When it comes to my sexual identity, I grieve a loss that’s hard to articulate, and a shame so deep in my bones I must have absorbed it from the vinyl seats of my school bus. When I’m able to contact this grief, I think of my first sexual and romantic gestures with a woman. Her name was Maggie. She had striking features, icy blue eyes, a defined jawline, and teeth that make me think she grew up in the suburbs. She was openly bisexual, my first queer female friend, and the third openly queer woman I had met in my life. I was 21. We met while I was studying in Paris on a university exchange.

I knew I found her beautiful. I knew her friendship excited me in a way that was unique from others. I just wanted to be around her all the time. There was a spark. I didn’t know then that it was anything more than that. Not until one night when I was more than a bottle of wine deep, walking down cobblestone streets and out of bars with mood lighting fit for the perfect Wong Kar-wai mise en scène, and we found ourselves in the cramped apartment of two French men who were probably much older than us. When Maggie told me she was going to go upstairs with one of them, the words spilled out of me. “I want to go with you.” We locked eyes and she said okay.

Six words, spoken with the certitude of someone whose inhibition centers had been drowned out by tannins. It was that same pompette bravado that made me trip as soon as I’d made it up to the bedroom and hit my head against the corner of the wooden bedpost with remarkable force. Instead of exploring my sexuality, drunk with bravery, Maggie walked me home, nursed my jaw, and put me to bed.

The next day we met at a café and recounted stories of the night, attempting to soak up our hangovers with cheese and bread, physically sick and markedly giddy, making mistakes but certainly living life. The only thing we didn’t speak of was those six words and the trip up the bedroom stairs. It wasn’t forgotten, more like something I didn’t know how to talk about, easier to brush aside than unpack. I could factually acknowledge what happened, but it stopped there without questions or any emotional recognition that something formless was lurking beneath the surface. The impulse, freed by glasses of wine, floated like a walnut thrown into the ocean. It couldn’t touch the bottom, and I couldn’t yet tell there was a bottom to touch.

The impulse came back two months later. I had a French boyfriend by then. He and I slept together on a pullout couch in the living room of a 6m x 6m apartment and spent days exploring the city, him with fresh eyes. One night we went out to a bar with Maggie and a few other friends. A couple or many drinks in, Maggie and I brushing arms on a sweaty, amber-lit dance floor, it happened again. The words fell out of my mouth, almost to my own surprise. “I like you. I wanted to be with you that night.” Maggie admitted the same, and we kissed right there, locking bodies as tiny squares of light danced off our skin, my boyfriend watching from 15 feet away.

I didn’t know he’d seen Maggie and me until he mentioned it on the way home. He was the typical jealous Frenchman, and yet he wasn’t upset. If anything he seemed mildly excited, and I could guess where his mind had gone: Maggie was beautiful, and maybe there was something in this for him. What strikes me now is that not even my boyfriend considered the kiss a threat. A kiss between women didn’t count as desire. It didn’t count as cheating. It didn’t count as anything. I wasn’t accused or asked to explain myself, and never once was there even the question that I might be anything other than straight. The world’s indifference matched my own numbness so perfectly that neither of us had to look at what had happened. Maggie and I didn’t speak of it either.

When a later boyfriend said he thought I might be queer, it hardly registered. I can’t explain the feeling other than something again bouncing off the surface, not thrown with enough force to reach the affected, feeling parts of myself. I didn’t deny it or accept it. The answer to questions like that just came up blank.

Then, a decade after meeting Maggie, I met someone else. When I saw them for the first time my jaw dropped. The same eyes, the same striking features, the same defined profile and mix of femininity and masculinity I have since realized I find alluring. The same quality Hilary Swank had in Boys Don’t Cry, a film I watched my junior year of high school and couldn’t stop thinking about, though I wouldn’t have called that attraction either. More like fascination, a wanting to take someone in, to stay close to a particular kind of beauty I couldn’t put my finger on. But this time it was different. Something had been shifting quietly underneath. The somatic work I’d been doing had created enough space and safety for what had always been there to move closer to the surface. I felt a dormant part of my system kick into action: butterflies, the giddy low-grade electricity of a teenager navigating her first crush. This time I knew I didn’t just want friendship.

