How somatic intelligence becomes the foundation for trauma-informed leadership—and why aliveness isn’t something you achieve, it’s something you attune to.
This is Part 3 of the Patterns of Aliveness series. Read Part 1: How I Learned That Broken Doesn’t Mean Beyond Repair and Part 2: When Trauma Forced Me to Become My Own Authority first.
There was a morning, about eighteen months into my recovery, when I woke up and didn’t immediately scan my body for threat.
I didn’t check: Is the headache there? Can I handle light today? How much capacity do I have?
I just… opened my eyes. Felt the sheets against my skin. Heard birds outside the window. And something in me whispered: I want to feel alive today.
Not “I need to survive today” or “I have to push through today.”
I just want to live.
It was such a small thing. Such a quiet thing. But it meant everything.
Because aliveness—real, full-bodied, present-moment aliveness—had been absent for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like. I’d been so focused on regulating my nervous system, managing symptoms, creating safety, that I hadn’t noticed when something shifted.
I had moved from surviving to living. From collapse to coherence. From override to attunement.
And now, from this time distance, I realize: This isn’t random. This isn’t luck.
This is a process. A methodology. A map that can be followed.
Not the same exact path—everyone’s terrain is different. But the same underlying principles, the same somatic intelligence guiding the way home.
This is what I want to share with you now: the framework that emerged from my lived experience, grounded in science, refined through practice, and offered as a guide for anyone ready to lead from their body’s deepest wisdom.
What Somatic Intelligence Actually Is (And Why It Matters for Leadership)
Let me start with what somatic intelligence isn’t.
It’s not just body awareness. It’s not mindfulness. It’s not “listening to your intuition” in some vague, mystical way.
Somatic intelligence is the capacity to read, interpret, and act on the data your nervous system is constantly generating.
Think of it this way: Your body is always communicating. Always sending signals about safety, capacity, threat, aliveness, depletion, resonance, misalignment.
Most of us were never taught to listen to that language. We learned to override it. To push through fatigue. To ignore the tightness in our chest. To dismiss the gut knowing that something isn’t right.
We learned to trust external metrics—productivity, achievement, other people’s approval—more than we trust our own somatic data.
But here’s what trauma taught me, what brain injury forced me to learn: Your nervous system is a sophisticated intelligence system. And when you learn to read it, trust it, and lead from it, everything changes.
This is what I mean by embodied self-leadership: not leading from your head alone, but from the integrated wisdom of your entire nervous system.
And this is what makes trauma-informed leadership possible: understanding that every person you lead (including yourself) is operating from a nervous system state, and that state determines everything—capacity, creativity, decision-making, resilience, aliveness.
The Three Phases of Somatic Intelligence Development
Through my recovery and my work with clients since, I’ve identified three distinct phases in developing somatic intelligence. They’re not strictly linear—you might cycle through them multiple times—but each builds on the previous one.
Phase 1: Stabilization—Learning the Language
The work: Building basic somatic literacy and nervous system regulation
What it looks like:
- Learning to identify your nervous system states (sympathetic activation, dorsal shutdown, ventral engagement)
- Beginning to notice body signals before they become screaming emergencies
- Creating safety and predictability where you can
- Establishing micro-practices that regulate: breath, movement, nutrition, rest
- Tracking patterns: what dysregulates you, what supports coherence.
The challenge: This phase feels slow. Frustratingly slow. You’re not “achieving” anything visible. You’re building invisible infrastructure.
Why it matters: You cannot access higher-level somatic intelligence (intuition, creativity, embodied decision-making) from a dysregulated nervous system. Stabilization creates the foundation for everything else.
The science: When your nervous system is in chronic survival states (sympathetic or dorsal), your prefrontal cortex goes offline. You lose access to executive function, perspective, nuance. Stabilization literally brings your brain back online.
This was my “soil phase”—the months of seemingly nothing happening while my nervous system quietly rebuilt its capacity to tolerate life.
