Visionary Somatics: Embodied Resilience in the Age of Trauma
Autor Brian Tierneyen Limba Engleză Paperback – 25 mar 2027
• Presents a comprehensive overview of somatic psychology, from its roots in shamanic healing and early psychoanalysis to neuroscience and trauma research
• Explains practical trauma resolution protocols, including the Visionary Somatics Trauma Re-Sequencing Process, with applications for clinicians and individuals
• Teaches how to recognize and work with your body’s rhythms, address defensive patterns, and support the integration of traumatic memories
Visionary Somatics provides a much-needed and comprehensive roadmap for practitioners and individuals seeking to understand the connections between trauma, neurobiology, and healing. In this book, somatic psychologist Brian Tierney reveals how understanding and healing trauma occurs through embodied experience.
Locating the roots of somatic psychology in early shamanic traditions and the work of Wilhelm Reich, Tierney presents the theory as well as the practice of body-oriented healing. He details the limitations of current trauma discourse and outlines the challenges posed by hyper-specialization in clinical and academic settings. He then explores a wide range of somatic modalities—including osteopathy and somatic experiencing—as well as dance, family constellations, myofascial release, and active imagination. He also describes how trauma is encoded in the nervous system and how somatic practices can support healing and integration.
Practical protocols for trauma resolution are provided, including the Visionary Somatics Trauma Re-Sequencing Process, which integrates contemporary neuroscience with accessible therapeutic techniques. Tierney emphasizes the importance of imagination and collaboration in the healing process and shows how to recognize and work with your body’s rhythms, address defensive patterns, and support the integration of traumatic memories. Tierney’s integrative approach will equip readers with practical tools for fostering embodied resilience and meaningful transformation.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781644115121
ISBN-10: 1644115123
Pagini: 690
Ilustrații: 8 b&w illustrations and 2-page color tip-in
Dimensiuni: 216 x 279 mm
Greutate: 1.13 kg
Editura: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Colecția Healing Arts Press
ISBN-10: 1644115123
Pagini: 690
Ilustrații: 8 b&w illustrations and 2-page color tip-in
Dimensiuni: 216 x 279 mm
Greutate: 1.13 kg
Editura: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Colecția Healing Arts Press
Notă biografică
BRIAN TIERNEY is a somatic psychologist who has taught Craniosacral Biodynamics for a decade and for 6 years was a professor of neuroscience and archetypal/DSM diagnosis at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Tierney is also the host of the Boundless Body Podcast, which nurtures innovative thought and practice. He is based in Saratoga, California.
Extras
1
The Infrastructure of Articulation
Language is a body. Like all bodies, it is Janus-faced: It has an expansive side pulsating with cosmic potencies and a contractile side throbbing with the power to create by binding together forms and structures. Language heals and language kills, it sets free and imprisons. Language—and languages—allow us to express meaning. Meaning has a fundamental physics to it, and physics is the fundament of meaning. All eggs trace back to the original Egg of creation and language is a fertilized egg corresponding with all these other morphospaces. The following quote continues to invoke this cosmic dimension of meaning that language hatches from:
The cosmos is both mythos and physis, a “story of the universe” that the universe immanently engenders. Cosmos authors its own self-generation from chaos, and for this reason, its nature cannot be differentiated from its narrative: its nature is narrative. What is the cosmos if not the self-positing, self-referential, self-generating fabulation of particles, signs, and images according to which the universe spins its own story in real time? As cosmologists and the scientists of the nascent field of astrobiology have suggested, perhaps the cosmos is nothing else than this story, the perpetual and self-perpetuating auto-poesis of a universe whose self-consistency consists in particles giving rise to each other.
