“Release” can be a misleading word in the realm of somatic healing. The misnomer of release is that the pain will be forever gone. That the trigger or tender point, the wound or story, once worked through, will never return. This idea can give a false goal in the inner work, and leave us always feeling as though we’re falling short, perpetuating a cycle of never enoughness on a healing journey that should be leading us toward a sense of wholeness. 

The eradication of challenge is not what I mean by release. A human life will forever be bringing us moments where we come into contact with things that throw us, and these things often hold a similar flavour to the very trigger points of our deep trauma - because that’s what our nervous system is attuned to. But a life is no longer human if it is absent of feeling. The goal of release is not to have the thing gone from you in its entirety. 

I want you to think about release from a different frame. If a drain is clogged with roots and muck, to have a free flowing passage for water moving through once more, that drain must be cleared of the blockage. It is the stagnation that must be released. This form of release is what opens the channel to movement once more. There is no absence of water (emotion, memory, energy), simply a free flowing passageway for that water to pass through. 

Somatic release operates the same. The emotional wounding we didn’t have the capacity process at the time of the abrasion becomes stored in the body, it doesn’t pass down the drain. Overtime, it accumulates. It builds and gets denser, and we feel this density in our physical bodies, or perhaps become numbed to it because such discomfort is another sensation we do not have the capacity to bear.