The second time I kissed a girl, I came home and cried for an hour. I had cried even before that, actually, the time before, when I shut my apartment door after saying goodbye to her, having failed to tell her how I felt, even though I really wanted to. That first time I cried out of disappointment in myself, for not being able to express something that felt important. The second time I cried because I was so full after the kiss. Relief, joy, and mostly sadness joining the party. I went ten years dating boys. I fell in love with them, committed to them, contemplated futures with them. I hadn’t been lonely or loveless. And still this moved me into a grief I had bottled away so thoroughly I hadn’t known it existed, until a part of myself that wasn’t sure she’d ever get the chance, finally had room to show herself.

The second time, I didn’t need alcohol to reveal my desire. The depths had drifted closer to the surface, and I finally had access to emotions that had been living in me a long time. It didn’t work out with her, in the end. But I’ll always be grateful, because it was with her, sober and awake, that I met a fuller version of myself.

Last fall, I started a poem in the notes app on my phone:

This unfinished poem is a fair representation of how I’ve felt writing this blog. My queerness still feels young and unfinished. When I talk to a woman I’m attracted to, I fumble over my words and can’t think straight. I started this piece in November and sat with it for months, unsure I’d finish it, unsure I’d publish it, caught between straight spaces I don’t feel I fully belong to and queer spaces I’m not sure I’ve earned. And the grief also remains, still hard to articulate, hard to name, and often hard to somatically access. A feeling that there are deeper waters beneath the placid surface, that have yet to be reached, parts of my self-expression so numbed out I only have an inkling they exist. Versions of Mari still longing to be free.

I’ve been toying with a theory for a while now. It’s that each language we speak is a different key, and each key opens a different door into the psyche.

As a somatic practitioner, I work daily with the way language activates the body. When someone puts something into words in a session, the body responds. It shows up maybe as a tightness in the chest, a shift in the breath, or a memory that surfaces in the mind's eye. The words we use have a way of calling experience forward, making it more present and felt. So it follows that different languages, shaped by different cultures, histories, and ways of organizing reality, would call forward different parts of us.

Research on the ‘foreign language effect1’ shows that people make different moral and emotional decisions depending on which language they’re reasoning in, with the mother tongue tending to carry more emotional reactivity, likely because of its deeper embodied and early-life associations. A second or third language may carry less of that history, but each one still brings its own cultural and psychoemotional architecture with it. What interests me is the possibility that in learning a new language, we are also gaining access to new psychological territory, parts of ourselves that this particular language, with its own way of organizing reality, makes more available.

I started thinking about all of this because of my resistance to learning German.

I’ve studied languages most of my life. Seven years of French in school, a semester studying at a university in Paris, enough Spanish to get by after two winters and a summer living with a host family in Costa Rica, and a few years of Thai while living in Thailand. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who likes learning languages. So I was surprised to find myself actively avoiding German. Every time I sat down to study, I’d find myself drifting toward French instead, starting a new French TV show, going to a French meetup, or opening a French book. I was avoiding German, and I couldn’t explain why.

Part of what makes languages interesting to me is their personality, and the way language and culture are always shaping each other. A language carries its culture inside it, in its grammar, its constructions, the concepts it has words for and the ones it doesn’t, its slang and idiom, the tone and gesture that accompany it. These components of language don't just reflect culture but also actively shape cognition. One example of this is the difference in how Romance languages and English handle agency. In French and Spanish, you don't say "I broke my arm," you say "my arm broke itself," making the arm the subject and absolving the self of agency. In English, the construction places agency, and often implicit blame, on the person. The grammar itself encodes a particular relationship to responsibility, accident, and selfhood.

Thai has a completely different quality. It’s a language of few words and notable simplicity. Where English has dozens of synonyms for “good,” Thai mostly just adds emphasis: gaeng, gaeng mak, gaeng mak mak. Verbs have a single form regardless of tense or subject, with time indicated by context or a simple time word rather than conjugation, and pronouns are often dropped entirely. There is a lightness to the people in Thailand, a quality of presence, and I sometimes wonder if it has at least something to do with a language that doesn’t require you to locate yourself so precisely in time and relation before you can say something.

