Peter Levine, Ph.D: TRAUMA/Finding the Roots of Trauma

If you’ve read or heard anything about trauma, you likely knowPeter Levine’s name, as he’s the father of Somatic Experiencing, a body-awareness approach to healing trauma that’s informed the practice of almost every trauma-worker today. Levine is a prolific writer—his international best seller, Waking the Tiger, has been translated into twenty-two languages—though much of his work has been for fellow academics and teachers. He’s just published a new book, An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey, which is highly accessible for all of us. It’s a beautiful book that recounts how he came to understand the somatic experience of trauma through an event in his own childhood—and the scientists and cultures he encountered along the way that informed what ultimately became a world-changing protocol. Today’s conversation explores all of this—including some very surprising appearances by Einstein—so let’s turn to it now.

MORE FROM PETER LEVINE, PHD:

An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey

Waking the Tiger: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

Trauma & Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past

In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

Somatic Experiencing International

RELATED EPISODES:

PART 1: James Gordon, “Tools for Transforming Trauma”

Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”

Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”

Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”

Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”
Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE: Thank you for everything that you've done for all of us. It's pretty remarkable, and I know you're still teaching and still training and it's still spreading, even in my short career, or shorter career, it feels like somatic experiencing everywhere. It might be my algorithm, but I feel like it's really feels like

PETER: It is.

ELISE: to spread it.

PETER: Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Yeah.

ELISE: You're sensing that too, that it's starting to Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, when I started, it was to a group of a dozen or so Berkeley therapists. And they would come to my treehouse in Wildcat Canyon every couple of weeks, and I would kind of try to explain what I was doing or demonstrate what I was doing, and in my mind, that's the end of my teaching was with these 12, 15 people, but then somebody reminded me that it's been taught now in 44 countries to 60, 000 people, and I couldn't comprehend that. It just seemed Unfathomable to me and to be somebody who's carrying that work. Well, actually, to tell you the truth, I'm not carrying that work, not on my own shoulders, because I have about 50 incredibly gifted trainers in somatic experiencing, and they've really taken the load off my shoulders. And so I'm able to much more kind of relax into my life.

get in the ocean and play with the dolphins. But what I think is also so amazing, and we should probably talk about exactly what somatic experiencing is for people who are uninitiated, but you write about how, you know, it's this evolving healing method, and in some ways it doesn't lend itself to anything to be studied or precisely documented, because it's not or maybe it is more formulaic now, but it's not a codified protocol, right? It's like it's being present with what's

PETER: Yeah, I agree. It's important to know that it's not formulaic. There are definite signposts things that we look for, but it's not do A and then do B and then C and D and, but I think probably more than anything, when I started teaching to my cabal of Berkeley therapists, they wanted that this only be taught to psychiatrists and psychologists to nobody else. And I felt that was a mistake because basically somatic experience isn't a form of therapy per se, but it's an approach that really helps people do how they do what they do. So we have people from many, many different disciplines that are reinforced and are supported by the different tools that we've developed in somatic experiencing.

And when I first started to discover that there was something that's trauma, but this was, remember, this was 14 years before there was PTSD, I realized that trauma, again, was not known in that name at the time, is something that happens to people, yes, it happens in the mind that it happens in the brain. But primarily it's something that happens in the body. So for example, when we see something horrifying, so if you go out of your door and you see somebody has been hit by a car and your guts twist. And then if you look out and see the person's really hurt, then the guts twist and twist. And what happens is our bodies forget how to get untwisted. And that's one of the important approaches about somatic experiencing is that we find ways to change the experience in the body to contradict those of overwhelming helplessness. And so in a way, it's different than most approaches, but as I say, it really fits with many, many different approaches and we encourage people to study whether it's who are different disciplines, whether it's psychotherapists or other, whether it's physiotherapists and body workers and so forth, each one has their own unique contact with people, with human beings that can be fortified by understanding these basic principles. so this eventually evolved into a training program, which is now, as I said, taught in 44 countries and by many, many gifted, really deeply gifted teachers. So I have time now really to enjoy my life, to, find places where I really feel nourished, but I also continue to do some work. And I do some work in Switzerland and Europe, and I do a little bit of work now here. But again, now at this point, it's much more something that it's not on my shoulders. You know, I've asked myself the question, Elise, have I done enough? And I can truly say, yes, I have done enough, but it's not on my shoulders anymore. It's on the shoulders of these 50 or so teachers. And so that's an easy no brainer.

