20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction: Using the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model

Trauma and addiction heal in tandem with this paradigm-shifting approach.

What if addiction, dissociation, and other manifestations of trauma were not framed as diseases or disorders, but rather as adaptive methods of regulating the autonomic nervous system? This book does just that, and guides readers through twenty embodied practices that allow for a rewiring of the ANS. By integrating the latest neuroscience from Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory with Eugene Gendlin’s embodied Felt Sense, Jan Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model is a paradigm-shifting, deeply somatic approach to healing trauma and addiction.

Here, the reader is presented with two vital tools for healing: learning how to recognize and rewire autonomic state, and finding the felt sense of body wisdom. The book’s exercises are uniquely designed to be completed with a mental health professional, another person engaged in this embodied process, or both. Through the twenty embodied practices, the reader and their felt sense partner explore their trauma history together, developing a Four Circle Harm Reduction Plan. Graphic models and case examples help to illustrate the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model.