The study of signs, semiotics, is the study of meaning production and exchange. Originally, semiotics limited itself to the body of language: the meaningful utterances and bodily gestures produced in humanity to express or describe events and things. But the field eventually expanded into cosmic proportions, as expressed in the above quote. Entire subfields in the body of semiotics have descended with modifications from its original egg of language, fields like biosemiotics (the study of biological meanings), astrosemiotics (the study of meaning making in relation to astronomical phenomena), and sociosemiotics (the study of meaning production and power relations in societies). Visionary Somatics, in fact, can be thought of as an expression of iatrosemiotics, the study of the signs and meanings of therapeutic events and languages. This chapter offers the reader a cosmic backdrop for meaning as it develops through evolutionary biology, human language acquisition, and the formation of social systems that circulate meanings in ways that profoundly shape the individual bodies who are part of them. The anthropology of language acquisition will provide a framework for how language differentiated out of a swarm of virtual potentials in ways that correspond to how life differentiated out of the prelife swarm of molecules and forces.
All fields studying signs are interested in relationships, because a sign is a meaningful reality in relationship with other meaningful realities. Take for example, the reality of symmetry. Symmetry is a fundamental sign; it expresses novel meanings in relationship with other distinctive types of symmetry and with the forces and intensities of symmetry-breaking dynamics (these forces also being signs). Traditional semiotics focused on an anthropomorphic image of meaning: Only humans create meaning. But the field has matured, allowing for a non-anthropocentric understanding of meaning production—a physics of meaning. Deleuze is a huge advocate for a nonlinguistic semiotics, ushering us through the folds of a universe saturated with meaning:
Physics supposes an objective and unambiguous matter subject to the conditions of reality. We are wrong to believe in facts; there are only signs. We are wrong to believe in truth; there are only interpretations. The sign is an ever-equivocal, implicit, and implicated meaning. . . . Everything is implicated, everything is complicated, everything is sign, meaning, essence. Everything exists in those obscure zones that we penetrate as into crypts, in order to decipher hieroglyphs and secret languages. . . . Neither things nor minds exist, there are only bodies: astral bodies, vegetal bodies. The biologists would be right if they knew that bodies in themselves are already a language. The linguists would be right if they knew that language is always the language of bodies.
Now, psychotherapy and other talk therapies use language and meaning making as primary tools in their morphospaces of repair. Therapeutic space is thus sonorous—saturated with the phonemes and morphemes of meaningful sounds that shape bodies. Freud was originally a hypnotherapist who used touch and sound to guide his folks into the depths of unconscious mind and his theory of the unconscious—like all theories—can be understood as a system of signs and their interpretation. Freud believed the process of repression was closely tied to language. When a person encounters a traumatic experience, their mind may use language to transform the experience into a form that can be safely stored in the unconscious. This process involves the use of various defense mechanisms, such as denial, projection, and intellectualization, which help to protect the conscious mind from the full impact of the traumatic experience. One of his more sophisticated clinical tools, free association, was designed to plunge a person into their own system of meanings so that Freud could then interpret how the repression was organized by the unconscious. He filtered the data through his own meaning making about what were primary vectors of suppression in the unconscious mind: the repression of incestual desire and the suppression of primordial urges to suck, bite, fight, fuck, look, be looked at, and nurture.
Freud also believed that language shapes the way we think about ourselves and the world around us, and that the meanings we ascribe to words and signs are shaped by our unconscious desires and fears. He proposed that the unconscious mind communicates its hidden meanings through various forms of symbolic expression, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes.
Overall, Freud saw language as a powerful tool for both conscious and unconscious communication, and he believed that understanding the role of language in the formation of the unconscious mind was essential to the practice of psychoanalysis.
As a somatic psychologist, Freud held that language was a crucial part of the developing ego and that “The ego is first and foremost a body ego.” To him, the concept of the bodily ego refers to a psychological boundary—most evident in the skin—between the individual and the external world. As a physical structure, the skin is the boundary between inner and outer and as a psychological structure, the body/skin ego is the interface between the meanings expressed within the individual and the meaning worlds existing outside the individual. As a person learns to use language—especially the very important word I—the bodily ego gradually carves itself out a meaning space distinct from the meaning space of others. This is a space of representation—a theater where meanings are expressed through narratives, abstractions, signs, and symbols. Language is thus a tool that shapes an individual’s sense of self in the morphospace of relations with the external world.
