A great deal of mental health issues and internal conflict can center around two core experiences: What your parents were in conflict over when you were a child , and How your mother treated you. Humanity’s nature as a species is to adapt to its context so that life continues. Adaptation is an act of internalization. The same function takes place within us as individuals. We adapt within the given context of our growth. Imagine a nail hammered into a young tree: as the tree grows, it grows...

Somatic work is quickly finding its place within the therapeutic community.Under the somatic umbrella live words like felt sense , embodiment , and experiencing. Fair enough. Implicit in somatic work is the belief that, like the soul, it is something interior—something we sense within. I’d like to offer another perspective. What if “soul” isn’t just inside us? What if soul is everything that surrounds us—the field we move through, the atmosphere that holds us? The universe itself as soul....

When I began practicing yoga in the early 1990s, our focus—in both teaching and practice—was on breathing into pain . At the beginning of...