A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part III – Awakening My Body)

In Part II, I told the story of how I opened my heart. This next chapter is about going further inward and downward – into the realm of the body and gut.

It all started when I was 22 and began to feel a nagging pain and tension in the back of my throat. That small discomfort eventually turned into a searing pain throughout the right side of my neck, accompanied by an inability to control my voice – to speak, to sing, or to laugh without a lot of effort. 

The social and psychological effects were even worse than the physical ones – I was so wrapped up and preoccupied with my voice dysfunction I found it impossible to naturally interact and connect with others, leading to intense feelings of isolation bordering on despair.

While I’d love to be able to say that my quest for self-knowledge was fueled by nothing but my insatiable thirst for truth, the reality is much simpler: it was pain that launched me on my journey. I turned inward because I had no other choice.

After several years of seeing a variety of medical specialists, undergoing countless tests and scans, and trying everything including powerful medication with severe side effects, I had almost given up hope of ever finding a remedy. That was when I turned to alternative, esoteric forms of personal development to find some relief from my suffering (you can read more about my journey through psychosomatic illness here).

By 2022, I’d explored Vipassana meditation, Landmark’s educational programs, psychedelics, and Joe Hudson’s coaching, and gained some incredible tools for turning my pain into something positive. 

But my quest began with the most fundamental sensations arising from within my body, and that is where it had to eventually return. Today my journey has led me full circle, back to where it all began: the realm of the body.

Discovering the root of my pain

It was in this third chapter of my story when I began to really get at the root of my chronic pain: that I had disconnected and dissociated from my body at a young age in order to survive painful experiences, treating the signals it was sending me as annoyances, distractions, or signs of weakness. 

The models for emotional expression I saw in my parents gave me the impression that there were certain “bad” emotions that should be avoided and ignored for the sake of family harmony. Conflict and disagreement in particular were swept under the rug.

I was always a sensitive, introverted child, and being thrust into the rowdy, rough-and-tumble world of school forced me to create a hard external shell to retreat into. I thought I had to be tough, to show I was a “real man,” and that meant first and foremost not succumbing to my own needs for comfort.

If I had to go to the bathroom, I would hold it for as long as I possibly could in an attempt to show my body who was in charge. If I was sick I refused to take medicine, because I didn’t want to feel weak and dependent. I purposefully wouldn’t put on a jacket when I was cold, or I’d refuse to eat when I was hungry, in order to “toughen myself up.”

Later in life, this compulsion toward self-numbing and self-punishment manifested itself in other ways. I began to develop a taste for danger as I became an adult, because it gave me a thrill that allowed me to feel excited and alive. I was attracted to places that offered acute risk, such as when I lived and volunteered in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or worked in rural parts of northern Colombian (near FARC territory), or joined the Peace Corps in Eastern Ukraine. Somehow, I felt more at home and at ease living in these risky places because at least I felt alive.

As I started my career and business, this impulse to suppress my needs and wants at first felt like a terrific superpower. I could power through 12-hour days without a problem, work straight through the weekend, and ignore my needs for rest, recovery, and social connection seemingly forever. My ability to dominate my body caused me to receive a lot of praise, further cementing it as a core part of my identity.

But as the years passed and I entered my 30s, my dysfunctional relationship with my body began to break down. I could no longer physically push it the way I had throughout my 20s. Even if I could have, I didn’t want to have to do that anymore. While I’d gotten married and become a dad, that same relentless drive to push harder and move faster continued almost unabated. 

Yet I no longer knew what I was striving so hard for. What was so important that I had to sacrifice my present life to achieve?

Ayahuasca as somatic medicine

That sense of unease and weariness slowly grew throughout my mid-30s, finally breaking through the surface when I took part in my first ayahuasca ceremony in late 2023, which I wrote about in A Journey Between Worlds: The Story of My Ayahuasca Experience. 

I had experimented with various psychedelic substances in small ways before, but this was something different altogether: three potent ceremonies over three days, in the most conducive and supportive environment possible, and with a much earthier and more primal substance that was found in nature, not created in a lab. 

This was the first time I did healing work centered directly in the body, rather than using my mind or my heart as portals of entry. The mind loves to come up with theories, explanations, stories, interpretations, and justifications, and as valuable as those things are, I’ve come to believe that unless those ideas find their way into the tissues of the body, they will always remain merely intellectual playthings. The body speaks in a much more primitive language – the language of bodily fluids, physical urges, and visceral contraction and release.

I’ve learned that trauma isn’t primarily intellectual. What happened to you remains literally embedded in your nervous system, in your muscles and fascia, and even in the way your metabolism functions, your lungs breathe, and your posture holds you. Trauma shapes how you interpret your bodily sensations at the most fundamental level, thereby giving your everyday experience its default emotional state. Your body has hidden memories, storing fragments of your past all over your body, not just in your brain.

This is one reason trauma is so hard to heal from – it literally stays lodged in the tissues of the body, which continue to send the same urgent signals of panic no matter how many insights you think you’ve had.

Ayahuasca is known for the vomiting that often accompanies it, and I found that far from being an unfortunate side effect, it was an essential part of the healing experience. Vomiting is our body’s most visceral way of rejecting something that isn’t good for it, and that applies as much to ideas and stories as it does to poisonous substances. 

Instead of wrestling intellectually with an idea or a memory or a past traumatic event for hours, I found it was easier to just let go and allow the body to do what it needed to do. The change in mindset quickly followed.

For some, what their body needed to do was grieve, and their grief came out in spectacularly physical ways like wailing and prostrating and weeping. For others, it meant expressing fear, and they did so, with shuddering and shaking and shouting. 