The developing self is not just bathing in the meaningful bath of sound that is language, it is immersed in a world of meaningful images. At some point in development the sighted child gazes at a mirror and, for the first time, recognizes (often with a smile) the image seen there as a representation of the actual body. Together with the meaningful sound I, the meaningful image in the mirror becomes a mental representation of the actual body. Like two-bladed scissors, the sound and the image cut the subject out as a representation of the body. The consequences of this process for the human cannot be overstated. It is the space where self becomes other.
Jung was also fascinated with the powers of sound and image. Together, they form the basis of his understanding of the unconscious. He agreed with Freud that a word in language is a nexus of images, tactile sensations, meanings, emotions, and sounds (a mini BwO). The birth of archetypal theory came from Jung’s passionate interest in this zone of intensity. His Word Association Test provided the participant with a long set of words and each time they heard a word, they would respond with spontaneous associations. Jung found that when a person was less aware and less consciously attentive, their associations would be plunged into a subconscious matrix of sound resonance. The sounds constituting the word came into register as the more primordial association in the mind, as opposed to the conceptual dimension of the word. Furthermore, Jung gradually noticed that the sound associations people made clustered around feelings and images. This was a key moment in the birth of archetypal theory: the discovery that words are a feeling-toned matrix of conceptual meanings floating on top of a deep relational network of sounds and images. With cross-cultural scholarship, Jung found that these characteristic patterns of meaning making in humanity were expressed in archetypal images containing distinctive topographies of intense feelings, meanings, and sounds showing up in the narratives, dreams, behaviors, myths, social dramas, psychotic contents, and literature of all people.
The Infrastructure of Articulation
Language is a body. Like all bodies, it is Janus-faced: It has an expansive side pulsating with cosmic potencies and a contractile side throbbing with the power to create by binding together forms and structures. Language heals and language kills, it sets free and imprisons. Language—and languages—allow us to express meaning. Meaning has a fundamental physics to it, and physics is the fundament of meaning. All eggs trace back to the original Egg of creation and language is a fertilized egg corresponding with all these other morphospaces. The following quote continues to invoke this cosmic dimension of meaning that language hatches from:
The cosmos is both mythos and physis, a “story of the universe” that the universe immanently engenders. Cosmos authors its own self-generation from chaos, and for this reason, its nature cannot be differentiated from its narrative: its nature is narrative. What is the cosmos if not the self-positing, self-referential, self-generating fabulation of particles, signs, and images according to which the universe spins its own story in real time? As cosmologists and the scientists of the nascent field of astrobiology have suggested, perhaps the cosmos is nothing else than this story, the perpetual and self-perpetuating auto-poesis of a universe whose self-consistency consists in particles giving rise to each other.
The study of signs, semiotics, is the study of meaning production and exchange. Originally, semiotics limited itself to the body of language: the meaningful utterances and bodily gestures produced in humanity to express or describe events and things. But the field eventually expanded into cosmic proportions, as expressed in the above quote. Entire subfields in the body of semiotics have descended with modifications from its original egg of language, fields like biosemiotics (the study of biological meanings), astrosemiotics (the study of meaning making in relation to astronomical phenomena), and sociosemiotics (the study of meaning production and power relations in societies). Visionary Somatics, in fact, can be thought of as an expression of iatrosemiotics, the study of the signs and meanings of therapeutic events and languages. This chapter offers the reader a cosmic backdrop for meaning as it develops through evolutionary biology, human language acquisition, and the formation of social systems that circulate meanings in ways that profoundly shape the individual bodies who are part of them. The anthropology of language acquisition will provide a framework for how language differentiated out of a swarm of virtual potentials in ways that correspond to how life differentiated out of the prelife swarm of molecules and forces.
