Gemma Spake

And humans have the same mechanism.

Like we've just learned to suppress it.

We've just learned to not look weird in front of people, even though our body needs something from us to process what we've been through.

I know when I went through like a really, really sad time a couple of years back that, let's be real, like manifested in a lot of just like anger at the world.

That is when I picked up boxing.

And I would sometimes cry during those classes because I was so pent up and angry about

um at the world in life what was really below that angle was just like sadness and unfairness and helplessness i had to get the anger out that was like i had to get through that that was the only way to access what was actually below the surface and boxing helped me do that by releasing the somatic or the physical feeling it's obviously a very intense example but the same mechanism is at play for things like yoga as well if you want to go down a whole

rabbit hole, look at the research on yoga and emotional processing and how many people will want to cry, scream, chant, heave, giggle during yoga classes and yoga practice because of how all these deep emotions are channeling through them physically, probably for the first time ever.

The most famous paper on this is from 2014.

It was a study on 64 women who had chronic treatment-resistant PTSD.

So they tried a bunch of stuff.

And they divided the group.

They had half of them do these trauma-informed yoga sessions for like three years and half of them just do normal therapy.

At the end of the study, almost 52% of the participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD compared to just 20% of the people who did therapy alone.

One in two of those people, their PTSD was treated.

Now, obviously execute your judgment here.

This

It's not the only method and intervention for processing our feelings or for trauma, but you can't deny the research is pretty powerful.

Especially for a somatic approach, there's so much evidence that this channeling works.

Any movement that you have access to