German is the opposite. It is a language of rules and precision. Verbs often come at the end of a sentence, which means you have to know where you’re going before you begin. It has three genders, four grammatical cases, and adjective endings that shift depending on context. You cannot drift into a thought in German the way you can in English. You have to commit.

And then there is the way German sounds to an American ear. More than once, I’ve watched a German friend have what I assumed was a heated confrontation, my chest tightening and alarm rising in me, only to be told afterward it was a perfectly friendly exchange. An Italian friend who worked at a German company told me that people would occasionally raise their voices in meetings, yelling, and then walk out afterward as if nothing had happened. Anger expressed itself, and then it was over.

As an American, expressing anger directly already runs against the grain of how we’re taught to communicate. But growing up, I also learned that anger was dangerous and could hurt people, including me. German builds precision and directness into its very structure, and in its tone and delivery; anger flows as a functional and unremarkable means of expression. The qualities the language demands, commitment, clarity, the willingness to hold a position, are the same qualities that come with knowing how to use anger well. As someone who hasn’t fully learned how to do this yet herself, I kept running back to French.

What I was resisting wasn’t the grammar. It was German Mari. The version of me that speaks up clearly, holds a position, says precisely what she thinks, tolerates confrontation without collapsing, and doesn’t apologize for taking up space.

This is why I’ve come to think of language learning as a form of self-actualization. Each new language is an invitation to expand the range of who you can be, to access parts of the psyche that your first language may not have words for, and to meet the resistance that arises when a language asks something of you that you haven’t yet learned how to embody.

I’m still studying German. Reluctantly, honestly, but with more curiosity now that I understand what the resistance is about. I’ll let you know how German Mari turns out.

There is one more layer to this that I think is worth mentioning. As a somatic practitioner who has also studied childhood development, I often think about the languages we had before we had words at all, movement, touch, sound, and facial expression. The Reggio Emilia educational tradition, which I used to teach, speaks of the hundred languages of children, all the ways a child expresses and understands the world beyond just verbal language. If spoken languages are keys to different rooms of the psyche, then embodied languages: dance, music, gesture, breath, somatic awareness, might be keys to an even deeper layer of consciousness. Something that predates the cultural conditioning built into any spoken tongue. Maybe the most complete version of self-actualization isn’t just learning the languages of the world, but learning to move in them too.

For those of you who are new here, I’m Mari, a Pantarei Approach somatic practitioner, community builder and artist based in Berlin. I use my neurodivergent, highly sensitive mind to help other people move through what’s stuck, find their strengths, and come home to their bodies. Feel free to reach out or find out more at www.maricrook.com

In somatic work, we often begin by meeting the feeling that’s actually present, even when it contradicts what we think we should feel. During today’s session, my client felt disgust when describing how he’d received an award for his teaching. Most people expect recognition to bring joy or pride, but for him, praise triggered an old, familiar voice of inadequacy.

If that judgmental voice could speak, he said it would say, “You should have gotten this reward, this is the bare minimum, and it’s still not good enough. You should be even better.” He recognized it as an echo of his father’s expectations for academic perfection.

When I asked him why he had received the reward, he had a long list of reasons. He truly had accomplished a lot. He was improving the school’s curriculum, involved in student clubs and student life, and actively involved in improving his own teaching practice.

During the online somatic session, we first moved to meet this feeling of disgust in his body. I took him back to that experience of winning the award and the emotions that came up. He placed his awareness on the tightness in his heart center that he associated with this feeling.

As he turned his attention to this disgust, he began to come into contact with the grief beneath it. He recalled a memory of a fellow teacher who came into his classroom to congratulate him, then asked if he was okay. This other teacher noted his mood wasn’t what you would expect from someone who had just won an award. He felt sad that he didn’t feel joy for his own accomplishment or celebrate it.

This sadness about being unable to receive his own success led us deeper into his relationship with achievement itself. Another memory surfaced—a time when he won an award at university from the education department. That time, he said, he could celebrate and feel proud of what he’d done because he hadn’t had any expectations about receiving it. But this time, because he knew of the award beforehand, there was a sense of expectation, a feeling that this was something he “should” be able to get. Therefore, the sense of accomplishment wasn’t reachable. Then he said, in a change of tone and direction, “But even if there wasn’t an award this time, I still would have done all of those same things because I care for the kids.”

