Mari Crook Somatics

28/07/2026

Lately I’ve been thinking about the years of childhood that come before memory.

I used to locate early wounding in what happened between me and another person. Now I notice it also arrives through the field itself. An infant can be overwhelmed by more than what is done to them. They can be overwhelmed by the nervous systems they had to co-regulate with in order to survive. Because a newborn has little capacity to regulate its own state yet, it matches the caregiver’s. When that body is frightened or shut down, the infant attunes to it.

While the systems that narrate experience aren’t online yet, implicit memory is working from birth, so what we’re left with is felt in the body without a story attached, a state we can source only partly, if at all. Through somatic work, I’ve experienced glimmers of these coming back: felt-sense memories of fear, hunger, the longing for love.

Most of us can’t verify what happened in those years. But since some of what we carry was absorbed from them, one thing we can do is look to our parents and feel into what their systems might have been like, the ways they suffered or struggled. Seeing their pain becomes one way to a little more consciously meet our own.

23/07/2026

The phrase “the only way out is in” bounces around the more “spiritual” sides of the internet. I believe there’s truth to it. The biggest changes in myself, like my relationship to anxiety and depression, have come from turning my attention toward the parts of myself I didn’t want to see, acknowledge, or feel—my own self-hatred, the fact that I had outgrown a partner, abuse I experienced as a child. Whether it was things I didn’t want to feel or truths I didn’t want to admit, by looking at them with curiosity and the gentleness and patience of my breath, these places of contraction and resistance in my system began to soften.

I used to say somatic work changed me, that I’m a completely different person than I was before. I’ve since realized I’m not a different person, but just more fully myself. Beneath the sadness I built up and absorbed over my life was always a happy, curious person who loves people, who loves to dance, who follows her heart and isn’t afraid to take risks. She was there painting naked in front of a canvas at two years old, dancing in princess costumes (or her brother’s underwear). And she’s still here, thrilled by every new person she meets and every groove she gets to flow with on the dance floor.

15/07/2026

This image became the center of a somatic session I had recently.

In it, I was touching a young part of myself, a part that feels quite helpless. If she had a story, it would be, “I can’t do it on my own. I need someone to help me.” She’s the part that freezes when I think about going to the doctor for a check-up, or that puts off understanding exactly what my visa renewal requires, that would rather not know than face a problem she isn’t sure how to handle. From the outside it might not even look like a problem, this simple act of not doing. But in the session I saw that these small avoidance patterns connect to something deeper, a frozen helplessness that felt about two years old, a feeling of needing support I couldn’t get.

There’s no story when I go back this far, no scene I can replay. It lives in the body, as sensation and feeling. But imagery helps connect the pieces. This part of myself still has short blond curls that will later darken. She’s still unsteady on her feet as she explores her first home, a Victorian brick house built to last, in a neighborhood that grew poorer every year as white families with money moved to newer developments with better schools. When I felt into this two-year-old self, I felt her pain and her uncertainty, unsure the world was entirely safe or reliable.

When my somatic coach asked me if there was a place in my mind where this younger me could go, somewhere that could support her, I imagined the garden. My secret, safe place had been to crawl behind the bushes lining the brick porch. Close to the ground, hidden in the vegetation with my back against the solid 19th-century foundations, I felt invisible to the world and sheltered by the curved green boughs. When my coach asked if I wanted to include anything else in this inner sanctuary, I said my cat Gaia, her namesake somehow present in the image too. The calm, steady love of a pet, as I imagined her in my young arms, brought me to tears. I could let the grief held in my body move, and be felt, while staying resourced. My thirty-five-year-old self held hands with this younger me in the garden where she felt safe, Gaia warm in her arms.

08/07/2026

01/07/2026

A distinction I find myself making often is that some people need to develop their interoceptive sensitivity, their ability to notice and discern what’s happening in their body. Others already receive abundant somatic information. What they need is nervous system regulation, a wider window of tolerance that allows them to stay present with the intensity they already feel. This tends to be true for people with trauma histories, anxiety, or certain neurological profiles.

For this second group, breathwork regulates the autonomic nervous system, increasing vagal tone and shifting the body toward parasympathetic states, which expands the window of tolerance over time. Attentional practices like titration, moving attention incrementally toward intense sensation rather than fully into it, and pendulation, oscillating between activation and a resource state, build the capacity to stay present with intensity without tipping into overwhelm or dissociation.

Somatic work gets framed sometimes as universally about feeling more, but some people’s nervous systems are already highly responsive, and the work for them is building enough safety to remain present with what they already feel.

01/07/2026

What’s special about a gathering of somatic practitioners? I think it is that you can really see everyone’s permission to allow life to flow.

A few weeks ago I went to a gathering of Pantarei somatic practitioners hosted by at the retreat center .seminarhaus

We didn’t have a set agenda for the weekend. Let’s give and receive sessions, someone suggests. Let’s have some discussions, cook together, hold a closing circle...maybe a bonfire? Our schedule looked like a brainstorm, ideas scribbled in, a person’s name written in with a question mark, no times set except a suggested idea of when to eat breakfast.

And yet somehow, with no fixed agenda, the weekend flowed almost seamlessly, people stepping up to lead, people throwing extra hands into dinner prep so that no one had to miss out on exchanges we did, and the closing circle coming together the morning of, people listening to one another and building on each other’s ideas with no one in charge.

At the end of the weekend, during our closing circle, we each set an intention. Mine was to trust life more, to trust that if I let go of control, like I did this weekend, life could actually flow with more joy and ease. 🧡

23/05/2026

This is the first of three post series sharing books that have shaped my thinking. This first part starts with my roots: the concepts I encountered through meditation and nondual ta***ic teachings before I even trained as a somatic practitioner. These books form some of the foundation underneath my practice, and they reflect where my personal path began, which also happens to be a particular, predominantly white male corner of the spiritual world. The series broadens from here, moving into books on somatics, trauma, and worldview that bring in wider perspectives.

18/05/2026

This testimonial captures something I hear often, and not just from clients. I've found somatic work more effective for my own healing than talk therapy alone, and so have my partner, my mother, and my childhood best friend.

I think this comes down to a common misconception about the mind and body. Many people tend to treat the two as separate and view understanding ourselves as primarily a cognitive act. But the body is a site of neurological activity in its own right. The enteric nervous system alone contains roughly 500 million neurons. The heart has its own intrinsic neural network. Embodied cognition, the intelligence that lives below the neck, is part of the same system as the thinking mind.

What this means practically is that when we try to understand our lives, solve problems, and make sense of our experiences from only a "cognitive" level - which is just the tip of the iceberg - we're depriving ourselves of our primary store of implicit knowledge.

When we include the body in the conversation, we gain access to memory, emotional charge, and unprocessed experience held in its tissues, breath patterns, and points of chronic tension. And because it is a connected system, grounding in the body tends to also sharpen cognitive access, unlocking deeper layers of imagination and insight. As this client found, one session that included the body helped them access what months of talk therapy could not.

I personally think all therapy should be somatic, in the sense that all approaches to healing the human experience should recognize the body as a source of knowing, understanding, and processing.