Waking the Tiger

And Dr. Peter Levine has written several books.

One that's really good is called Waking the Tiger.

Um, but those are also decades old, at least a decade old.

Yeah.

It's great but when I did, that was when the real magic set in My mind was completely clear now The stories that had consumed me earlier were nowhere to be found There's no grasping, no anxiety, no need for my present reality to be different I remember thinking, what was I going on about? Like what was that? That was so embarrassing Why was I so caught up? That was so silly of me In that moment, it felt so obvious to me that thoughts didn't have the solidity I had always assumed they did They came and went so easily that they no longer felt like things I needed to take as real I noticed that I seemed to have moved through the emotions that I seemed to have digested my emotions and because I did, the thoughts associated with them dissolved entirely In that sense, thoughts started to feel like ghosts, like echoes, residual impressions of an unprocessed event They felt empty rather than something that carried weight or authority Perhaps I didn't need to believe thoughts After all, if they could disappear so completely after the underlying emotion had been felt and digested then what validity did they really have? From a somatic experiencing lens, what had happened was I had uncoupled meaning from a huge trauma cluster And I can speak to this in another video But for now, to stay with the non-dual thread This experience raised an existential question If thoughts are empty, then who am I? If the self I had taken myself to be was really just a collection of impressions then who am I really? I can't just be a collection of impressions What was actually here beneath all of that? Instead of trying to answer this question with more thoughts that I was now beginning to doubt I looked at my direct experience instead for what remained after the thoughts and emotions had settled And what I found unequivocally, undeniably was awareness itself There was nothing else in my direct experience that felt stable or constant other than awareness itself Everything else came and went, only awareness remained And just like the analogy I had heard so many times up until this point, it was as if the clouds had passed and I was noticing the sky for the first time With my stories gone, there was now also a sense of timelessness I noticed that time only exists when you are in thought The past is a thought, the future is a thought Without thoughts, there was no time There's no future to anticipate, no problems to solve no next thing to prepare for in actual reality Thoughts of the past and future suddenly felt so trivial and effortful My brain was no longer wanting to work as hard because I was now perceiving reality beyond time and it was as if I had suddenly snapped out of a dream or as if a bubble had popped The present felt so fresh and new and still without my thoughts clouding it and it was from this moment on that thoughts in general became significantly quieter Awareness and presence replaced them at the forefront of my experience and thoughts fell to the periphery I began to feel a greater sense of agency with how I wanted to use my brain and how I wanted to relate to the past and future and a deep okayness began to emerge as a foundational state I felt as if I now had a solid, reliable ground for my experience and that reliable ground was awareness Paradoxically, the opposite was also true now It felt as if I was now free-falling but it was fine because there was no ground I was going to hit So there was this deep sense of okayness now and it was there all the time and because of that, the chronic anxiety I had lived with ever since childhood which I had grown accustomed to was now gone My kundalini awakening happened around the same time as Kensho I realize now, having spoken to other people who've experienced Kensho It seems like they don't always happen together but for some reason for me, they did Also, I'm a bit reluctant to use the term kundalini awakening because I'm sure it brings up a lot of new agey associations but this is the closest term I have to describe my experience so bear with me Sometime after returning from India, I started noticing a subtle constant vibration in my lower back and it would get louder whenever I meditated or did the Osho practices As mentioned earlier, my abandonment wound was bringing up a lot of activation around this time so much that I had to self-soothe every night in order to fall asleep Now as I did this every night, I began experiencing what somatic experiencing would recognize as discharge responses So heat waves through my body, buzzing and tingling through my hands and feet I had somehow intuitively figured out a way to release stored trauma energy from my nervous system Then one morning, my capacity to sense subtle sensations in my body came online in a new way From that point onward, I was simply always aware of my subtle body To this day, I notice subtle sensations 24x7 and it's just something It's just part of my experience.

