobs and thin waists.
Then, I tried to get a similar vibe, but only three women, now clothed and “curvy” to see if I could get some more meat on their bodies…
This time, I got conventionally gorgeous women with huge boobs and thin waists. Sigh.
I scrapped this idea altogether because I could not figure out how to prompt for women/message I wanted to depict.
I then moved on to try to create an image for the section about my Oases… I prompted wanted a woman dancing in nature, so I asked ChatGPT for that. But, I had the word “embodied” in the description, which prompted a reply that I was “violating the guidelines.”
So I took that out this time it worked but I didn’t like the result because the women were super thin. So then I asked…
Me:
What prompt do I have to give you so that the woman looks like a regular human and not a perfect model?
ChatGPT:
For an image that represents a more everyday human appearance, you might specify characteristics often associated with real people and avoid terms that imply idealized beauty standards. Here is a sample prompt you could use:
"Create a landscape-oriented image of a woman with an average body type, depicting a natural and relatable look, dancing freely in a vibrant natural setting. She should have a realistic figure, with the natural variations and softness typical of someone who isn't a professional model. The woman should be dressed comfortably, in clothes that move with her as she dances with joy and abandon in the great outdoors. Surround her with a scene that includes lush grass, mature trees, and a wide, welcoming sky. Her movements should be full of life and energy, capturing the essence of genuine, uninhibited dance."
Me:
Yes!"
Here’s the result…
Are you kidding me right now? This is a “woman with an average body type, depicting a natural and relatable look.”
More like, “jerk-off material of a girl-next-door frolicking in nature.”
But I didn’t give up, I prompted: “They still have a very thin, model-looking woman. How can I make her body have more fat?”
ChatGPT was immediately suuuuper helpful and created this:
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? 🤦♀️
Conclusion:
Not only do we have to live in a culture where we are routinely manipulated by diet culture, thin ideals, and constant fat shaming. Now we will have to endure the same from AI robots. UGH.
It will be interesting to see how this will develop over time. Stay tuned.
OH my gosh. Your writing is an inspiration. It moves me. I am so sorry you had to go through so much of that on your own. But being here with you now, I am doubtful I would have wanted it any other way. Your "Trauma and Investigation of it" has made you the incredible human you are today. You are my sunshine, my partner, and my best friend! I appreciate you more than I will ever be able to truly show! You allow me to be in my mess and still love me. You are special and help me on occasion remember I am special too. Thank you, my love. I am thrilled to be here with you as you are breaking out of those chains and shining your wisdom, love, and light on the world. Shine on your Crazy Diamond!
The ChatGPT part -- that made my day. It's so interesting to see how AI is internalizing biases.
This whole piece was an excellent reminder to trust my body and its wisdom. Even when you know, you have to reconnect.