As soon as he said this, the energy in the room shifted. I felt the emotions, the love behind his words. It touched my heart. I told him to notice in his system how it felt to say those words. He repeated, "I love them," his voice catching slightly as the feeling moved through him. Tears collected in his eyes, the same as in my own. I guided him to make space for this feeling, which he was able to locate in his chest, breathing deeply into this love, using his breath and awareness to stay present to the sensation. As he connected with the emotion, it filled my own system as well. I felt my own breathing naturally synchronize with his deeper rhythm, and warmth spread through my chest in response to his openness. I was touched by the tenderness, but also recognized it in myself. It is my love for people that motivated my own work as an educator for eight years. It’s the same love and care I have for people that motivates my work as a somatic practitioner.

At the end of the session, my client remarked that this was the first time he’d really consciously felt into this love he holds for his students. But he added that this felt mundane. As I heard him say that, I thought to myself, that’s not quite it. Before I’d formed a question in response, he said, “Actually, it feels strong and steady.”

So for the last minute of the session, we sat in silence with that energy. This source of not mundane, but steady and stable energy, the kind that can show up day after day. Essentially, the strength of love. Leaving the call, I felt honored to serve a teacher, standing in shoes I myself have previously filled. I felt even more honored to serve the next generation, someone a decade younger and setting out in their first year in the workforce, someone who wants to make a difference in the lives of those even younger than him. But I felt most honored to be trusted enough to witness and feel into this energy of service motivated by love.

I’m a somatic practitioner in the Pantarei Approach. Online Pantarei somatic sessions focus on verbal exploration, nervous system awareness, and guided attention to sensation that helps the client develop clearer internal sensing, insight, and emotional processing. Permission was received by my client to share this session story.

Having woken up early, my eyes are still groggy with sleep. I wear my stiff green work polo and formal skirt as I climb across the slim mattress in my spare bedroom and I try to arrange the pillows so I have back and neck support during the video call. I search for something to prop up my computer, finally settling on a suitcase, and I open a test browser on my Zoom screen. “O.K. you can see my head and my chest. I think I’m ready.”

I open the Zoom link and find myself in the waiting room. I’m early. I want to leave a good impression. I’ve followed all the directions carefully. Suddenly, I get the notification that he’s joined the chat. The webscreen shifts and starts to load the call. Then there he is.

His eyes beam thousands of miles away from me, yet also less than 1 meter away and make contact with mine. He smiles and a well of feeling, before unseen and unnoticed begins to bubble to the surface. By the time he asks, “Why are you here?” a few tears have started to trickle down my cheeks and I know, not in my mind, but in my body that this is a space where my feelings, deep, old, and often unnamable are allowed to be. Not to be changed, but just to be witnessed. My body knew what this space was before the session had even begun.

I can’t remember all of the details of that first session with Lawrence. I remember that many of those initial sessions were spent experiencing grief—a sadness I'd been sitting with, one whose seeds had been planted in my childhood and had been growing since then. When this sadness bubbled up, water collecting at the corner of my eyes or a quiver in my voice as I explained a challenge or story from my childhood, Lawrence wouldn’t respond with advice on what I could do to move through my sadness or let go of my past. Instead, he would ask me to notice my body and my breath.

I’ve tried many times to explain what a somatic session is to curious strangers, old friends, and new clients, and I often find myself stumbling over my words. It’s not something that translates easily into language—a common challenge when trying to describe a primarily bodily experience. You know it impacts your consciousness not through instantly quantifiable data, but through shifts you track in your own lived experience over time, like running a months-long experiment on yourself where you are both the researcher and the subject.

What Lawrence was guiding me toward—this practice of meeting my body with breath and awareness—wasn’t entirely new to me. Before we ever met, I’d stumbled on a principle that would become central to our work together.

Contraction describes how we unconsciously restrict the natural flow of energy, breath, movement, and awareness through our body-mind system as protective strategies to maintain safety and survival, which then become limiting holding patterns. I was first exposed to a method for working with stuck energy and difficult sensations in a book called Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender.1 At the time, I was desperately seeking relief from chronic pain, including a mysterious pain in my left leg when I would stand for any extended period of time and severe migraines that could dominate my days.

