Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Levine
Quick Overview
This book has nothing to do with tigers! The subtitle is the central idea of the book: healing trauma. Peter Levine’s key point is that trauma is not only a psychological issue; it is also a physical one. He argues that traditional forms of therapy, such as talk therapy, can often be ineffective at treating trauma because they fail to address the physical symptoms of trauma. This is where his concept of ‘somatic experiencing’ and the ‘felt sense” come in. He argues that unhealed trauma is held in the body in energetic form and needs releasing, and this trapped trauma can be released through movement, and other somatically informed exercises and techniques.
Waking the Tiger is very accessible. Levine writes clearly, making the book easy to understand for both professionals and laypeople. He also includes numerous case studies and examples to illustrate his points, which makes the book engaging and relatable. Overall, Waking the Tiger is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding trauma and its effects on the body and, importantly, how we can all heal from trauma, because we are all built to both experience trauma and ultimately to heal from it.
Initial reaction to the book
It might sound like an exaggeration to say that Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger changed my life, but it did. I listened to this for the first time during the first lockdown in 2020 walking around the neighbourhood. I listened to it a second time the winter of 2021 and it went even further. I re-read it again to do this review. The book has helped me make sense of my life in a new way.
Before I read it, I could pinpoint events and times in my life that had been especially challenging. But after reading it, for the first time in my life, I could see how they were all threaded together in a way that was both cumulative and interactive. I walked around with tears running down my face in a couple of parts — mainly from the feeling of relief that I was simply human, trying to grapple with things that humans tend to find challenging — ironically, because of being human. I have been placing more awareness on my body since reading the book, which has ultimately led me to a disciplined daily practice of meditation and breathwork.
In what follows, I sum up the five key ideas from the book that I intend to take forward to my breathwork practice — namely: 1) a particular approach to trauma; 2) why it’s important to understand the energetic impact of trauma; 3) the felt-sense; 4) the trauma/healing-vortices and how they interact; and 5) and why and how the ‘gentle-gentle’ wins the healing race fastest.
1. We all experience trauma
Peter Levine’s concept of trauma is very specific. This was the first time that I had heard of trauma in this way. For Levine, all humans, like all animals, are built to experience and heal from trauma. Being alive means experiencing trauma.
Before this book, I had always assumed the term ‘trauma’ was for very severe incidents, like war, murder, rape or physical or sexual abuse. But Peter Levine widens the definition to include any incident that creates an energetic shock to the body. This includes all the aforementioned types of trauma and more common human experiences, such as surgery, a car crash, anasthesia, getting your teeth taken out at the dentist, death of a loved one, childbirth, even your own birth.
That all lives experience trauma — and conversely for trauma to be present in all lives — may seem as though it’s diminishing or belittling the impact of certain kinds of trauma. But Peter Levine is very careful not to go down that path. He agrees that some traumas can have a deeper impact on the body than others. But he also argues that it’s not always obvious which traumas have been trapped, or which events have created deep energetic shocks and which haven’t. The body knows more than the conscious mind does. It also doesn’t matter what you remember or don’t remember. And here’s the kicker: what we remember, how we cognitively interact with, and give meaning to, what we remember in our lives often interrupts the body’s natural healing processes.
I personally found this approach to trauma very liberating and extremely empowering. It meant I didn’t have to measure my trauma up against other people’s; it means we are all united simply by being human; it means that being human is challenging for all humans; and often it’s not even our fault — our brain is built in such a way that, whilst we can reflect ad infinitum about this or that experience, that reflective capacity is often what also interrupts the body’s natural physiological healing process. When I read this book, I felt this tsunami of hope and compassion towards myself and my life. I could also make sense of why I had only managed to come so far; why I had got stuck in my life and the healing process more generally.
2. It’s all about energy
To understand how to heal from trauma, it is important to understand what happens when the body experiences shock. To do this, Peter Levine uses dozens of examples. The one that spoke most immediately to me was of a little bird flying into a window. When this happens, the bird gets stunned, it shivers and shakes, but usually it eventually flies off seemingly unaffected. The bird doesn’t spend years thinking about how stupid it was to fly into the window, or how it might have taken a left turn and avoided the window, or has pent-up rage towards all windows; that bird is most likely going to fly off and get on with being the chirpy, lively and brilliantly living bird it is ‘meant’ to be. It’s because the bird doesn’t have our massive prefrontal cortex that it can recover from its window trauma so efficiently.