ELISE: Yeah.

PETER: The other question is, am I enough? And that's a work in progress. And I think that's how this book, the autobiography of trauma came about because it was really meant only for my own excavation. And it was not meant to be published as a book, which again, obviously it was, and a very good friend of mine, Laura, she said, Peter, you really need to publish this as a book, because it can really help a lot of people with their own trauma, their own issues, and I thought, I can't do that. It's too revealing, it's too exposing. And she said, well, think about it. So often when I'm in conflict or I don't know what my next step is, I'll have a dream and dreams and synchronicities have guided me throughout my whole adult life. In the dream, I'm facing this large field and I have in my hands papers in each of my hands, many, many papers and they're typewritten. And I look to the left and I look to the right and I look again and clearly I'm conflicted. I don't know what to do. And then from behind me, this strong wind comes. This breeze that takes all of these papers and they come into that meadow to land where they may. And that's when I realized, yes, I will do this. I will land where they may. And the thing that I'm committed to myself in the inquiry, and then in writing the book is that it's something that I know can help and again, it's something that became a book. And at first, again, I had a lot of resistance. But again, with some encouragements from my friends, I really decided, yes this could work. This could also help a lot of people in revealing some of what happened to me and this is really in a way the backstory of how I developed somatic experiencing from my own trauma, from my own wounding.

The word trauma actually in Greek means wounding, a wounding of the soul, a wounding of the spirit. So anyhow, I realized that this is something that our shared humanity, that we all have these kind of injuries. And in Greek mythology, there's a archetype called Chiron and Chiron, at least as I understand it is much more of the wounded healer, of how we heal our own wounds and then be able to help others. And I think sometimes therapists lose that and they think they're just helping people, which very much likely they have been, but haven't done their own healing work. And I think that's essential. And that's a lot of what the book is about, how I heal some of the violence and abuse, but also some of the joy in my life that helped me be able to meet some of these without being overwhelmed, because trauma is about being overwhelmed. And when we're able to come to connect with these parts of ourselves that are beyond wounding, that have been there eternally, some parts of the self that have been there before trauma and will be there forever. In the last chapter of the book, The Autobiography, I have a picture of myself as probably an 18 month old child. And the last chapter is called, Living My Dying Through the Eye of the Needle. And I feel this connection, this reconnection, with this precious, gifted child, and hold him in my heart, and then makes it more possible for me to let go into the final part of my life.

ELISE: Beautiful. I loved the format of the autobiography too, because, one, it's a way of walking through in real time, right? I mean, healing yourself and then taking just the myriad teachers, I want to talk to you about Einstein, obviously, but these teachers, real and psychic, who inform this method, it's fun to read, to watch you as you are navigating, trying to understand what's alive in you and how to move it, and then how to, in some ways, codify it for people.

PETER: And folding. It's really very much of an infolding and unfolding.

ELISE: Tell us about your friend and your lifesaver, right? In many ways.

PETER: Yes, Deeps actually, when I wrote my first manuscript and I sent it to a few of my friends to see if, you know, they wanted to say something about it. Well, one of them said, well, I can only endorse it if you leave out the part about Einstein and also the part about the sexual healing. And I said, no, my commitment was to tell the truth wherever it took me and if it took me to this encounter with Einstein.

ELISE: Most important parts of the book.

PETER: So when I was doing my doctoral work in department of biological and medical physics in Berkeley, I was also developing the somatic experiencing and at the end of a long day, I would go to my favorite restaurant. It was called the beggars banquet. It was on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. And when I ever would arrive, the waitresses would always greet me by name and sit me down and say would you like to start with the soup? And I usually said yes. So it would come in piping hot with a nice big piece of French bread, really crispy on the outside and soft and moist on the inside. And so this is something I really look forward to after a difficult day at work, a prime day at. So one day I'm sitting there and all of a sudden I see a shadow coming from the left side and I look up and there's this man with completely unruly hair and a crumpled suit, probably three times too big for him, and he asks if he can sit down, but actually he doesn't really ask. He sits down and introduces himself as Albert Einstein. Now, you know, I'm also a scientist and I realize this isn't something that's really happening, but it's also something that can happen with active imagination. It's not mental imagery. It's not self hypnosis. It's really something that emerges from inside and connects us to this deep knowing, this unconscious, subconscious knowing.

