Book tip: Waking the Tiger

Waking the Tiger - healing trauma

Peter A. Levine

In many ways this book was an eye opener for me, I am really grateful that my friend recommended it to me. It's about how traumas develop and the physiological process behind it, which goes back to the prehistory and it is similar for all mammals.

In fact our bodies, like wild animals, instinctively know - it's in our nature - what to do but it's our developed rational brain ( the neocortex) that blocks the physiological reaction. The instinctive reaction is repressed and we are left behind confused. So we have to go back to our nature, to our roots and foremost into our bodies out of our heads.

The book is about healing trauma not just psychologically but really physically. Because of our physiology the impact of a trauma and the energy that is not released after the freezing mechanism causes symptoms even long after the actual event.

Levine gives some practical exercises to help focus on the bodily sensations and what he calls the 'felt sense'. His method ‘somatic experiencing’ works with your own innate power to heal by reconnecting with essential and lost parts of yourself.

He insists on the fact that trauma can be healed without the need to relive or to remember the trauma because we can use our bodies and finish the physiological reaction that is at the origin of the actual trauma leading in short and/or long term to the symptoms.

I loved the practical cases and also the way he shows how we can learn from animals. Wild animals are rarely traumatized, part of the explanation is culturally and the fact that humans have the neocortex, the rational brain. But there is more!

He also explains how in shamanistic cultures they tend to approach traumatic events and traumatized individuals in a different way, hence why in these cultures they have less trauma symptoms because they deal with it as a group, they don't silence or dismiss the person who had a traumatic experience and they literally dance, shake out the energy, which is kind of a big difference with the Western modern 'don't be weak' culture.

Definitely worth the read in my opinion! If you like these book tips/reviews, follow my Instagram account @energinne_ for more :)