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Erin Wahl • Somatic Experiencing

@hum.somatics

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Somatic trauma healing for women
Relationships | Relational trauma, Grief & Love
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Nearing 6 months of navigating the deepest grief portal I’ve ever walked through, and I’ve never felt more alive.

Feeling alive doesn’t mean feeling happy all the time. Aliveness is being in authentic connection to whatever is alive within us at any moment, and committing to embodying that experience, not running from it or self abandoning.

Our culture seems to navigate grief in extremes: either go on with your life and avoid your grief, or avoid living in order to grieve.

I have found myself more authentically connected to a secret third way - choosing to live while I grieve and honor my grief while I live. It requires nuance and capacity to navigate complexity, and it can feel messy and uncertain, but, in my experience, it’s much tastier and sexier and more exciting than the alternatives.

If you or someone you know is navigating loss, transition, grief, mess, or uncertainty, I’ve opened up more availability for 1:1 somatic trauma resolution. Link in bio ❤️ by @hum.somatics

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4 months ago

Forever my love 🕊️💔 by @hum.somatics

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9 months ago

Comment SOMA to receive my free masterclass: Sensual and Safe: Nervous System Healing for Secure Love 🌹

As a somatic practitioner, I’m on a lifelong healing & transformation journey too! These are 5 things I don’t prescribe to as someone walking the healing path:

🌊 somatic tools to ‘calm’ my nervous system
🫂 healing in order to ‘fix what’s broken’
🌹 cycle syncing
🦄 ignoring my inherent complexity and multi-dimensionality
❤️‍🔥suppressing my anger to focus on * love and light *

#somatichealing #somatics #femalenervoussystem #nervoussystemhealing #rocd #cpts #selflove #selftrust by @hum.somatics

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2 years ago

❤️ by @hum.somatics

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The first 6 weeks after my husband died were pure, suffocating darkness. I spent most moments in bed or curled up in a ball on the floor crying.

Then one day, to my surprise, I started to come alive within my grief.

The heaviness I was blanketed with for those initial weeks lifted and my heart suddenly felt more open than ever before.

Initially, I had a feeling I was experiencing something profound, and then I became a bit fearful that I was losing my mind as a result of the grief and trauma.

But I decided to trust my system and remain open to the mystery instead of running from the intensity.

To be suddenly so madly in love didn’t feel good necessarily. It felt like I had been shot out of a canon and landed in the extreme wilderness on the other side of the grief<>love continuum.

For days, I walked through the world feeling raw, exposed, and vulnerable… I realized that the blanket of grief I had been wearing had been there for so long it started to feel familiar, safe, and cozy.

I began searching for that familiar, heavy grief. I wanted it back. I thought I was suddenly grieving wrong because grieving had only been known to me as a breaking down.

But in one of the ten books I was half reading at the time, I read that sometimes we are broken down by grief, and sometimes we are broken OPEN.

Reading that, I felt my entire body exhale in the resonance. It finally became clear - I was experiencing a visceral breaking open in response to my grief.

This wasn’t something I could control, so I was in complete awe, gratitude, and relief that this was an experience I GET to have as a result of the tragedy I had lived through.

I’ve grieved many experiences and people in life before this, but I had never been broken open by it.

Since then, the intensity has quieted, but in its place is a subtle vibrant hum that never goes away. I can only describe it as a wildish insatiable eagerness to sink my teeth into life.

When people speak of having a ‘zest for life’, I now have a felt sense of what that really means and man do I feel blessed to hold it everyday.

#griefjourney #somatichealing #nervoussystem by @hum.somatics

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3 months ago

Losing a beloved doesn’t always come with grieving the good things. At some point, grieving all the good is often accompanied by having to grieve some sobering, sometimes even devastating realizations once they are gone.

Radical grieving is the practice of being with the truth. The whole truth of your experience of whatever or whoever you lost.

And when we finally make the courageous leap to do so, we experience our own authenticity like never before. The medicine of authenticity is part of why it feels so damn good when we finally allow ourselves to experience our grief in its wildest, truest form.

#somaticexperiencing #somatichealing #grief #griefjourney by @hum.somatics

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3 months ago

life handed me a whole barrel of lemons this year, so I’ve learned a recipe or two or three or five for lemonade 🍋.

Here’s one for the first time mamas.

#motherhood #matrescence #somatichealing #nervoussystem by @hum.somatics

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3 months ago

Trauma often shows up in our inability to hold nuance.