The book’s premise is that when a negative feeling or emotion arises, rather than pushing it away and trying to resist it, or expressing it (venting, fixating or mentally dwelling on it), allow yourself to instead fully experience the sensation of it in your body without attaching to any mental commentary. The idea being that when emotions are neither repressed, numbed, or projected, but instead located in the body and allowed to be there without resistance (e.g. accepted through moving our awareness towards the sensory experience), they will naturally dissipate or change form on their own. The path of surrender means dropping any narrative attached to the feeling while staying present to its raw, energetic and sensory quality.

With no spiritual or somatic conceptual foundations to my name, but desperate for a way out of the physical and emotional pain I was in at this point in my life, I decided to test out this approach on my migraines. When one struck, instead of trying to escape the pain or feel sorry for myself for it, I chose to move my attention toward it with curiosity. I’d turn the lights off in the room, draw the curtains, tuck myself under the covers and have a special, intimate date with my migraine.

What I discovered was twofold. First, that when I stepped away from naming my experience as painful and sank into the sensory experience of it, there was relief. The pain actually became less painful the more I became curious about the raw experience of it. The second thing I found was that sometimes when I kept going towards the core of the discomfort, I’d find at its center something utterly different. When I moved my attention wholeheartedly toward what I’d been calling pain, sometimes it would dissolve into an expansive sense of relief and oneness, like finding the pearl tucked away at the heart of a rough clam’s shell. My forehead would relax, my neck would loosen and a warm spaciousness would flood through me. I’d literally watch my thinking mind switch offline and sense my whole body operating automatically. Thoughts would entirely drop away and I’d feel a sense of total calm and rightness at the heart of the tension I had decided to move toward instead of avoid.

This self-guided practice of moving toward rather than away from difficulty illustrates one of the principles at the heart of my somatic practice, both then when I discovered it while dealing with migraines, and later when I rediscovered it during my work with Lawrence: when we turn our attention towards the part of ourselves we contract around, resist and avoid the most, these parts of ourselves soften and change becomes possible.

Another way to frame this: instead of pushing something down or looking away from it, we can choose to make space for it. An effective way to do this is through the breath. The breath is our constant anchor to the present moment, a bodily, sensed experience we can always locate.

Lawrence taught me to use the breath as a way to touch sensation and contraction in the body. He had me imagine that the breath can flow over contractions the way water flows over rocks in a stream, shifting their form through gentle touch rather than brute force. Picture sending your inhale directly to a tight shoulder blade or clenched jaw, using the breath to carry your gentle attention into those held places. While the breath can’t literally reach every part of our body, when we imagine that it does and visualize the breath touching sensation, we use it as a felt tool for moving our awareness toward those contracted parts—the places we hold fear, sadness, shame, anger. With each sip of air, we make space for our contractions, allowing their edges to soften and more life to flow.

This idea of using the breath to meet contraction in the body is hard to explain and even harder to prove. The effects don’t show up overnight. Sometimes they creep in so subtly you hardly notice the shift until weeks down the line when you’re in a situation that would have sent your anxiety skyrocketing, and you realize it didn’t, or your partner says something that used to instantly set you off, but you’ve kept your cool. It’s the slow work of water smoothing stone, well-worn grooves and patterns gradually softening until life flows differently.

There’s much more I could say about somatic work now that I’m a somatic practitioner2, and I hope in time I will. But I wanted to start here, with these core insights I learned from Lawrence: that our contracted places soften when met with attention, and that the breath is a way we can practice that meeting.

The hum of the TV is on in the background. I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop open. Sleep weighs in my eyes from the three-hour nap I just took. There’s a bowl of tortilla chips resting somewhat precariously on the armrest.

The sky has gone dark, and headlights are dancing on the window panes. A web browser is pulled up on my computer screen open to my favorite artificial intelligence, and in the submission box I’ve asked, “Can ADHD make you feel exhausted?” On the left-hand side of the browser you can see my past searches: “struggling with ADHD when alone”, “ADHD paralysis”, “ADHD and isolation fatigue.”