Non-human-animals do this healing process ‘automatically’. That shivering, shaking and wobbling that the bird does before flying off is actually key to its healing process. It may look trivial, but it’s where the animal is actively releasing the energy that literally got trapped in its body at the time of hitting the window. The energetic shock from the impact needs to go somewhere before it can fly again.
Another famous example Peter Levine uses is of a cheetah chasing an antelope. The antelope falls to the ground and plays dead to save its life. In this particular example, the cheetah hasn’t even touched the antelope yet. But the survival mechanism of the antelope has kicked in and its body has gone all limp and is now barely moving; even its heart beat has gone down rapidly. But the velocity — the energetic force with which it was running at full speed to save its life — that intense full speed energy is actually still trapped in its body, even though its body is now moving at zero velocity. That energetic force contracts and is stored in the muscles in the moment of shock. If the antelope doesn’t get eaten by the cheetah, like the bird, it trembles and wobbles when it tries to get up and walk — it needs to wobble and shake and run off to release the energy of the shock. After that, just as for that bird, life goes on for the antelope, much the way it did before the cheetah attack.
The moment just after the shock experience is one of the key parts of the body’s healing processes — but this is the bit that humans often don’t complete. If they start to do it, this stage often gets interrupted and can remains incomplete for years. Even if we start shaking or trembling after a shock, we may just as quickly try to stop it the moment we notice it. Likewise, we might start thinking, ‘oh no, what happened?’, ‘I shouldn’t have done that’ or ‘how did this happen?’ In other words, we quickly try to understand what happened; our mind goes into over-drive trying to give meaning to what happened. Even if we don’t do this, other people around us are often quick to do or say something that interrupts this stage. Whilst this cognitive capacity of humans is wonderful — it’s what has enabled us to build cities, create art and poetry, appreciate beauty and love — our cognition often disturbs healing. We talk about the tragedy of being human without realising the depth of that statement when it comes to our own capacity to heal ourselves, both individually and collectively. But once we know this, the exciting news is we can lean into our body’s innate intelligence and let our body heal itself.
3. The felt sense
How do we allow the body to do what it needs to do to heal? Well, the body gives clues as to where in the body the trauma is stored — listen to your own ‘felt sense’ to know where. What is the ‘felt sense’? It’s everything! But as Peter Levine explains, it’s difficult to explain using language because the felt sense is quintessentially an experiential and nonlinear phenomenon.
His advice about learning to tap into your felt-sense is to start gently. Before delving into the left-over trauma tales in the body, learn to become aware of your body more generally. He gives the example of ‘feeling comfortable’ — how do you know you feel comfortable? Where do you feel it? Can you touch it? How does ‘feeling comfortable’ feel in the body? On the skin? The hands? The belly? ‘Feeling comfortable’ isn’t in the chair or the sofa — hence why you need to sit on a chair to see if it feels comfortable to you. You already know what ‘feeling comfortable’ feels like, but there is power and healing in becoming consciously aware of what comfortable feels like at any moment. You may need to focus on yourself and your body in a conscious and more experiential way than you are used to. But learn to do this when you’re walking, when you’re sitting doing nothing, and so on.
Another way to tap into your felt-sense is to listen to how your body reacts when you look at photos, listen to the radio, listen to the rain, imagine a sunset. Listen to your body. Feel your body speak to you in its body-kind-of-way, i.e. somatically. Become aware of the micro-twitches and tingles that your body emits all the time wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Feel the body’s energetic signals.
For many who have unresolved trauma, tapping into the felt sense can be challenging because the way the trauma has been dealt with, i.e. by numbing or cutting ourselves off from our body. The book gives many exercises for how to find your ‘felt-sense’. Reconnecting ourselves to our body is an important first step. This takes practice, patience and training. But it’s through this body-awareness, and ultimately movement and touch, and other conscious somatic excercises, that you can help the body process and release stored trauma. The body knows how to heal itself and it wants to. By working with the body’s natural processes, we can facilitate healing.
4. The body knows
Peter Levine’s somatic therapeutic approach is what he is famous for and why this book has been so influential to those working with trauma. But that wasn’t the main thing I got from it. Perhaps I have always intuitively understood that my body held my trauma. This didn’t — and still doesn’t — mean I could or can always access it though. But the body has a way of telling you what it needs, if you listen to it. And it will make you listen by getting sore or ill in some way until you do listen to it.