If you’re wanting to start living your life, not just surviving, you need to expand your capacity to live in the grey (aka the unknown, the void, the mystery that is life).

Working with a nervous system trained somatic practitioner can help, but please DO NOT put your trauma resolution journey in the hands of someone who received a certification over a weekend - long training.

Also - gentle reminder as someone who is also prone to anxiety and ocd: stop believing everything everyone says on the internet. Most people are just trying to create some form of control in a world that feels out of control which is why we are constantly bombarded with black and white, attention grabbing, click baity garbage!

Take everything with a grain of salt and if you’re triggered, unfollow !❤️😘

I’m taking a select number of NEW clients beginning in August! Link in bio for connection call or dm to chat/inquire.

#somaticexperiencing #somatics #healingjourney by @hum.somatics

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2 months ago

It’s real noisy out here, folks… your healing deserves to be handled with care-full, experienced hands ❤️ by @hum.somatics

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5 months ago

Earlier this year, I became my son’s only parent - within a matter of seconds - .

Freshly postpartum as a first time mom, no time to prepare, body still healing from birth, chronically under slept. … didn’t have a say in the matter.

Before the day my husband died, I hadn’t changed a single diaper. I didn’t know how to load the car seat into the car, or how to put on the baby carrier without support.

Within the last 6 months, I’ve learned how to do it all. Not because I’m hyper independent but because I had no other choice but to rise to the occasion.

I’ve had no real breaks save for an hour once a week reserved for therapy and 5 hours a week to take one client a day once I started back up with work.

I have done every bedtime, every night waking, every bath, every nap, every diaper, every meal, every tantrum, every tooth, every new skill. Every fever, every doctors appointment, every decision, every ‘uppy’, every leap, every feeding, every regression as the only parent.

My body hurts, but is stronger in ways than before. My heart is tender with grief and a tinge of resentment, but more open and connected to love than ever before. The moments when I’d cry and curse my husband for leaving slowly became moments that make me chuckle at the absurdity of life.

And I’m not special. I’m not an exception to the rule. I’m just a woman carrying many versions of her little girl self inside.

A part of me will always grieve what this season robbed from me - the chance to be the softer version of myself in early motherhood and to savor all of the moments I knew I’d never get back. The chance for my body to heal slowly.

But it’s also held a mirror up to the depth of strength within all of us women. And it revealed a version of myself that I don’t think I ever would have met if this hadn’t happened.

She is a resilient, strong, badass mother devoted to learning this sacred dance.

This isn’t the highlight reel, or the delusional influencer version of the mother self, but the wildish, gritty, scrappy, ugly, force of fkg nature that we become when we have no other choice but to rise to the occasion.

#motherhood #grief #nervoussystemhealing by @hum.somatics

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2 months ago

The grief is so immense, so all consuming at times that I can lose touch with the ground. I noticed myself floating more the last few weeks - and if not floating, struck by profound heartache leaving me gut-punched, breathless.

All of the resilience, all of the strength, all of the ‘work’ I’ve done doesn’t stand a chance against these tidal waves of grief. And the thing is, is that I don’t think we’re meant to withstand it.

So after some wrestling with myself and the pain, I found myself back at his resting place. Ritualizing, tenderizing, honoring, and moving with the pain, the love, the loss.

As life continues to move, I move with it. Always in devotion to this unbelievable experience of having loved and lost long before it would’ve made any sense to lose him.

So here we are, closing one chapter of grief and opening another. Forever committed to learning how to not run from it, and instead, welcoming it with a loving ‘hello, again’…

❤️
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. by @hum.somatics

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19 days ago

At my husband’s celebration of life, a beloved approached me, took me by the hands, looked into my eyes and said, ‘I’m just now realizing that you’re a widow’.

That word was one that I’d wrestled over shortly after my husband passed - I debated whether or not I wanted to take on the identity that comes along with it. Whether or not I wanted that to be a door I open for those who do not yet know me to walk through before even having a chance to hear my voice.

But when my friend reminded me of this at the celebration of life I thought, ‘I’ve been so busy letting my grief break my heart wide open that I had forgotten all about that, too’.

I care much more deeply about how the event of my husbands out of order death is shaping me from the inside. The spiritual pathways it’s opened that allow me to move through life much differently than before - more open to the mystery, and so much closer to love.

#somaticexperiencing #somatictherapy #griefjourney by @hum.somatics

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3 months ago