All fields studying signs are interested in relationships, because a sign is a meaningful reality in relationship with other meaningful realities. Take for example, the reality of symmetry. Symmetry is a fundamental sign; it expresses novel meanings in relationship with other distinctive types of symmetry and with the forces and intensities of symmetry-breaking dynamics (these forces also being signs). Traditional semiotics focused on an anthropomorphic image of meaning: Only humans create meaning. But the field has matured, allowing for a non-anthropocentric understanding of meaning production—a physics of meaning. Deleuze is a huge advocate for a nonlinguistic semiotics, ushering us through the folds of a universe saturated with meaning:
Physics supposes an objective and unambiguous matter subject to the conditions of reality. We are wrong to believe in facts; there are only signs. We are wrong to believe in truth; there are only interpretations. The sign is an ever-equivocal, implicit, and implicated meaning. . . . Everything is implicated, everything is complicated, everything is sign, meaning, essence. Everything exists in those obscure zones that we penetrate as into crypts, in order to decipher hieroglyphs and secret languages. . . . Neither things nor minds exist, there are only bodies: astral bodies, vegetal bodies. The biologists would be right if they knew that bodies in themselves are already a language. The linguists would be right if they knew that language is always the language of bodies.
Now, psychotherapy and other talk therapies use language and meaning making as primary tools in their morphospaces of repair. Therapeutic space is thus sonorous—saturated with the phonemes and morphemes of meaningful sounds that shape bodies. Freud was originally a hypnotherapist who used touch and sound to guide his folks into the depths of unconscious mind and his theory of the unconscious—like all theories—can be understood as a system of signs and their interpretation. Freud believed the process of repression was closely tied to language. When a person encounters a traumatic experience, their mind may use language to transform the experience into a form that can be safely stored in the unconscious. This process involves the use of various defense mechanisms, such as denial, projection, and intellectualization, which help to protect the conscious mind from the full impact of the traumatic experience. One of his more sophisticated clinical tools, free association, was designed to plunge a person into their own system of meanings so that Freud could then interpret how the repression was organized by the unconscious. He filtered the data through his own meaning making about what were primary vectors of suppression in the unconscious mind: the repression of incestual desire and the suppression of primordial urges to suck, bite, fight, fuck, look, be looked at, and nurture.
Freud also believed that language shapes the way we think about ourselves and the world around us, and that the meanings we ascribe to words and signs are shaped by our unconscious desires and fears. He proposed that the unconscious mind communicates its hidden meanings through various forms of symbolic expression, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes.
Overall, Freud saw language as a powerful tool for both conscious and unconscious communication, and he believed that understanding the role of language in the formation of the unconscious mind was essential to the practice of psychoanalysis.
As a somatic psychologist, Freud held that language was a crucial part of the developing ego and that “The ego is first and foremost a body ego.” To him, the concept of the bodily ego refers to a psychological boundary—most evident in the skin—between the individual and the external world. As a physical structure, the skin is the boundary between inner and outer and as a psychological structure, the body/skin ego is the interface between the meanings expressed within the individual and the meaning worlds existing outside the individual. As a person learns to use language—especially the very important word I—the bodily ego gradually carves itself out a meaning space distinct from the meaning space of others. This is a space of representation—a theater where meanings are expressed through narratives, abstractions, signs, and symbols. Language is thus a tool that shapes an individual’s sense of self in the morphospace of relations with the external world.
The developing self is not just bathing in the meaningful bath of sound that is language, it is immersed in a world of meaningful images. At some point in development the sighted child gazes at a mirror and, for the first time, recognizes (often with a smile) the image seen there as a representation of the actual body. Together with the meaningful sound I, the meaningful image in the mirror becomes a mental representation of the actual body. Like two-bladed scissors, the sound and the image cut the subject out as a representation of the body. The consequences of this process for the human cannot be overstated. It is the space where self becomes other.