Phase 2: Attunement—Developing Somatic Literacy
The work: Learning to read increasingly subtle signals and trust your body’s guidance
What it looks like:
- Recognizing the difference between “I’m tired” and “I’m depleted” and “I need rest” and “I’m avoiding”
- Noticing body signals in real-time during decision-making: Does this contract feel expansive or constrictive? Does this conversation energize or drain me?
- Understanding your capacity window: where your edge is, when you’re approaching it, when you’ve crossed it
- Developing trust in body-based knowing: “I don’t know why, but this doesn’t feel right”
- Using your body as a compass for alignment: Does this direction feel like yes or no?
The challenge: You’re learning a new language while everyone around you speaks the old one. You’re making decisions based on sensing while the world demands logical justification.
Why it matters: This is where embodied self-leadership actually begins. You’re no longer just responding to crisis—you’re proactively leading from your body’s intelligence.
The science: Interoception—the ability to sense internal body states—is trainable. The more you practice attending to subtle signals (heart rate, breath, muscle tension, gut sensations), the more refined your somatic intelligence becomes.
This was my phase of experimenting, tracking, learning to trust that the tightness in my chest was data, not something to ignore.
Phase 3: Aliveness—Leading from Embodied Wisdom
The work: Integration, creative expression, and leading from your full, alive self
What it looks like:
- Clarity about what you want, not just what you should want
- Access to desire, creativity, authentic self-expression
- Making decisions from a place of groundedness and coherence, not reactivity or obligation
- Leading others from regulated presence, not anxious control
- Trusting your body’s wisdom as much as your analytical mind
- Experiencing moments of flow, of being fully present and alive.
The challenge: Staying here requires ongoing practice. Life will continually dysregulate you. The work is returning to coherence faster, more skillfully.
Why it matters: This is the payoff. This is where somatic intelligence becomes embodied leadership. You’re no longer managing symptoms—you’re living from aliveness.
The science: When your nervous system is regulated and you’re in ventral vagal states, you have access to social engagement, creativity, play, and complex problem-solving. This is where innovation happens. Where authentic leadership emerges. Where you’re most fully yourself.
This is where I am now. Not perfectly. Not constantly. But frequently enough to know: This is what my nervous system was always trying to help me find.
The Five Pillars of Somatic Intelligence
These pillars emerged from my lived experience of recovery, but they’re grounded in polyvagal theory, neuroscience, and ecological systems thinking. They form the foundation of how I work with clients and how I continue to lead myself.
Pillar 1: Your Body Is Always Right (You’re Just Misinterpreting It)
Your nervous system is not malfunctioning when it shuts down, panics, or resists. It’s responding accurately to real or perceived threat based on the information it has. When you or someone you lead is “not performing,” the first question isn’t “What’s wrong with them?” but “What is their nervous system responding to that I can’t see?”
Pillar 2: Regulation Before Optimization
You cannot think, create, or lead effectively from a dysregulated nervous system. Safety and coherence come first. Always. Stop trying to optimize before you’ve stabilized. Rest isn’t a reward for achievement—it’s the foundation that makes achievement sustainable.
Pillar 3: Capacity Is Variable, Not Fixed
Your capacity changes daily based on sleep, stress, hormones, relational dynamics, environmental input. Respecting that variability is wisdom, not weakness. Design your life and work around your actual capacity, not your ideal capacity.
Pillar 4: Somatic Data Is Valid Data
Your body’s signals—the gut knowing, the chest tightness, the inexplicable resistance—are information, not obstacles. They deserve the same respect as cognitive analysis. Before you override a body signal to meet an external expectation, pause and ask: What is my body trying to tell me?
Pillar 5: Aliveness Requires Attunement, Not Achievement
You cannot force aliveness through willpower, productivity, or checking boxes. It emerges naturally when your nervous system feels safe enough to come fully online. The goal isn’t to do more—it’s to create the conditions where you can be more present, more regulated, more alive in what you’re already doing.
