Somatic Movement for Trauma Release Healing: Finding Emotional Dignity
We’ve extracted the wisdom shared in a powerful discussion between Jeff Haller and Lavinia Plonka at the Feldenkrais Awareness Summit for your reading pleasure. This conversation gets right to the heart of how we carry our history in our bodies and how, through awareness we can actively cultivate a sense of emotional dignity. For anyone dealing with stress, anxiety, or seeking deeper self-understanding, the ideas shared here offer a path toward greater composure.
The relationship between our feelings, our movement, our sensations, and our thoughts is a core element of the Feldenkrais Method®. This approach also reflects how the Feldenkrais Method for trauma supports restoring internal resources through awareness and gentle movement. When approached through somatic and experiential learning, this relationship offers a way of living that supports emotional maturity—favoring resourcefulness over reaction, presence over urgency, and dignity over self-judgment.
Feldenkrais Method for Trauma and Emotional Dignity
Understanding Emotional Dignity
What does it truly mean to move through the world with emotional dignity? Jeff Haller, a master Feldenkrais Trainer and Educational Director who studied directly with Moshe Feldenkrais, brought his background as a transpersonal psychologist to explore this idea.
Jeff presented the case of a recent client who experienced serious mountain biking injuries. While the physical clearing up of the injuries was relatively swift, a persistent, excessive tension remained. He described this tension as a fabric she maintained within herself.
This tension, he discovered, didn’t come from the biking accident. It stemmed from a deep emotional wound: when she was seven, her mother disowned her, leading the client to adopt lifelong, deeply self-protective processes. These processes created a constant state of alertness and tension.
Trauma, Resources, and Healing
Jeff offered a simple definition of trauma during the talk. He shares that a trauma is a moment where we don’t have the resources necessary to meet the moment. If we possessed the internal resources, the event wouldn’t leave us traumatized.
“A trauma is a moment where we don’t have the resources to meet the moment.”
The Feldenkrais work, then, was to help this client feel supported in her skeleton and within herself. This allowed her to drop the extra voluntary muscular control that supplanted simple, natural support; what Moshe Feldenkrais called the phasic muscular control.
As this physical tension eased, her ego defenses began to dissolve. Jeff explained that our conditioning quickly solidifies our habitual tones and tensions into the very fabric that we wear. He noted that we end up living our history.
As her internal sense of dimension opened, she experienced a transformation. Critically, she began to move with a different kind of dignity; she became regal within herself. She handled former difficulties with neighbors and in her work because she developed a refined sense of self that was resourceful, not defensive.
This is emotional dignity: finding and bringing the latent resources within ourselves to the surface. This brings about a sense of well-being and composure. For many people, this process becomes a pathway to somatic healing for anxiety by restoring choice instead of reactivity. He connected this to Moshe Feldenkrais’s definition of health:
“The ability to live your unavowed dreams.”
Jeff suggests that health is having the resources to meet the changing, uncertain moment with enough resources to thrive instead of constantly defending yourself.
Your History Is Your Biology
Lavinia Plonka reflects on a phrase many somatic educators use:
“Your history is your biology.”
In other words, experience becomes visible in how we stand, breathe, and move. Jeff’s “fabric” metaphor lands because it describes something many people recognize: the tension feels normal from the inside, but others can often sense it immediately.
This is a key thread for understanding trauma: the past doesn’t only live in memory, it can live in tone, posture, and habit.
From Posture to Presence with Somatic Therapy Exercises
Lavinia Plonka noted that Jeff’’s client’s history was reflected in her carriage, the invisible fabric others could perceive. She also found the description of walking regal interesting, contrasting it with acting regal. True regality, she implied, comes from centeredness, not from upper chest tension or pomposity.
Jeff agreed, offering the word “self-possession”. This is not bombastic or attention-seeking. It has a quiet reserve and an immediate availability to meet change. It is responsive to the moment, not reactive. In this way, somatic therapy exercises cultivate self-possession and grounded presence.
This state allows a person to sit in what Jeff described as the place of not this and not that. This is the space between stimulus and response, where choice becomes possible. This aligns with Moshe’s concept of good posture: the freedom to move in any direction without hesitation or preparation.
The Space Between Response
This idea of sitting between stimulus and response relates to our thinking, our emotions, and our action. When our habits take over, we become unconscious of our actions. Jeff stated that this very situation, where habits constantly subsume us, is close to the definition of neurosis. While we need useful habits, we must also have the ability to inhibit them to fit the moment.
Lavinia drew a connection between this not this and not that space and the freeze response in the fight, flight, freeze mechanism. A person experiencing a freeze response doesn’t have the ability to choose what is happening internally. Their system is pre-calibrated to external stimuli, often called a trigger. Practicing somatic exercises for anxiety can gradually widen this space between stimulus and response.