For me, it meant reconciling with my younger self, and accepting that he had disconnected from his body and dissociated from the present as a way to escape the feelings he didn’t know how to process. I saw clearly who I had to become in order to survive, hardening myself and shutting down certain parts in order to make it through. 

I forgave that small boy, and thanked him, and in doing so, forgave myself, who is still that same boy. At the same time, I saw how these patterns of self-denial and emotional repression hadn’t started with me; they could be traced back through multiple generations of tough, resilient immigrants, passed on to me as my intergenerational inheritance. I saw that I could acknowledge the achievements of my ancestors, while also healing their pain using the full array of tools I had gained via the mind, the heart, and the body.

As I passed through all these experiences, and as the three-day retreat wound down, an awe-inspiring vision slowly began to fill me. I saw that there was an underlying theme to my life that transcended my writing, my teaching, and even my career: I am someone who creates bridges between worlds. Every time I say or write those words I feel emotion welling up from inside me.

Building a Second Brain was about connecting the right and left sides of the brain – making structure more creative and creativity more structured – but that was just one instance of a much larger theme. 

I’ve always built bridges: between the U.S. and Mexico and Brazil, between Christianity and secular culture, between liberals and conservatives, between the masculine and feminine, and between the body and mind. 

My ability to migrate between contexts and to see the good in every perspective, inherited from generations of my immigrant ancestors who roamed from one country and continent to another, is in fact my core superpower: to bridge the divide between and within people and transform the pain of separation into a source of connection.

My intuition tells me that the next chapter of my career and life will continue to be about embracing that inherent nature, and building bridges once again.

Fascial therapy as bodily restructuring

As part of my somatic explorations, I’ve seen a skilled fascial therapist (also sometimes known as a “bodyworker”) in Los Angeles regularly over the last few years. 

I’m always astounded that, within a couple hours, she can reliably locate and release emotions that have been trapped in my body, without me needing to do much except allow the accompanying thoughts, realizations, memories, and physical sensations to arise and flow through me without too much resistance.

I’ve come to understand that these sessions are changing me at a structural level, even though I have almost no understanding of what she’s doing. It isn’t primarily an intellectual process nor an emotional one. By releasing bodily tension directly, she is unwinding the underlying physiological sources of tension in my relationships, my decisions, my thoughts, and my goals. 

Often, as soon as she releases an underlying stiffness in my body, that part of my life immediately becomes more fluid as well. It’s not that I receive the exact answer to a problem I’m facing; it’s more that I regain the flexibility to consider the full range of possible options that my tension has been keeping me from seeing.

I’ve had to let go of the assumption that personal growth must always be wrenching, painful and confronting. Sometimes it does, but other times it requires nothing more than lying on a table and allowing things to come to the surface.

The somatic, bodily plane of my existence is the current frontier of my personal growth, and the one I’m most excited and intrigued by now. I think it was important that I started with the mind, since that was my “home base” and the entry point I was ready for in the beginning. It was also critical that I addressed the heart next, because I needed to learn how to allow my emotions to arise and use them to connect with others.

But these days, I am finding that the body offers some profound and tangible benefits:

Healing at the somatic level often happens faster and more efficiently than at the heart and mind levels, because I can integrate new ideas directly without having to change my beliefs or mental constructs first.Once you learn to listen to it, the body is very decisive and self-confident, issuing its wisdom in single-word responses, utterly primal and unshakeable in its conviction (this capability translates to much more effective decision-making in business and other areas of life).Body-based work is often more fun and dynamic, because it involves movement and play (this also makes it easier to integrate into your “normal” life in the form of morning routines, exercise, yoga, or meditation).Somatic work is more “agnostic” and content neutral – it doesn’t impose any particular doctrine or dogma on you, and there is nothing you have to believe (or even necessarily understand) to receive its benefits.You don’t have to learn new skills to participate in somatic healing – you just allow your own body to do what it already knows how to do.You don’t need more information for somatic work – the body and brain already possess a tremendous amount of information, and usually just need a higher level of connectivity to make sense of it.

My body-based explorations are only beginning, but have taken on a few other tantalizingly promising forms:

A more feminine approach to productivity, work, ambition, and effort, largely inspired by my wife Lauren and her understanding of nature’s cycles.Parenting, which is all about being present and embodied with children, since that is their default state (see my conversation with Joe Hudson on this topic here).Hosting in-person experiences such as entrepreneurial masterminds and our first Second Brain Summit , which in the past would have felt too overstimulating and overwhelming.Most recently, I’ve found that even inherently abstract topics, like my relationship with money , can be approached from a somatic perspective, allowing me to integrate new ways of thinking more quickly and at a deeper level.I’ve had a couple brief but powerful experiences with breathwork, and have been shocked how quickly and deeply I can go using nothing but my breath. I plan on exploring this avenue more in the future.

The aspect of somatic work I most appreciate is that it has given me a deep sense of certainty, rooted viscerally in my body, that I am okay. I can feel that everything will turn out alright, and that I can trust the journey of my life as it unfolds, without impatience or judgment.

The mind and the heart are wonderful, but they are also fickle creatures, fluttering around like hummingbirds reacting to every slight puff of wind. My body is like the earth, solid and monumental, unperturbed by the daily emotional weather, reminding me that I don’t have to be either.

I take great comfort these days in the constant reminders that I am an animal, an idea I would have previously felt aversion toward. I am a mammal like any other, and lying below all my abstract hopes and fears and worries and dreams is the biological reality of my skin and bones and guts and bowels.

Returning to that biological reality gives me peace. It roots me in the here and now. It compels me to seek out nature, one of the main reasons we decided to move to the mountains of Mexico recently. I am finding tremendous joy in coming home to my body after all these years of wandering in the wilderness of the mind like a prodigal son returning to his family after years of searching for something that he always had.

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