The Latest from our Blog
Is embodiment as a key tool for managing anxiety?
Helping people with anxiety has traditionally been seen as the territory of mental health professionals. Anxiety is most commonly framed as a psychological problem. My clinical experience for over twenty years has been that by safely connecting to the body, people...
Most people dissociate, most of the time
As a young child, one of my clients learnt to dissociate when her parents were arguing. When I first started treating her, and didn’t understand the dissociation model I now work with, we both thought the sessions were productive because she consistently reported a...
Feeling is hard. Let’s make it simple
Feeling is hard. My aim is to make it simple I’m a passionate and persistent champion of embodiment. As a bodyworker, all my work is aimed at supporting people to find health and happiness by connecting to the body. Whatever has happened to you, whatever your belief...
Being sensitive may be how we become less sensitive
When we’re looking to reduce pain and anxiety, developing skills and words about how to interact with the feeling states inside you is really important. In this blog, I’m going to explore the art of feeling, and how we can get better at learning how to manage intense...
How Shaking Can Support Us in Difficult Times
It may be five years since the first covid lockdowns, but in some ways we’re still navigating very disrupted times culturally and politically. In these challenging times, we can resource ourselves by acknowledging the feeling states inside of us. For me, the body is...
How to Create Safety in Trauma Healing
The very nature of trauma is that it is overwhelming – it’s more than our organisms can cope with. Trauma often shatters our worldview and rules of fairness and justice no longer seem to apply, which can lead to a spiritual crisis and a profound re-evaluation of...
What People Say About the Power of Shaking Meditation
A few years ago, several newspapers wrote stories about my Trauma and Tension Releasing (TRE) workshops, calling TRE “the new mindfulness craze set to take London by storm.” Today I thought I’d share one of the articles, from the London Evening Standard (you can see...
Keep feeling, keep feeling, keep feeling
Over the past twenty-five years as a bodyworker, I’ve come to see that most of us don't understand how powerful feeling is. And I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the important changes that happen for people experiencing pain, trauma and anxiety, when they become...
Book Review: The Blind Spot on Science and Experience
‘The map is not the territory’ Science gives us amazing tools and models. But when we divorce scales of temperature from the human experience of hot and cold, when we think of measured ‘clock time’ as more real than ‘lived time’, when we substitute maths for living...
Pain: Nothing Works Always, Some Things Sometimes
Anything can work some of the time. Nothing works all of the time. This phrase works really well to illustrate the complexity of working with pain. Pain is dependent on multiple, diverse, interacting variables. Pain is a perception due to the interplay of biological,...
How to ‘Mind the Gap’ Between Your Body and Your Emotions
As you probably know, I’m passionate about exploring how feelings and bodies work together, and how emotions are created through embodiment. Often when people are experiencing anxiety and trauma, a psychiatrist might tell them that they need to talk about it. Their...
What Can Octopuses Teach Us About Pain and Consciousness?
What would it be like if your arm had a mind of its own? Even stranger, if you had eight arms so ‘suffused with nervousness’ that they wander, explore and feel with their own goals, acting as ‘agents of their own’. This is the model offered for being an octopus in...
How Learning to Feel Healed my Chronic Pain – Susan’s Story
An old client of mine has written a book, 'Leading Beyond the Numbers’, for business people on feeling. She wonderfully, and generously, describes some learning from a set of sessions we did together, in this extract from the book, below: “I still remember my first...
Most pain is not a tissue issue
Here's a big question for you: if you have pain in your big toe, is your pain in your big toe? Or is your pain inside of you? We used to always think that the pain was in the big toe. That the issue was in the tissues. And that's useful to some extent – of course the...
An unusual way of thinking about pain (new course)
We used to think that pain was just about the tissues; we focused on operations, we focused on aligning things. But we now know that a huge contribution to our pain experiences is the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we’re given by other people. The modern...