So for a period of a year, I would ask him questions, and he would ask me questions about my questions, really kind of like the Socratic dialogue. And it was very, very useful and informing. And as I say, it went on for a good period of time. Oh, and then also at one time, I really asked them, because I was starting to work with people and realizing it's not just things that happened to them in this life, but these are things that may have happened to people many lifetimes ago. And so I talked to Einstein about that. How do you work with this? And in a dream, within the dream, he takes me to a pond, and he's holding a yardstick with a number of small stones along the yardstick, and so he holds it over the pond and then twist it. And then the stones fall at the same time, and then it ripples in every direction, forward, sideways, and backwards. And, of course, you know, Einstein taught us about space time. It's not in one direction. Time is not a linear thing. And we would see the ripples going forward and backwards, and he would say something. Now, look what happens if two of these wave fronts get stuck, then everything gets distorted after that. And I said, well, and then how do you work with that? And he said that I'm going to have to leave to you, Peter.

I don't know the answer to that. And that was about the last conversation I had with Einstein. Again, I call it conversations with Einstein at the beggars bank with. And I wouldn't say I forgot about it, but I would sometimes get sensing and feeling about that connection and how important it was to me, how beneficial it was to me. So fast forward several decades, and I was visiting my parents in New York, and I'd been downtown going to different museums and enjoying that, and then coming back, knocking on the door, and then when I entered the room, both parents were sitting on a couch, a sofa, and on a bookshelf above them, was Einstein's Theory of Relativity. So I was rather a bit startled, and I told my parents, particularly my mother, because she could be Quite intuitive. She was a difficult person, not to say, but she was quite, quite, quite, you would almost call her psychic. You know, if you were born at this time in life. I told her about my experience with Einstein and she stood up straight and she said, Peter, I know why this happened to you. At first, I had no idea what she was talking about. She said, when I was eight months pregnant with you, your your father and I were, in a canoe on this lake in New Jersey, and a wind came, talk about the dream also, this wind came and it turned the canoe over, and they couldn't right the canoe, so they surely would have perished, they would have died, and I would not be here having an interview with you. So, at that moment of life threat, the small sailboat came alongside and they pulled my parents and me in utero to safety. And then they announced themselves as Albert Einstein and as his stepdaughter. And my mother reasoned, I mean, again, to me, this is just, amazing that in that moment of life threat, because he saved my life, we would be forever connected. And I believe that's what happened. And again, I mean, it sounds in a way crazy, but like I said, I committed myself to telling my truth wherever it would go, whenever it would take me. And that was certainly one of the most important engagements in my life to be in the service of Einstein and understanding why we connected, at least that's what I've learned from my mother.

ELISE: Yeah. I mean, it's an amazing story and I think, yeah, even if it's active imagination, even if it's some way of you accessing some higher version of yourself, it's I think a lesson for all of us about how, in some ways, life changing or life evolving technology comes to happen and the cooperative effort across time and the way that you are literally in conversation with people who have come before.

PETER: yes, yes, indeed. You know, like I said, the scientific part of my mind knew this was active imagination, but also active imagination is supposed to disappear after childhood. And I thought, that's not right. What a shame because it's there with us for our whole lives, we just need to call on it. And I think that's one of the things I offer the reader as ways to call for that, to open to whatever was coming through them, and to understand that, and to trust it, and to follow it where it might lead you, the reader.

ELISE: Yeah, and it doesn't seem like such a leap because your entire process in some ways is about stuck energy, right, or energy that hasn't been fully processed or metabolized in the body that's repeating itself or trapped. I don't know if I'm explaining it accurately, but that these things want to complete. So why would there not be all sorts of different types of energy?

PETER: Absolutely, you know, and again from dream with Einstein, the waves are going in all directions and he showed it to get stuck in one place, talking about stuck energy, then everything after is distorted.

ELISE: Yeah.

PETER: And so we have to find a few of those places and unstick them to let the energy move through. And energy is about our aliveness of vitality.

ELISE: I want to talk about PTSD and rituals, but before we get to that, the section of the book where you write about, I don't know how to say this name, Pregogine, probably mispronouncing that, Pregogine, and negative entropy, and this idea that when we think of entropy, everything decays and dies.

PETER: that's right.