And boy, has my body been trying to get me to listen! By the time I was a teenager, I was ill with headaches; I barely slept; I frequently ‘lost time’ when I was awake. I had so much inner-tension I hardly knew what to do with myself. Thankfully, around that time, I also discovered that playing a lot of tennis, and playing very aggressively, helped immensely. It was such a relief! Similarly, long-distance running helped me channel my teenage rage. I was already having daily cold-showers long before it became ‘a thing’. In my early 20s, I blacked out regularly. After graduating, I still had so much tension inside of me, I felt the need to pedal my way through France on my bike, consciously pedalling away anger with each downward-stride. To date, I have broken both arms, my left foot three times, my left ankle once, and my right foot once. I have fallen up more stairs than I can tell you, had umpteen bike falls needing stitches. I’ve just turned 50 and my body is still trying to tell me to stop and take time to heal. This time, I am listening more than ever — I’m trusting my felt-sense and listening to it more than anyone or anything else in the world.
5. Gently-gently out of the trauma-vortex
So why is the body so important? What is it that makes it so central to healing? Well, it goes back to energy again. This time, Peter Levine uses the concept of a vortex to explain what happens in humans when they experience shock trauma. Imagine a stream with its banks protecting it. Now imagine something external (a spade, a tractor digging) suddenly rupturing the banks. The water immediately creates a whirlpool to rapidly adjust to what has happened, but there’s also another kind of whirlpool outside the banks to counteract the water whirlpool. His bank and stream example is not the best in my view, but what he is getting at is that the ‘rupture’ — the shock of trauma — creates a trauma-vortex.
The trauma-vortex keeps sucking us back until it is fully dissipated. If we have a trauma-vortex in our bodies, we are invariably and inevitably pulled to either get sucked back into repeating the old-trauma-pattern and get activated and retraumatised — or we avoid them. This either-repeat-the-trauma-or-avoid-it ends up sucking out the life force. Ultimately, the repeat-or-avoid trauma vortex constricts your life choices. Even if you learn to avoid the trauma triggers, your entire life has become shaped by trying to avoiding them. Your life is still ‘led’ by trauma instead of free from it.
So what’s the solution? Peter Levine’s work is about building up a second vortex — a healing-vortex. The healing-vortex goes in the opposite direction, energetically speaking, to the trauma-vortex. The healing-vortex allows us to ‘renegotiate trauma’ and ‘mend the ruptured bank by circling around the peripheries of the healing and trauma vortices, gradually.’ That is to say, we now have a figure of eight — energetically and rhythmically moving from the trauma-vortex to the healing-vortex — and if done right, gently experiencing the turbulence between them.
He explains:
“By moving between these vortices, we release the tightly bound energies at their core as if they were being unwound. We move toward their centers and their energies are released; the vortices break up, dissolve, and are integrated back into the mainstream. This is renegotiation.”
If you buy into Peter Levine’s vortex ideas around trauma and healing — and the science around these issues is increasingly supporting this school of thinking — then the important take-home message is that healing needs to be done gently.
If you move too quickly between the two vortices, you risk being sucked back into the trauma-vortex. The more often you fall into the trauma-vortex, the stronger its momentum becomes, the deeper its train-track-like grooves become within your whole being. So don’t rush the healing. It’s better to move gently in and out of the vortices — gently and safely conscioulsy feeling the turbulence between the vortices and without setting off ‘danger’ alarm bells — than rushing the process and getting retraumatised, deepening the power of the trauma-vortex.
For breathworkers, especially those whose clients come with stories of trauma, illness or body pains of any kind, this gentle-gentle approach to healing is key. The body knows. Don’t be fooled into speeding up healing. On the contrary, encourage body-awareness. Gently-gently go deeper towards greater activation and make sure to always gently-gently come back to the grounded, embodied present. Trust the process. Don’t worry about memories or what is remembered or not. Allow them to emerge. But try not to get pulled into trauma stories either. It doesn’t help. Stay in the present, in the body, listening to the way the felt-sense continually re-presents itself, moment by moment. Follow the energy. Notice small body movements. Subtle tingles. Tiny twitches. Ringing resonances. Quiet sensations, vibrations. The absences. The silences. The body knows. Learn to listen to it. Don’t rush it. Keep it gentle. Gentle-gentle, rhythmically moving safely and carefully, kindly and compassionately, between the trauma-vortex and the healing-vortex. Gently-gently wins this healing race.