The list of prompts continues. I’m desperately trying to understand the crash I felt after my partner left on their month-long trip to Argentina. After just a couple of days alone in my apartment, my system collapsed. I didn’t realize how much I’d been regulating my cycles and the passage of time based on my partner, or how much stimulus their presence was adding to my environment. With them away, I lost my sense of time. Whole days would pass, and even though I logically could list everything I’d done in a day, it felt like nothing had happened. I experienced no satisfaction from work or leisure. I kept the TV on almost the whole day as a way of avoiding both the excruciating silence and boredom that would quickly descend. My bedtime was inching later and later. Weirdest of all, though I arguably had quite a bit of free time and was sleeping more and more each day, I felt utterly exhausted. I realized that, as hard as I thought it was to manage my ADHD as a work-from-home freelancer, when I was actually alone all day, things got even worse.

When I thought about what someone with ADHD looked like, I never pictured myself. I was a good student. I got good grades. I always got my work done. Only when I ended my demanding, fast-paced, many-hatted full-time job at 31 and found myself unrecognizable did I begin to consider I might be neurodivergent.

To explain why I didn’t recognize myself, I should paint a picture of the Mari I had gotten to know up to that point. I was honestly impressed with my ability to focus. During my seven years as a classroom teacher, I was able to work 12-hour days without distraction. The only time I veered off task was to quickly change lanes and accomplish an even more urgent task before seamlessly returning to the other midstream. I was a multitude of people: a team leader, coach, carer, social media content creator, communications specialist, social worker, relationship manager, clown, and teacher all at once.

Honestly, sometimes my own ability to keep going would surprise me. Wow Mari, you didn’t look at your phone once today? You inputted grades while finishing your morning coffee and read critical documents while eating your lunch. This is seriously impressive. You never let a ball drop.

When I moved to Berlin and made the conscious decision to leave behind classroom teaching, my life suddenly looked a lot different. I went from overfull and demanding days to an expanse of open time. My partner had the material security to support me as I navigated a career change. There is a huge privilege in this that I’m very aware of. To have the support needed to move in a new direction is a luxury many people can’t afford. I wasn’t rushed or pressured to figure things out quickly. I had all the time I could need.

For me, however, this was the start of a period of massive confusion. The Mari who went to a demanding college and studied in the library every evening, who never pulled all-nighters, was gone. The Mari who worked 12-hour days without checking her phone, and worked on Sundays so she’d walk into Monday ready, had disappeared. The extraordinary focus that kept 100 things spinning suddenly collapsed into exhaustion, brain fog, and paralysis. I had space to pursue my interests but couldn’t make myself do anything. I often literally couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t understand what had happened.

Then a friend casually mentioned my “inattentive ADHD.” “You think I have ADHD?” I inquired curiously. I can no longer remember his reasoning at the time. I think it was a hunch more than anything, based on the fact he had ADHD himself. Desperately in search of answers and an explanation for this new, unfamiliar Mari that had emerged in the open space of my life, I began to do research.

My idea of someone with ADHD had been a little boy incapable of sitting still in class, physically fidgeting with no impulse control. This did not describe me at all. I was the picture of the “good kid.” Petrified of getting in trouble, anxious about doing things right, and severely untrusting of any adults or figures of authority who had the power to deem me “bad.” I was a very sensitive child. Every time an adult yelled at me was seared into my memory.

When I started researching inattentive ADHD in females, the profile matched. My dysgraphia as a child, omitting words because my brain raced ahead of my hand. My chronic skin-picking habit, fingers always searching for rough spots to go after. My need to doodle any time the teacher spoke and constantly shift positions in my chair. My extreme sensitivity to rejection and the depths of my emotions. My perfectionism and critically low self-worth. Why the library was the only place I could focus in college, why I had to work in my school classroom during COVID instead of being able to work from home because of body doubling. Why having the TV on paradoxically helps me concentrate. Why deadline pressures trigger hyperfocus and double my energy. I share this in case someone else recognizes themselves here.