ELISE: But that this scientific effect of the opposite, I mean, and you can think of this, right, we're all in some ways, theoretically, hopefully our consciousness is growing and evolving or we're becoming larger containers, can you explain...

PETER: sure. Gladly.

ELISE: negative entropy?

PETER: Gladly. There are a couple of sections in one of the chapters and one is called the most important women in my life. And the other one is the most important men in my life. And with the women, I got more more feeling tone, more feeling given to me, being supporting me and the men have been more intellectual, but also incredibly important and brilliant, you know, entropy, there's a law in thermodynamics, it's the second law, basically the universe is going to hell in a handbag, you know, we become more and more disordered as life goes on. And it's clear what entropy is, for example, if you introduce energy, then there's more entropy. For example, let's just say, you're looking at ice, and you introduce energy in the form of heat. That's a form of energy. And the ice melts. In other words, it becomes more distorted because the crystalline structure of ice is very ordered. As you continue to bring energy into the system, it becomes vapor, which becomes much more distorted. So, what Pregogine taught me, Is that if you have a certain type of system. And in my doctoral work, I demonstrated that the nervous system was such a system, that if you introduce energy to a complex system, just enough, but not too much, what can happen is it starts to become disordered and then it becomes more ordered. And in somatic experiencing, we make sure not to overwhelm the person. I call it titration. So one small boost of energy at a time. And then what we see is a slight decrease in order, but then an increase in order. So it's really a matter of gently nudging the system. And this was what Pregogine understood in terms of the of negative entropy of neg entropy. So entropy is disorder. Neg entropy is more and more order. But again, not too much at a time because, well, if anything's too much, it's because it's too much.

ELISE: Yeah.

PETER: Right? So again, we have to do it with very gently just up to where there's a shift in the nervous system and then letting it come back to equilibrium.

ELISE: Can you practically outline what that means for someone who is traumatized and you're trying to get them back into that state to process some of the energy? Is that the idea? But you don't want to put them in a war zone, you want to walk them in? How does that work?

PETER: Yeah. I really support many, many different kinds of therapy. Again, like I mentioned, somatic experience really helps people do how they do what they do, how they do better what they do. And there are therapies where the person is made to relive their traumas over and over and over again. It's called flooding. And that's the one type of therapy that I do not agree with. I think it, not all the time, but it can be harmful, again, in somatic experiencing, we titrate the experience, we touch into a sensation in our bodies that have to do with the trauma, but just touch into it, and then notice the shift to a higher level of order, a higher level of coherence, a higher, greater level of flow. To go from trauma to awakening and flow is really, I think, what healing is all about.

ELISE: And in that moment of negative entropy, I'm thinking about your story that you tell near the beginning of the book, but there was a moment it seemed like, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, is you were sort of re entering this very traumatic experience where you were re traumatized and then there was enough maybe titration where suddenly you came to and sort of had the reaction that you weren't able to have?

PETER: Well, yeah, let me take a little bit of a different slant on that. In somatic experiencing, as I've just indicated, we don't go right for the trauma and go right to the core of the trauma. We go in a gentle way around the periphery, so, at one time, I was starting to develop these really disturbing sensations and images. So, I asked one of my students to sit with me and to guide me and she did it and first guided me towards something that happened that was a very positive experience, but that was something that I was feeling in my body. And what came up were images and memories. When I was four or five years old. It's my birthday and my parents must have come into the room in the middle of the night and they made rail railroad tracks going underneath my bed out into the room back again in an oval form and then again into, via the below the bed. And when I woke up, I was thrilled. That would be an understatement. I jumped out of bed. I ran to the transformer. I changed the speed of the train. I made the whistle go, whoo, whoo. And in that moment, I was cared about. I knew that I was loved. And that's an important thing, because no matter how much trauma we have, if even one person really cared for Us and loved us and showed that love, that no matter how deep the trauma is, they're going to be okay, so then coming from there, my student, my guide was noticing a slight shuffling of my feet, and she brought my attention to that, and it started to amplify and it felt like they're starting to run and then images of when I was a child probably about 12 or 13, I would run home from school, would scarf down some milk and cookies, and then go to the park, Reservoir Oval Park, which is across the street from the house, I would climb over the wrought iron fence, and down into the bushes, and go to a track below a cinder track, and I would run around the oval around the track, and I could start to feel the strength in my legs. And my guide really had me deepen that experience of the power in my legs. And again, this is so important because again, this is something we'll see in a moment, what gave me some kind of a ballast for the horror that did happen. And so a bit of a background is my father was asked to testify against the mobster Johnny D'Aguardo, Johnny Dio. He was featured in the Goodfellows and the Irishman. He was one of the most murderous. And he threatened my parents that if my father testified against him, that he would find us all face down in the East River. So what happened, at least as I pieced it together, is that I was brutally assaulted and raped by a gang, probably from the mafia, so that I would tell that to my parents, and they would be, of course, scared but I didn't tell it to my parents. I didn't even tell it to myself, and it wasn't until that time with my student together, that I really told it to myself, and found the strength and the power That was overwhelmed, but was still living in me.