It's like noise along with everything else From a somatic experiencing perspective, what was happening was that my window of tolerance was expanding Sensations that had previously been too overwhelming to register or that my system had to learn to fragment and push out of my awareness were now becoming accessible I was developing the capacity to be with my inner world in a much more subtle way without being overwhelmed by it As someone who has struggled with dissociation almost daily up until this point this was completely unfamiliar and strange to me and so because of this increased sensitivity and the novelty of it emotional processing naturally began to take center focus in my life I found myself sitting for hours every day just tracking what was happening internally and it was a really enjoyable thing to do, I never got boring What I began to sense was that my life force was starting to flow more freely I had so much more energy than I knew what to do with As it moved, it would inevitably meet areas of obstruction places in me where emotional material or trauma seemed to be held These would show up as very specific sensations of tension and pain These were holding patterns in my body Because of my increased sensitivity and my inability to turn the sensitivity dial down I felt as if I had no choice but to give my attention to them because it was more painful to ignore these sensations than to just witness them So rather than looking for things to process these things were finding me and it just felt better to witness them unravel and complete themselves than to ignore them and resist them As I did this, I began to notice that the holding patterns I seemed to be releasing corresponded to the chakra system This is something I can speak to in another video because I could get into a whole side tangent and go on for hours Let me know if you're interested Over time, I began to see how much of what I used to call emotional overwhelm was actually undigested physiological responses or physiological energy that needed space, attention and time to be discharged So you can imagine my surprise and excitement when I came across Peter Levine's book Waking the Tiger Peter Levine is the founder of somatic experiencing and Waking the Tiger is an excellent introduction to the world of somatic experiencing if you're curious So I found this book and found him describing exactly what I had been experiencing in my body and I just became absolutely fascinated with his approach and philosophy Somatic experiencing was now the perfect map for the territory I was in Because I was releasing trauma and unraveling layers of deep conditioning and holding patterns in my body I was beginning to relate to discomfort differently triggers that once would have sent me into a deep negative spiral or avoidance now felt more like initiations into deeper contact with myself and with life and truth They no longer felt like things to avoid but more like synchronistic events worth paying attention to an opportunity for a level up or a clue to the next step So instead of turning away, I found myself learning to move toward discomfort to step into the fire so to speak whenever life presented them to me And this felt different from the kind of striving It was like I knew I could handle it I knew the things I was moving towards were things within my capacity now And the more I leaned into this framing of learning to face my triggers and discomfort and the more I lived it, the more synchronistic my life became I was now paying a lot more attention to my inner world and because of that I was beginning to notice how much the outer world seemed to reflect my inner world with surprising and uncanny precision I felt like I was beginning to see the law of correspondence in action as within, so without I have it tattooed here by the way on my wrist As with them, so with thou As I deepened into emotional processing, I felt a growing need to find language for what I was going through Somatic experiencing gave me the framework for the body but there was another dimension to my experience The symbolic, mythic, and archetypal that it simply couldn't explain It didn't have language for it Synchronicities were beginning to feel way too precise at this point to be coincidences and there was a growing sense that what was happening to me carried meaning beyond nervous system regulation and personal stories.

Personal stories which by the way I didn't believe in anymore.

and this was what drew me to Jungian death psychology Of all the frameworks I encountered it felt the most grounded and articulate about transpersonal experiences Around this time, my anxious attachment and abandonment wound gave me a lot of psychological material to work with and so I used it to understand Jungian psychology Through the Jungian framework, I was learning I had encountered my own shadow through my ex The qualities I had been most triggered by and most drawn to were projections and reflections of what I had been rejecting of myself and what I had been unconsciously attempting to integrate in order to become whole again.

That's dissociation, biggest predictor of PTSD symptoms.

And so the question is, you know, his whole body of work, which I detail in my book, and he, you know, he has a great book, Waking the Tiger, on this, is that we need to return to our body and feel where that energy lies.

And he has an exercise called tracking, which I also detail in my book, which is, like, going into your body, noticing where you feel a certain tension or a charge.

Maybe it's the lump in your throat.

...

Waking the Tiger, about like the innate, um, capacity of the body to heal itself through listening to sensations, and I love it because if we really, you know, hold this belief, then we can totally trust the body and trust that the body will release whatever it needs to release in its own time, 'cause a lot of the times people would also, "Oh, so when am I gonna cry? When am I gonna experience this emotional release?" When your body is ready.

Yeah.

And trust your body that it will feel safe enough and your nervous system would, will feel safe enough when it will.