By Lily Rockefeller
Somatic Experiencing® practitioner and meditation instructor Kathy Cherry’s retreat at Garrison Institute this week, “Beyond Calm: The Intelligence of Presence” engages somatic work, a growing field that focuses on the connection between the physical body and mental health. Kathy sat down with us to answer some questions for readers curious to learn more about this innovative field and her work within it.
Kathy is a founding member of DharmaPunx NYC. She integrates somatic awareness, Buddhist teachings, mindfulness, and co-regulating touch practices to support nervous system regulation, trauma healing, and psycho-spiritual growth. She also has additional training in Kathy Kain’s Somatic Touch Skills approach.
What is Somatic Experiencing, and what first drew you to this work?
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a way of working with the mind and body to help the nervous system complete cycles that were interrupted. When we go through something overwhelming, our body often prepares a response — to run, to push back, to seek help, to brace — that it doesn’t get to complete. That unfinished energy doesn’t just disappear. It stays in the system, showing up later as anxiety, tension, shutdown, or a low-grade sense of not being quite safe in our own skin. SE helps that old response complete itself, gently, in the present, so the body can finally let it go.
I was first introduced to somatic practices through my teacher, Heather Sundberg. Her retreats included orienting, containment and grounding practices along with QiGong twice a day. Years later, as I was beginning to manage and teach more retreats, Heather suggested that I do the first year of the SE training. I actually had no idea what Somatic Experiencing was — but I signed up and at that first training module I was sold. It was like receiving the psycho-biological manual for my body. A new angle on the how and why of suffering and how to address the deeper roots and patterns that can continue to taunt us years into practice.
What does current scientific research tell us about the relationship between the nervous system, physiological regulation, and emotional well-being?
For me, one of the most resonant takes right now is that our emotional states aren’t purely psychological — they’re deeply physiological first. In plain terms, below our conscious noticing, our brain is always making a prediction: “Based on everything I’ve encountered before, what’s about to happen, and am I safe?” That prediction shapes everything — our mood, our thoughts, our capacity for connection — before we’ve consciously registered a thing.
This is sometimes called the predictive brain: rather than simply reacting to the present moment, our nervous system is constantly forecasting it, using the body’s past experience as its raw material. This helps explain why people who’ve been through trauma can get stuck in dysregulated states — the system keeps predicting danger because that’s what it learned to expect; what looks like an “overreaction” to a safe situation often isn’t irrational. It’s just an old prediction that needs to be updated.
How have contemplative traditions and scientific understandings of the nervous system begun to inform one another? What conversations are happening today between contemplative practitioners, clinicians, and researchers that weren’t happening 20 years ago?
In one way, none of this is new. Contemplative traditions have always worked with these nervous system states. We’ve had names for them for thousands of years — hindrances, afflictive emotions, dark night of the soul — and we also have a wide range of tools for identifying and working with them, rooted directly in the teachings.
I think what’s new is that we now have a more developed scientific understanding of why these states arise and move through us the way they do, and that’s giving us some fresh ways to teach people how to work with their own emotional content and system. I also think that the body was left out of many forms of practice or was seen as something to be transcended. Now we’re seeing more evidence on how to work with the body — which speaks to the Buddha’s famous quote about how everything we need to know is here in this fathom-long body.
Contemplative traditions often emphasize awareness. In your experience, what is the relationship between awareness and transformation? Is simply becoming aware of our experience enough to create lasting change?
Awareness is a tricky word these days in Buddhist teaching. It can point to so many different things — simple mindfulness of an object all the way to pure awareness in the non-dual sense. So when someone asks if awareness is enough, I find myself wanting to ask, which awareness do you mean?
For me, lasting change is a process of our view becoming wiser and wiser over time. As that view matures — alongside a body that’s grounded, present, and steady — we’re able to meet the afflictive content and emotional charge of a moment with a quality of knowing that lets us actually perceive what’s true about that situation. Not the story we’re used to telling ourselves about it. Not our habitual “flinch” away from it. We see what’s really there, through a wisdom lens — of the Three Marks or the Four Noble Truths, et cetera.