ELISE: Mmm. Beautiful and terrible.

PETER: Yes, yes, yes.

ELISE: Yeah.

PETER: That's well said beautiful and terrible, terrible and beautiful.

ELISE: And I think you know, I'm sure you encounter this all the time. I didn't realize until I was, I don't know, the end of my thirties that I lived primarily dissociated from my body. I mean, not completely literally, but somewhat. I didn't know how to talk to my body or interrogate my body. Do you feel like that's most of us?

PETER: Yes. I mean, actually, quite frankly, we live in a society that is quite dis embodied,

ELISE: Yeah.

PETER: And it's something that's probably been with us since the 1600s with the René Descartes, I think therefore I am. Rather that I sense and feel and then connect and then I am. So I think we're very much as a society, disembodied, but dissociation occurs from trauma. And that's a bit different and it's much more compelling and it really, it fragments us into pieces. But when we can put these pieces together, then we can heal from those wounds and come out of dissociation and connect to our knowing selves, our fully more and more embodied selves.

ELISE: Yeah. No, I'm so glad you brought up Descartes because I feel like there was a stark demarcation in this idea that the body is depraved and base and somewhat irrelevant, right? Or animalistic with all of its needs and appetites, and that it was our job to get above it, or ignore it or bring it into rule in a way that's Not helpful.

PETER: Yeah one of my heroes is Blaise Pascal and he wrote a letter to Descartes, something I'm paraphrasing. He said, Monsieur Descartes, you have really done something terrible. And he said, the body has its reasons, which reason cannot reason, or the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot reason. And he gave us this alternative to know that we have a sensing, knowing body

ELISE: Yeah.

PETER: yeah, and that it gives us so much more knowledge than we could possibly get. I think in the so called primitive culture and they say that if knowledge doesn't exist in the body, doesn't exist in the muscles, then it doesn't exist. So I think there are people who have great wisdom that have led us in the good direction and said, yes, this is a mistake to disconnect from your body. This is probably the most vital resource that you can possibly have to make that connection, to embellish that connection, to join with that connection.

ELISE: Yeah. It's from Papa New Guinea. I know because I wrote it down from your book. Knowledge is useless unless it lives in the body.

PETER: Yeah, yeah.

ELISE: Yeah. So you talk a little bit and I feel like this is so essential for every moment in time, but certainly our moment in time about this idea of reintegration rituals, PTSD, which, as you mentioned, is a relatively new term, and this idea of how John Huston's movie, which was supposed to be a narrative of, like, heroics and how men prevail in war, was shelved or nearly destroyed, right?

PETER: Right. Well, that is a very interesting thing. You know, one of the things I talk about is how different cultures, First Nations cultures deal with what we call trauma. And we have a lot to learn from them doing together and healing in community. So, I heard a rumor that John Huston had made a film showing a treatment center in Long Island at the end of the Second World War. And they really did some innovative healing work, very much like I've experienced in different religions, like in the Navajo religion but that he was prevented from showing it because the U. S. government was afraid that if people not knew that you could be Injured psychologically injured, they wouldn't agree to fight but it was really quite the opposite that there was really about our capacity to heal that he filmed and so some of us tried to at that time you could get a thing. It's called a freedom of information act. To have it released, but I think before we were able to do that, it was released and I recommended to anybody, it's called let there be light and it really shows this innovative approach, which is far beyond what we see today in some of the VA hospitals, so I would hope that we can learn. I mean, we're not so called First Nations people, but I think we have a lot to learn, and I have learned a lot, in being with different shamanic, pre shamanic cultures, and learning how they look at trauma, how they see trauma. And in Brazil, in Portuguese, it's called cisto, or it's pronounced cisto, which basically means something like fright paralysis. So, when I talked to the chief of the people, I asked him if he was familiar with that. And he said, yes, he was. And that also he had heard about the word trauma because his daughter, the princess was the first one to go to college and she told him about that and so he asked me, you know, what I had wanted. And I mentioned that and it took us like several days to get there and going in the noonday sun we were just about spent. And he saw what shape I was in and immediately took us to A spring in the rock and just to stand up there to get a full shower. Then he took some flutes and invited me to sit outside under a mango tree on a bamboo mat.