This nervous system pattern—where awareness narrows and choice disappears—is explored further in Reducing the Body Pattern of Anxiety and Stress with Feldenkrais, which looks at how habitual tension, posture, and attention can lock the body into stress responses, and how gentle movement can reopen internal options.
Jeff expressed dislike for the term trigger because once you are triggered, you are hijacked by the external world with little capacity for spontaneous action. The limbic system’s main job is safety; when we lack resources during a stressful event, we go into self-protection, like freezing. This becomes deeply calibrated into our system.
The freeze response, Jeff stressed, is not a choice; it’s very different from choosing the calm space between stimulus and response.
A Simple Practice of Choice: Finding Your Center
Jeff offers a brief Awareness Through Movement practice to illustrate this quality of attention. The practice gently explores right, left, and the quiet place in between—not this and not that—to cultivate observant attention rather than reaction.
Finding Your Inner Center with Jeff Haller
By practicing this, you calibrate the difference between left and right while resting in that internal quiet space. This practice helps you observe what happens to your internal sense of dimension and your mental activity. It builds awareness of how observant you can become when you aren’t identified with the extremes.
Somatic Awareness & Identity
Identifying with the story
Lavinia reflected on how focusing on that center can either expand attention or cause a contraction if you tensionally try to block the this side or that side. The attitude dramatically changes the experience.
Jeff emphasized that this is a simple example of what it’s like to be still for a moment without being identified with one extreme or the other. We become profoundly identified with ourselves; with the narrative of who we are and what we’ve endured.
Lavinia noted how quickly action can escalate once triggered, likening it to a nuclear meltdown once the trigger is pulled. The work helps us recognize what is building up before that moment, so we aren’t caught by surprise.
This identification often happens below conscious awareness, shaping our posture, tone, and readiness to act, a dynamic explored further in 7 Reasons Somatic Awareness Is the Missing Link in Modern Connection.
Catching Patterns Early
This is where the concrete process of Awareness Through Movement® shines. Jeff noted that in a lesson, you can watch the unfolding of a motor plan; you can watch the earliest moment the muscle fibers prepare the skeleton for action. This is palpable and concrete.
He contrasted this with meditation, where watching the rising of a thought is often less concrete. Yet, he mentioned a teacher, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, who noted that you reincarnate every time you become identified with yourself. The practice is to watch yourself ready to occupy your identity right before it happens, catching it at the earliest arising moment.
Emotional Dignity in Practice
Jeff says that he is not blackmailed by his emotions. He knows that he is not going to lose himself if he experiences them. This gives him a particular internal resolution and a resilience to handle situations.
This inner resolution, he argues, is tied to emotional dignity.
It’s not about avoiding difficult feelings; it’s about detecting their early rise and having the internal strength to meet your experience without becoming violent or overly protective toward yourself.
The Drive to Accomplish vs Self-Care
Beyond Accomplishment
Jeff shared a personal story about working intensely in his movement center, teaching many classes and administering the building 16 to 18 hours a day. Despite being highly accomplished, he finally realized he had no clue how to care for himself. His well-being was entirely based on what he could accomplish.
He sees Moshe Feldenkrais’s entire work as bringing people face-to-face with this paradigm shift: moving from well-being based on accomplishment to well-being based on caring for oneself. Awareness Through Movement helps people learn to be gentle and refine themselves from the inside out, moving away from parasitic patterns established for self-protection.
Lavinia pressed on this point. What about someone whose dream, like being a world-class athlete, requires intense dedication? Must they give up accomplishment to be gentle?
Jeff clarified that the process matters more than the activity itself. Moshe Feldenkrais loved to work, but his dedication stemmed from curiosity and process, not neurotic drive or the need to prove worthiness externally.
The key question is: Is the work driven unconsciously by the quest for external proof, or does it come from the settled knowledge that bringing forth your life force is worthwhile for its own sake?
Pleasure Versus Well-Being
Jeff used the example of a soccer player who pushes through excruciating pain just to participate. He recalled working with a woman who felt profound happiness after walking without pain for the first time, only to immediately return to playing 80 minutes of soccer, causing the pain to return.
She admitted she enjoyed the game too much to stop. Jeff noted that while he also enjoys playing basketball at 70, his enjoyment is valued separately from his well-being. Many people don’t yet know how to value internal qualities like tranquility and peace as highly as the relentless drive to succeed.
When success comes from the beauty of what is alive within us, it’s different. That distinction separates being driven from being dignified and resourceful. This resourcefulness is the source from which unavowed dreams can justly appear.
Recalibrating Self-Image
Core Self-Image and Change
Lavinia asked how this relates to self-image, particularly for those who cling to past athletic identity. When people realize that achieving comfort or health requires a shift in their self-image, they sometimes stop the work. How can we help them see that this next step isn’t giving up who they are?