In my experience, lasting change doesn’t come from aversion or from othering an experience. It comes from this maturing capacity to be with what’s true, again and again, until our relationship to it genuinely shifts.
These moments are hard to describe. There’s a clarity that arises in the system — it’s very bottom-up — and it can almost feel like confusion at first, because the old habitual response is still so familiar. But underneath it, something in you is already saying, “Yeah… why would I do that?” That’s the shift. Not willing yourself out of the pattern, but actually outgrowing it.
We live in a time of constant stimulation and uncertainty. How does this affect our nervous system, our capacity to be present, and our ability to live well?
[Laughing] It’s not great! Let’s just start there.
Our nervous system was built for occasional threats — a snake shows up, you deal with it without being bit, the snake slithers away, you return to a state that’s alert but relaxed. This actually happened on one of our DharmaPunx retreats at Garrison!
The nervous system was not built for notifications, news cycles, and 17 open decisions, all day, every day, with no “all clear” ever sounding. Our system never really gets the signal to downshift. We just keep hanging out in a low simmer and call it ‘Tuesday.’
It’s like driving your car everywhere with the oil light on. Technically it still runs. You can get where you’re going. But you’re putting serious wear on the engine the whole time, and eventually something’s going to need a much bigger repair than what an oil change would have cost you.
That’s chronic activation. It’s not dramatic, it’s not a crisis — it’s just expensive, and we’re paying the bill quietly, all day long. Presence gets harder not because you don’t have the skill, but because the body genuinely doesn’t feel safe enough to settle.
Terms like “fight, flight, and freeze” have entered popular culture. What do you wish more people understood about nervous-system regulation?
That these aren’t malfunctions — they’re information. The goal isn’t to regulate our way out of the response. It’s to build enough capacity and safety that the system can complete what is needed and return to baseline.
There’s a quiet, pernicious idea that lives in most of us, even though it makes no sense when we say it out loud: that one day we’ll cross some line and be done — that there is some vaccine against pain. It doesn’t exist but we keep waiting for it anyway, and we treat its absence as a problem.
I think of this work as a form of preventative medicine. The places we get stuck over and over — the meeting, the relationship, the same kind of conversation — become our teacher instead of just our trigger. Before walking into one of those moments, you pause, prepare, settle. Then, while you’re in it, you keep some percentage of awareness on your physiology the whole time.
That’s where the real information lives. The feeling in your body before you blow up at someone is data; when you build a regular practice with it, it begins to arrive early enough to use it — to take a breath, feel your feet, remember your intention. That’s the whole practice: not getting rid of the response, but getting there early enough to meet it differently.
For someone interested in developing greater resilience or nervous-system awareness in everyday life, what’s one practice or shift in attention you would recommend?
Notice sensation before diving into the story. When something difficult happens, pause for thirty seconds to be with sensations before reaching for the solution. Just ask: what’s happening in my body right now? Where do I feel it? Is it tight, heavy, cold? Is it moving up, down? Is there a color, a shape, and image? Bring genuine curiosity to it. You’re not trying to fix it or figure it out — just notice.
Over time, this (re)builds the relationship between your thoughts and your body. The more familiar you become with sensation itself, the more flexible your system gets. Big feelings stop being so frightening, because you’ve proven to yourself, again and again, that you can feel them without being swept away.
Act as an expert journalist with extensive experience writing articles for the Garrison Institute that capture the attention of people interested in somatic work and contemplative practices. Create five article titles that are concise and compelling with an inspiring, warmhearted tone, based on the article above.
Kathy Cherry will co-lead the retreat with DharmaPunx NYC guiding teacher Josh Korda at Garrison Institute called Starting Over: Stepping Out of Old Stories into New Experiences from September 4-7.
