Connecting to our Body as Healer with Peter Levine

Peter Levine, PhD, author of In An Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, discusses his pioneering somatic approach to healing trauma. He illuminates that while trauma effects the brain and mind, it is primarily something that also gets locked in the interiority of the body. By being able to access the roots of trauma, through interoceptive awareness, it is possible to create new experiences in the “Living Body” — experiences that contradict fear, bracing, and helplessness. In this way, it is possible to resolve and transform trauma by engaging our innate capacity to self-regulate high states of arousal and intense emotions. In addition to presenting his empowering understanding of the human experience of trauma in the body, mind, and spirit, Dr. Levine shares effective, practical tools for healing trauma and cultivating resilience, health, and well-being. In his book Waking the Tiger, Levine noted that “we can learn much about trauma from observing animals in the wild” and how they respond during and after demanding stressful events. Levine shares his coherent theoretical framework based in findings in biology, neuroscience, and body-oriented psychotherapy to show that when we bring together animal instincts and reason, we can heal and flourish. Peter A Levine, Ph.D., is the developer of Somatic Experiencing®, a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma. Dr Levine holds doctorates in both Biophysics and Psychology. He served as a Stress consultant for NASA in the early space shuttle development and has served on the APA task force for responding to the trauma of large-scale disasters and ethnopolitical warfare. He is the Founder and President of the Ergos Institute for Somatic Education, and the Founder and Advisor for Somatic Experiencing International. He is also a senior fellow and consultant for the Meadows treatment center. Dr. Levine is the author of several best-selling books on trauma, including Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma (published in 30 languages), In an Unspoken Voice, and Trauma and Memory. He has received Lifetime Achievement awards from Psychotherapy Networker, from the US Association for Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, and from Attach.