Jeff spoke about what is called the core self-image. This foundation develops from our earliest experiences, like learning to function in gravity within our family and culture. He stated that for real change, this core self-image must be addressed. You cannot just do patchwork on top of a faulty image.
Jeff believes you have to go to the foundation that the person is living in and help them come to a realization of an internal integrity that has always been there. You then help them build their life out of that newly established basement.
As somatic agents, practitioners must embody this depth themselves. They must have the gravitas to reflect to clients the underlying integrity that is already present within them.
“Happiness, peace, curiosity, and the capacity to learn are all intrinsic. We don’t have to learn how to learn; we have to remember the capacity we already possess.”
Jeff suggested that Moshe Feldenkrais didn’t teach movement; he created an environment through questions where people learned from within themselves. Our job is to create a rich environment that invites people into variation and attention.
Expanding the Learning Orbit
The forebrain’s first capacity is to make distinctions, which is the source of imagination and curiosity. Once distinctions are made, learning is taking place internally, and the person cannot not learn it.
The challenge is maintaining that change against inertia and habit. Jeff used the analogy of a rocket: Does the person have enough internal capacity to establish an orbit outside their usual gravitational field? Or does the orbit decay, pulling them back into the habitual field that served them in the past?
We must appreciate how intelligent every protective or compensatory mechanism a person used was. Every way a person protected themselves was necessary until they found a better way of doing it.
Maturation Through Difficulty
Resilience Through Challenge
Lavinia suggested that if the rocket returns, it might be on a slightly higher level, like a spiral. Haller agreed that this is the maturation process. You need enough internal measure to be willing to step outside the box.
If you are seeking help through somatic therapy, you often arrive after trying everything else. You must then be willing to defy the environment that tries to pull you back into old habits. To continue expanding that orbit, you need the heat of the cauldron.
Jeff referenced the Japanese method of making a Katana sword: heating, folding, and beating the metal over and over to beat out impurities until the blade is durable and flexible. He considers his own life to be a cauldron. This tempering means you cannot be blackmailed by fears or emotions.
Dignity Across the Lifespan: Skeleton, Support, and Aging
This leads back to dignity: the grace to meet difficulties. As he ages, Jeff watches functional capacities diminish. He must sit with what is diminishing and observe what comes back in its place.
Lavinia connected this feeling of dignity and the tempered sword back to the skeleton.
“ If you feel supported and organized in your skeleton, you can maintain that dignity regardless of age. “
Jeff agreed, noting that the reason we have a skeleton is to counteract the force of gravity. Through precise utilization of the skeleton, we live with the minimal tone necessary for any action.
Movement is Life, Found Through Choice
As a final point, Jeff shared Moshe Feldenkrais’s quote:
“Movement is life. Life without movement is unthinkable.”
He emphasized that this isn’t just about biological facility. If you are living a compulsive life, only doing one thing one way, that isn’t truly life. True life requires choice and the real resourcefulness to engage the moment fully.
Full interview link (longer listen)
A link to watch the full interview with Lavinia Plonka and Jeff Haller on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FM2pPPMZr5A?si=cODtaviiCNRzYES4&t=832
- Watch the full interview: Moving Towards Emotional Dignity
About the Speakers
Jeff Haller, PhD
Jeff Haller, PhD, Feldenkrais Trainer, regards the Feldenkrais Method® as a pathway to the inner composure necessary for living a creative life in a challenging world. He studied directly with Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method. In 1983, Jeff graduated from his own professional training program in Amherst, Massachusetts. From 1984–1991 his studio offered classes in Feldenkrais, Aikido, Yoga, Tai Chi, and meditation. Since 1993, Jeff’s primary focus has been to train Feldenkrais Method teachers and sustain an extensive private practice.
Jeff’s website: https://www.insidemoves.org/
Lavinia Plonka
Lavinia Plonka is an assistant trainer of the Feldenkrais Method®, a lead instructor of the Emotional Body® and founder of Kinesa®. She is an internationally recognized master teacher who combines somatic movement intelligence with her deep studies of ancient wisdom, mythology and the creative process.
Lavinia’s website: www.laviniaplonka.com
Resources for Your Healing Journey
If you are exploring somatic movement for trauma release healing, understanding the connection between your body’s habits and your emotional experience is key.
- Deepen your practice: If you are looking for ways to handle stress and trauma, explore our Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement resources.
- Movement Intelligence: Learn more about Movement Intelligence and bone health to see how somatic education evolves.
- Nervous System Support: For those dealing with a dysregulated system, discover our programs for Somatic Therapy for Stress & Anxiety to find your center.
If you want a clearer overview of how Feldenkrais approaches learning through movement, see Understanding the Feldenkrais Method and Learn About Awareness Through Movement (ATM) Classes.