Jung was also fascinated with the powers of sound and image. Together, they form the basis of his understanding of the unconscious. He agreed with Freud that a word in language is a nexus of images, tactile sensations, meanings, emotions, and sounds (a mini BwO). The birth of archetypal theory came from Jung’s passionate interest in this zone of intensity. His Word Association Test provided the participant with a long set of words and each time they heard a word, they would respond with spontaneous associations. Jung found that when a person was less aware and less consciously attentive, their associations would be plunged into a subconscious matrix of sound resonance. The sounds constituting the word came into register as the more primordial association in the mind, as opposed to the conceptual dimension of the word. Furthermore, Jung gradually noticed that the sound associations people made clustered around feelings and images. This was a key moment in the birth of archetypal theory: the discovery that words are a feeling-toned matrix of conceptual meanings floating on top of a deep relational network of sounds and images. With cross-cultural scholarship, Jung found that these characteristic patterns of meaning making in humanity were expressed in archetypal images containing distinctive topographies of intense feelings, meanings, and sounds showing up in the narratives, dreams, behaviors, myths, social dramas, psychotic contents, and literature of all people.
Cuprins
PREFACE
The Living Field as Lesson Plan:
An Interdisciplinary Healing Adventure
INTRODUCTION
The Body of Everything
PART I
The Conceptual Building Blocks of Visionary Somatics
CHAPTER 1
The Infrastructure of Articulation:
Meaning, Coding, and Decoding
CHAPTER 2
Language Is Born:
Topological Cerebellum, the Morphospace of Identity
CHAPTER 3
The Anthropology of Magical Capture
CHAPTER 4
Somatic Psychology and the Magical Unconscious as Glorious Body
CHAPTER 5
Navigating the Complex Universe of Trauma:
The Traumaverse in Clinical Practice
CHAPTER 6
The Predictive Processing Paradigm, the Cerebellum, and the Ancient New
CHAPTER 7
The Functional Organization of the Brain and the Basic Emotions View
CHAPTER 8
The Visionary Somatics Trauma Re-Sequencing Process
PART II
Archetypes and the Art of Rendering Ourselves Revolutionary
CHAPTER 9
The Big Four Archetypes and the Octahedral Diamond Body
CHAPTER 10
The Wandering Wand and the Capturing Scepter
CHAPTER 11
Magus Development
CHAPTER 12
What Can a Body Do?
Somatic Psychology Roots and the Visionary Somatics Body Psychotherapy Curriculum
CHAPTER 13
Cosmos into Clinic
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The Living Field as Lesson Plan:
An Interdisciplinary Healing Adventure
INTRODUCTION
The Body of Everything
PART I
The Conceptual Building Blocks of Visionary Somatics
CHAPTER 1
The Infrastructure of Articulation:
Meaning, Coding, and Decoding
CHAPTER 2
Language Is Born:
Topological Cerebellum, the Morphospace of Identity
CHAPTER 3
The Anthropology of Magical Capture
CHAPTER 4
Somatic Psychology and the Magical Unconscious as Glorious Body
CHAPTER 5
Navigating the Complex Universe of Trauma:
The Traumaverse in Clinical Practice
CHAPTER 6
The Predictive Processing Paradigm, the Cerebellum, and the Ancient New
CHAPTER 7
The Functional Organization of the Brain and the Basic Emotions View
CHAPTER 8
The Visionary Somatics Trauma Re-Sequencing Process
PART II
Archetypes and the Art of Rendering Ourselves Revolutionary
CHAPTER 9
The Big Four Archetypes and the Octahedral Diamond Body
CHAPTER 10
The Wandering Wand and the Capturing Scepter
CHAPTER 11
Magus Development
CHAPTER 12
What Can a Body Do?
Somatic Psychology Roots and the Visionary Somatics Body Psychotherapy Curriculum
CHAPTER 13
Cosmos into Clinic
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Recenzii
“After many years, somatics is becoming part of the therapeutic mainstream. At the same time, it is still an emerging discipline. In this unique exploration, Brian Tierney extends our understanding of the complex intricacies of the various systems making up the soma and psyche—including the underlying molecular and neurological mechanisms—enhancing our understanding of the roots of empowerment and resilience.”
“This is a Renaissance book in the truest sense of revival and reimagination of the human body. And Brian Tierney is the Renaissance artist who wields a brush more than a pen, with a palette of diverse colors and forms—from the microscopic to the cosmic. The continued degradation of the human body is well documented in our culture, and every epoch such as ours brings forward a healing method such as can be found in Visionary Somatics. No element—from science to magic—is left unturned. Every element is thoroughly examined and integrated into a new map of creativity for what a human body is and how it can heal. Brian shows us how to enter the mystery without the need to solve it. From theory to hands-on clinical practice, I have never read a book of such import in my life. To save our planet is to save our body, and this book is the royal road for that journey.”