And so I asked him the question and he compassionately said, I think that's a mistake trauma is not something that happens to an individual, but that happens to a whole culture, a whole society. And because it happens there, that's what we also have to heal it there. And they introduced us some of their beautiful rituals of drumming, of singing, of chanting, of moving that could really just in a few minutes, really change your state of consciousness in a profound way. And he really talked about how their society was all but destroyed by the farmers who took over and got rid of the indigenous people and so they would reconnecting, you know, the different kinds of experiences that they were going through. And again, you know, this was for me, an eye opener. Because again, it's not just what happens to a single person, or when I was with the Hopi people in Second Mesa, it's what happens to the family, it's what happens to the village, it's what happens to the tribe. And that's where we need to connect, because that's where the connection is broken. And when I was teaching at Hopi, usually I teach by demonstrating and then talking about what I'm doing and nobody would volunteer.

And so I tried different things. I thought maybe it was, you know, you don't want to Put out your dirty laundry or shyness. I didn't know what it was, but I knew I wasn't getting anywhere. So one of those evenings, I happened to have dinner with an anthropologist, and he laid it on the table. He said, no, of course not. They don't see them as an individual. They see them as part of a bigger whole. And so what I did the next day, as I asked them to present a case because they were very smart clinicians and then I asked, is there anybody here who has had a similar thing happen to them? And so one person raised their hand and I say, would you be willing to come up so we can see how we might be able to help them? And then there was no problem. So again, it's not about the individual. It's about the group. And I think that's something that we've lost track of in our overly individualized ways of working with healing and with trauma.

ELISE: well, to close our conversation, because I know you need to go, it goes back to what Einstein showed you, right? This goes forwards and backwards, seven generations, right?

PETER: Yes. Yes.

ELISE: when we heal ourselves, we heal forwards and backwards...

PETER: that's right.

ELISE: through the lines.

PETER: Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself.

ELISE: Yeah. And so for anyone who is listening who feels like it's somehow selfish to attend to your own pain, you can know you're doing it for yourself. Your whole family line and all of us too.

PETER: Is it okay to mention again the book?

ELISE: Yeah, of course.

PETER: So, this is the autobiography, which I wrote about my story and about my healing, my healing journey. I really am glad to share it with you all, because that's really the reason for writing it. It's not, again, just about me. It's for the all of us.

ELISE: Beautiful. I love the autobiography. It was fascinating to not only hear your story but to see the whole thing emerge, over time.

I loved this autobiography. It’s very slim and fast, so it’s not an explication of everything that happened in his life. But it does weave together the formation of a theory and a practice that most likely has touched all of you or anyone who engages in any type of therapeutic process has somehow, most likely, come in contact with somatic experiencing and it’s one of those, it’s not even a method really, but it’s this idea of what can be accessed in the body and relived and more importantly re-patterned or completed or resolved and put to rest. Again, it’s one of those methods that is hard to articulate because it’s not mental, it’s a felt experiencing. And it’s also one of those methods, as he talked about being the myth of being a wounded healer, that once you have some kind of a somatic event or healing, then you know exactly what it is and how to access it again. And as mentioned in our conversation, it’s taken me 39 years to learn how to talk to my body and it starts with just even asking or inquiring about a sore lower back or something that’s pulling in your neck and being open to conversation with yourself. And if Peter can talk to Einstein across time, you can talk to your aching shoulder, I promise. But to that Einstein anecdote story, I loved it, I love, of course, the space where science and spiritually, and everything we do not know converges with everything we do know, I think there’s a certain humility to that level of openness, to this idea that these are languages to explain and articulate the same thing and different languages work for different people. The book is An Autobiography of Trauma, by Peter Levine and it’s beautiful and his other work is incredible too. Thanks for listening, we'll see you soon.