How to Begin Developing Your Somatic Intelligence
If you’re reading this and thinking “Yes, I need this” but also “I have no idea where to start,” here’s where:
Start with three daily check-ins. Pause and ask: What am I feeling right now? Where do I feel it in my body? What does my nervous system need? This is sensing, not analyzing.
Build the foundation: Stabilize blood sugar (don’t skip meals), prioritize sleep, move your body gently daily, practice 4-count inhale/6-count exhale breathing. These aren’t sexy, but they create the conditions where somatic intelligence develops.
Track patterns without judgment: What dysregulates you? What supports coherence? When do you feel most alive? What does “capacity reached” feel like before it becomes overwhelm? Observe, don’t fix. Just gather data.
Cultivate aliveness through permission: Ask daily: What would make me feel alive today? Not productive, not “should”—alive. Maybe it’s five minutes outside, dancing to one song, or eating something beautiful. Aliveness lives in small moments of presence and authentic expression.
The Integration: Science and Somatic Intelligence
Somatic intelligence integrates everything I am. The scientist in me loves that it’s grounded in neuroscience and empirical observation. The mystic in me honors the inexplicable gut knowing and body wisdom that precedes thought. The educator in me knows it’s teachable. The survivor in me knows it emerged from wreckage and became my deepest teaching.
This is what embodied self-leadership gave me: the capacity to integrate all of who I am—analytical and intuitive, scientific and somatic, wounded and whole—into something coherent, alive, and real.
The Question That Changes Everything
So here’s what I want to ask you, here at the end of this series, after you’ve walked with me through collapse and recovery and the emergence of aliveness:
What would your leadership look like if you trusted your body’s intelligence as much as your mind’s analysis?
What decisions would you make differently?
What would you stop doing because your body’s been telling you for months it’s not sustainable?
What would you start doing because some quiet knowing inside you keeps whispering “yes, this”?
What would change if you led from aliveness instead of from depletion, obligation, or borrowed metrics of success?
This is the invitation. This is the methodology. This is the map.
Stabilization. Attunement. Aliveness.
From survival to coherence to fully embodied, integrated leadership.
It’s not a straight line. It’s not quick. But it’s real. It’s possible. And it’s available to you—whether you’re recovering from trauma or simply ready to lead from a place that doesn’t require you to abandon yourself.
Your body already knows the way. Somatic intelligence is just learning to listen.
What Happens Next
This is the final piece in the Patterns of Aliveness series. If you’ve read all three parts, you now have the story, the reframe, and the methodology for developing somatic intelligence and trauma-informed embodied self-leadership.
But reading about it isn’t the same as living it.
Post-traumatic growth is not just something that happens to us — it’s a conscious choice. We can decide to use our experiences, even the painful ones, as vehicles for transformation, expansion, and growth. When we choose to engage with our challenges intentionally, they become catalysts for deeper self-awareness, resilience, and purpose.
If you’re a woman leader ready to develop your own somatic intelligence—to move from override to attunement, from depletion to aliveness, from leading from your head to leading from your whole, integrated self—I offer private containers for this work.
This is for you if: You’re perpetually dysregulated but functional, tired of pushing through, ready to listen to what your body’s been trying to tell you, and committed to the slow work of nervous system transformation.
This is not for you if: You want quick fixes, you’re in acute mental health crisis (work with a therapist first), or you’re not willing to question how you’ve been leading yourself.
If this calls to you, learn more about private embodied leadership sessions here.
Thank you for following the series. From collapse to coherence to aliveness—it’s possible. Your body knows the way.
About This Series
This is Part 3 (final) of the Patterns of Aliveness series on post-traumatic growth and trauma-informed embodied self-leadership.
Read Part 1: How I Learned That Broken Doesn’t Mean Beyond Repair
Read Part 2: When Trauma Forced Me to Become My Own Authority
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