“Brian Tierney’s Visionary Somatics is brilliant, provocative, eminently readable, and—as the subtitle suggests—timely. It is a tour de force, with so much to teach us, so much with which one can wholeheartedly agree, and yet—as with all books that reward careful reading—some bits that cause us to question, even if not to disagree. This is a book that is needed, certainly by anyone in the healing professions, but also one that many from further afield will enjoy and find immensely edifying.”
“Visionary Somatics is an exhilarating work of philosophical audacity and clinical imagination. Brian Tierney refuses the deadening binaries of reductionism and mysticism alike, inviting us instead into the living intelligence of the body, where affect, bioelectricity, and becoming converge in a genuinely transformative vision. This is an important contribution to contemporary somatic psychology: fearless, deeply learned, and animated throughout by the Deleuzian conviction that life is always greater than the identities we impose upon it.”
“Brian’s work provides an excellent synthesis of fields that normally remain highly fragmented. By combining high-resolution knowledge maps of developmental biology with Deleuzian philosophy, he bridges these realms in a way that is not only educational but also deeply evocative of the imagination. Bringing the lens of a somatic practitioner, he tethers this rich theoretical landscape to something tangible: the lived experience of the body.”
“Visionary Somatics is a transdisciplinary inflection point for practitioners. This book can and will transform conversations about somatic psychology, individual and collective trauma, and the fate of civilization in the shadow of generative AI. As developmental practitioners find this book, the conversation that ensues could itself be generative and transformative. Be there!”
“This is a Renaissance book in the truest sense of revival and reimagination of the human body. And Brian Tierney is the Renaissance artist who wields a brush more than a pen, with a palette of diverse colors and forms—from the microscopic to the cosmic. The continued degradation of the human body is well documented in our culture, and every epoch such as ours brings forward a healing method such as can be found in Visionary Somatics. No element—from science to magic—is left unturned. Every element is thoroughly examined and integrated into a new map of creativity for what a human body is and how it can heal. Brian shows us how to enter the mystery without the need to solve it. From theory to hands-on clinical practice, I have never read a book of such import in my life. To save our planet is to save our body, and this book is the royal road for that journey.”
“Brian Tierney’s Visionary Somatics is brilliant, provocative, eminently readable, and—as the subtitle suggests—timely. It is a tour de force, with so much to teach us, so much with which one can wholeheartedly agree, and yet—as with all books that reward careful reading—some bits that cause us to question, even if not to disagree. This is a book that is needed, certainly by anyone in the healing professions, but also one that many from further afield will enjoy and find immensely edifying.”
“Visionary Somatics is an exhilarating work of philosophical audacity and clinical imagination. Brian Tierney refuses the deadening binaries of reductionism and mysticism alike, inviting us instead into the living intelligence of the body, where affect, bioelectricity, and becoming converge in a genuinely transformative vision. This is an important contribution to contemporary somatic psychology: fearless, deeply learned, and animated throughout by the Deleuzian conviction that life is always greater than the identities we impose upon it.”
“Brian’s work provides an excellent synthesis of fields that normally remain highly fragmented. By combining high-resolution knowledge maps of developmental biology with Deleuzian philosophy, he bridges these realms in a way that is not only educational but also deeply evocative of the imagination. Bringing the lens of a somatic practitioner, he tethers this rich theoretical landscape to something tangible: the lived experience of the body.”
“Visionary Somatics is a transdisciplinary inflection point for practitioners. This book can and will transform conversations about somatic psychology, individual and collective trauma, and the fate of civilization in the shadow of generative AI. As developmental practitioners find this book, the conversation that ensues could itself be generative and transformative. Be there!”
Descriere
Understanding trauma, neuroscience, and its application for embodied healing