It turns out, if one’s ADHD doesn’t negatively impact their behavior in the classroom or their grades at school, no one bothers to consider it or talk about its expression. If you’re a high-functioning female-bodied person, you might never realize you have it until you’re in the exact circumstances I was in: in my thirties, hormones less capable of masking my ADHD expression, and in the midst of a career change capable of showing me the exact circumstance where my mind struggles to function the most—when there is no external pressure or reward system that can give me the dopamine hit necessary to step into action.

These ADHD characteristics led me, in a way, to my career as a somatic practitioner.1 My sensitivity, my perfectionism, and the fact I’d learned to function and navigate life by running on cortisol are big reasons (though not the only reasons) why I struggled with anxiety and depression so intensely during my teens and early twenties. My neurodivergence also connects with how big and intense my feelings are. Even bringing this up, acknowledging the struggles I had for so long, brings tears to my eyes. I needed help, even before I connected these markers to ADHD. I even risked losing a relationship at the time in my mid-twenties. “Mari, I need you to find a way to care for yourself and manage your emotions, or I’m going to have to leave.” This ultimatum was a kick in the butt I needed.

Meditation and somatic work helped. It taught me how to meet my harsh self-critic with compassion, and to experience discomfort—whether from perceived rejection or my own mistakes—as sensation that I could learn to sit with non-judgmentally. I discovered that somatic practices offered something my nervous system had been missing: a way to ground myself in physical sensation when my thoughts spiraled, and to start finding regulation inside my own body rather than always needing external stimulus.

When I first started writing this piece, it felt like a story about challenge, and it still is. I am a self-employed freelancer working from home, which for someone with ADHD is a perfect storm. I should note that the challenge isn’t necessarily the wiring itself. In certain contexts, ADHD can be advantageous. The struggle is the mismatch between how my attention works and what self-employment demands. Motivating myself without external deadlines and accountability structures is a daily challenge as I build my somatic practice.

Often it still feels like I’m at the bottom of a hill, staring at the top and wondering, “How am I going to do this?”

Yet, as this post has unfolded, I see there is a bright side, which is how far I’ve come. Yes, I still struggle with boredom, time management, and motivation. But I’ve softened my inner critic and learned to ride my emotional waves, both accepting their sensory presence and creating safety in my nervous system through somatic techniques. The person I was in my twenties—sad, negative, highly self-critical, prone to worst-case thinking—has transformed into someone others describe as calm, bold, and optimistic. I credit this to the somatic work I’ve engaged in as a client for over six years.

What makes this struggle bearable, worthwhile even, is knowing why I’m doing it. As I learn to work for myself and build the structures I need, I’m preparing to support others as a somatic practitioner the way I was and continue to be supported.

The silver lining is that my neurotype actually makes me a better practitioner. My heightened emotional response and sensitivity to stimuli mean I pick up information from very subtle cues in my clients. Learning the histories, challenges, and uniqueness of others is something I’ll thankfully never get bored of. My mind thrives on novelty and the process of continuous discovery. Each somatic session is a many-forked path requiring immense flexibility to navigate in response to both my intentions for the session and what’s arising for my client. It’s a space where trusting my intuition and impulse is encouraged, and becomes something valuable I can offer others.

So even though I see the climb ahead, and I don’t know what obstacles still lie in my path or exactly how I’ll make it up the hill, I do know where I’m going, why I’m headed there, and that my challenges and uniqueness will be a gift for those I serve.

Yesterday, the moment I placed my hands on my client’s chest, I felt a wave of grief move through my own body—not my grief, but hers. I sometimes shy away from talking about my sensitivity or what it’s like when I’m working with a client as a somatic practitioner because I fear someone will think I’m crazy, or even worse, that it is true and I am crazy. In a world of science and rationality, one that I have considered myself soundly a part of since my teenage years at a math and science boarding school, saying something like “when touching someone’s stomach, I can feel their anger” will at best stir up incredulous looks and at worst get my experience discounted on the spot. Sometimes my experience is even more uncanny: a full sentence forming in my mind the second before a client says it, or a visual image rising moments before it’s described to me. While the words and pictures remain rarer, when consciously attuned to others, the depth of what I feel can astound me.