Pain as a bad habit (new course)
I want to explore a very powerful notion with you - that pain can be like a bad habit. At one stage the reflex to withdraw, to rest, to protect yourself from a difficult stimulus is important. For example, if you twist your ankle, you do need to rest and protect so...
Humans are Rhythmical Beings
I love biodynamic craniosacral therapy; the art of using touch to support health. When you touch people they change. It is that simple. Many people struggle with safety; it can be hard work negotiating being in the body. Coming into a relationship with a skilled...
Three Important Connections Between Embodiment and Health
My goal as a bodyworker is to help people - whether they are working with trauma, pain or anxiety - reconnect to a sense of wholeness and include more in their sense of self. Embodiment is key to this process - when we feel at home in the space bounded by the skin,...
What If Minds Emerge from Bodies? Impact on Trauma
Dr Karin Lindgard is an author, philosopher and biodynamic craniosacral therapist who I really respect, and someone whose work has influenced me over the years. Her unique perspective on consciousness draws on 20 years of research, including a PhD in philosophy. When...
How can TRE® help manage auto-immune conditions?
This article was written by Sylvia Benoist. (Note from Steve: Sylvia recently completed her training as a TRE - Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises - supervisor (mentor with me), and I asked her to share her journey with TRE and Ankylosing Spondylitis, a type of...
3 Ways to Engage Your Body to Transcend Trauma
I think it’s very useful to define trauma as “anything that overwhelms our ability to cope”, as well as to view trauma as a continuum. The overwhelm that leads to trauma patterns in the body may be from a specific experience such as a car accident, sexual abuse,...
Three Things that Dr Spock Can Teach Us About Emotions
I’m being playful with the title here, because - as many of you well know - feeling emotion is not the strong suit of Star Trek’s king of reason, Dr Spock. However, we live in a world that for several centuries has favoured Spock’s reality; where reason and logic are...
8 Books for Your Holiday Wishlist
If you’re looking for recommendations for books to read or request over the winter break, I’ve compiled a list of eight of my recent favourites, my go-to recommendations, as well as my own books. ONE: Look Again By Elizabeth A Trembley I can’t recommend ‘Look Again’...
How to Make Your Brain Feel Safer?
There is a lot of pain around: In a huge study (Breivik et al 2006) across 15 European countries, 19% of people reported living with moderate to severe pain for more than 6 months. That’s 1 in 5 people in persistent pain states, the majority for many years. Holy moly....
Why Touch is Essential For Humans
Touch can be an incredible way to soothe, create safety, and help us to feel whole and healthy. Numerous studies have revealed that touch is essential for us humans to thrive and in this blog I’m going to share the details of these studies and what they can teach us...
What I’ve Learned From Teaching TRE to 2000 People
Over the past 13 years, I’ve had the privilege of teaching TRE (Trauma and Tension Releasing Exercises) to over 2000 people. Here are some of the insights I’ve gained about the power of this simple trauma healing practice: People expect change to be painful or...
10 Things to Remember When Working to Heal Trauma
It’s now well understood that going slow is actually the quickest way to heal trauma. That’s why all modern trauma healing focuses on teaching how to regulate intense feelings. The truth is that feeling is a difficult business, and if it is hard to feel, it is hard...
Zen and the Art of Craniosacral Therapy
My journey to becoming a bodyworker started with the study of Zen and Shiatsu. Zen opened up a whole new worldview for me and immersed me in a rich tapestry of philosophies and new ways of approaching the world, birthing a fascination with the idea of ‘non-doing’....
My Four Favourite Books About Flow States
A few years ago, I offered a series of workshops with a dancer called Marina Collard. It was very inspiring for me to bring awareness to simple gestures for hours at a time. Every time Marina moved, she looked like water being poured - always carving an elegant...
Five Ways That Shaking Can Help to Heal Trauma
Shaking can release long-held tension patterns and promote new feelings of connection and ease. It is a novel stimulus to the central nervous system. New stimuli, approached with safety and curiosity, can support learning and growth. TRE®, Tension and Trauma Releasing...