If you are a woman who experienced any of her formative years in the 90s (and I know a lot of the readers of this newsletter are), the temptation to look into every plate glass window you pass, check yourself in any mirror that circumstance serves, or peer at your image in the murky scrying glass of your phone before meeting a friend is probably bridging on irresistible. 

And if you’re a man or don’t identify as any gender at all, keep on reading—there’s plenty here for you, too. 

As I was saying: the temptation to view yourself from the outside, to surveil and assess, feels inescapable—the media, the internet, and movie star culture has trained us for it. And make no mistake: there’s a rubric for looking good. While that set of rules may have shifted over the years thanks to the body positivity movement and a temporary effort by brands in the mid 2010s to perform interest in non-standard beauty, it’s remained relatively constant: thin. White. Coiffed. Controlled. Problematic.

There’s something even deeper at work here than the persistent urge to behold and judge our physical forms, and it has nothing to do with beauty standards.

When was the last time that you shucked all care for the appearance of your mortal husk and asked yourself with the intent to really find out, not just reflexively answer: what is my body feeling? That answer proves very difficult to produce for people at every point on the normatively-good-body spectrum. 

We haven’t always been this divorced from our bodies’ sensory experiences (we can thank Enlightenment thought for a lot of that), and in the 70s, a bunch of Western psychology figureheads sought to bring us back. They gave us (rather: Thomas Hanna did) the word somatics. He defined it as the study of the body from the perspective of the internal experience rather than the external, third-person. Somatic practices vary: there’s the Alexander Technique, Grimberg, Feldenkreis—all focused on the posture of the body in one way or another. There’s also rolfing, which is hands-on bodywork that stretches fascia, plus many mind-body techniques I won’t list out here. 

Somatic practices didn’t originate in the West, (or at least not only there), even if it branded the unifying word “somatics.” Indigenous cultures in the US, African, and Eastern cultures have long-serving practices that rely on movement, breath, and ritual. In Africa, drumming and shaking invokes the ancestors. In Oceania, hula carries cosmology through the body. Indigenous America offers up sweat lodges and embodied survival prayers. The East gives us Qi Gong and Tai Chi and meditation. 

And why, as fun as a sweat lodge sounds, would we want to do any of this stuff? Why ask the body how it feels? Why put it through a grueling dance ritual? Well, because somatic practices are an avenue to healing and wellness that give us deep information about the ingrained physical patterning that produces the circumstances of our lives.

In today’s episode of Simplify, we hear from Dr. Arielle Schwartz, a venerated somatic practitioner who has shaped the way that trauma is treated and understood. She sees patients, teaches courses, and has a way of explaining the almost-mythical polyvagal therapy that makes it immediately clear and useful. 

Arielle has been doing this work for thirty years—long, long before "somatic" became a TikTok caption—and she expertly concretizes something that can feel slippery and a little woo-woo. In our conversation, she explains polyvagal theory like she's talking to a five-year-old, unpacks how anxiety quietly becomes a feedback loop your body runs on you, and offers some tender thinking on how the earliest moments of our lives shape how safe the world feels in our bodies for the rest of them.

It's also an episode about getting out of the way. About what it means to stop looking at yourself from the outside long enough to actually feel what's there. And that turns out to be one of the most radical things you can do as a woman, or anyone, who came of age in a world that taught you to treat your body like an object to be ogled and managed.

Listen and let me know what you think. As Arielle says, this work isn't a quick fix—it's the peeling of an onion (which may include tears!?). But cook it down, make it transparent, and it's absolutely delicious.

More soon,
Caitlin on vacation

P.S. Please share with a friend you think will enjoy this episode. It’s the best way you can help Simplify stick around! Also, let me know what you thought by replying here or writing to me and Ben at [email protected]. 

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