This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang in the circles in which I run which include lots of therapists, meditation teachers, plus

lots of regular people who are patients and clients have said therapists and

teachers in these circles I have for years heard about a kind of therapy called somatic

experiencing. To be completely honest I usually nodded my head politely when I

heard about somatic experiencing semi pretending to know what people my

pretending to know what people were referring to but I actually had no idea but now I do

know what they're talking about because as you're about to hear I had a chance to

interview the dude who created somatic experiencing or SE, he will describe it

better than I can but in brief it's a kind of therapy where you learn how to regulate your nervous

system as a way to reduce stress anxiety depression, chronic pain and trauma.

There's been some research into somatic experiencing and the initial results are

quite promising.

Peter A Levine, PhD, has spent the past 50 years developing somatic

experiencing. He holds a doctorate in biophysics from UC Berkeley and a doctorate in psychology from international university.

His work has been taught to over 30,000 therapists in over 42 countries,

and he's the author of a new book and autobiography of trauma.

In this conversation we talk about how to do somatic experiencing and you will

hear me play the role of guinea pig here and make some weird sounds. The difference between

somatic experiencing and talk therapy, SE practices that we can all implement in

our own lives, why some people feel horror or terror at the thought of reoccupying their body

and how to overcome those fears, what the research says about somatic experiencing and how these practices

around body awareness have gone from the fringes to

...