Feeling is a sense that can be cultivated. I am using the word “feeling” loosely as it encompasses many meanings. As an active process, I’m talking about interoceptive awareness, and as something experienced within the body, I’m talking about affect: the predecessor to emotions, the sensation that rises up before it’s classified and named. The more you take photos, the more you notice beauty in your surroundings. And as I can personally attest to since moving to Berlin two years ago, the more you listen to electronic music, the more you distinguish between layers of sound and their timing, and the more you develop sonic taste. The same holds true for cultivating inner sensing. Through five years of somatic therapeutic practices, first as a client and now as a practitioner, I’ve developed my ability to feel. I’ve learned to notice subtlety and nuance in my own bodyscape and to discern my affective experience. While people’s starting points vary dramatically, anyone can cultivate this sense.1

Sensitivity is the ability to distinguish subtle differences in quality and perceive experience with more granularity. When it comes to other senses, the merits of their development are clear: develop your ear to become a more skilled music producer, refine your taste palate to become a better chef. But why cultivate your interoceptive sensitivity, your ability to map your own terrain so you can feel even the most subtle changes, flows, and waves of affect as they ebb and flow through the bodymind?

Answering this question is a challenge. Words might not even get me there because the answer lies in the body, which has a language that can only ever be partially translated into spoken words. The first part of the answer might apply to cultivating any sense, and why it is worthy to focus attention on sensations and sensory experience in general. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines. Rather than passively receiving sensory data, they’re constantly generating predictions about what we’ll experience next, then comparing incoming signals against those predictions. We only become consciously aware of the mismatches—the prediction errors. This starts in infancy, when we’re bombarded with sensory information that would overwhelm us without some organizing principle. Over time, our brains learn patterns shaped by survival needs, social learning, emotional experiences, and countless repetitions. These learned patterns become the lens through which we filter everything we perceive. And the brain prioritizes efficiency over accuracy: it’s metabolically cheaper to rely on predictions than to process every sensation from scratch.

This predictive processing creates distance from direct experience. We live life as we expect it rather than as it unfolds. By focusing attention on sensations, I argue, we wedge open our filtration systems, “take the blinders off,” and move closer to a more raw, unfiltered reality—a goal of many spiritual practices. Instead of glazing over details our brains and bodies have categorized as unimportant in the past, we encounter what is more directly. That said, we can never fully escape prediction—even our most direct experiences are shaped by expectation. What changes is the balance: we can learn to weigh incoming sensations more heavily than our predictions about them.

And here’s what makes interoceptive sensitivity particularly valuable in this process, at least as I’ve come to see it: interoceptive signals have a different relationship to our predictive models than external perception does. When you see a tree, your brain constructs that tree from photons, learned categories, memories, and expectations. There are multiple steps between the light hitting your retina and your experience of “tree.” But interoceptive signals—the tension in your jaw, the flutter in your stomach, the expansion in your chest—are signals about states that are already you. Your body is reporting on itself instead of something distant. This doesn’t mean interoceptive awareness gives us unfiltered access to truth—our brains still interpret and categorize these signals, generating predictions about them. But the signal chain is shorter, the stakes are more immediate (these sensations directly reflect our well-being), and most crucially, we can train ourselves to notice the raw signals before our conceptual mind labels them. In this sense, interoceptive sensitivity offers something uniquely valuable: not reality as it truly is, but the most direct form of self-knowledge available to us.

Beyond helping us perceive reality more directly, cultivating interoceptive sensitivity provides understanding of ourselves and others. Whether the recommendation is to listen to your gut or your heart, there’s a knowing that we have other, potentially better, sources of wisdom and decision-making than the mind2. Studies back this up, showing that signals often appear in our body before we consciously arrive at thought-based knowing.3 The more somatic work I’ve done, the more I’ve been in touch with and been able to act based on bodily knowing. In my life, this shows up as instant recognition when I meet someone who has an important role to play, an instinctive pull in certain directions on my career path, a clear signal that I don’t trust someone, or simply a much more refined body map showing me exactly what stimulates my nervous system and how, giving me a chance to work with my reactions with much more agency.

I can give an example of this. I met someone at a party. Within seconds of our conversation beginning, my chest opened, my breath deepened, and I felt an unmistakable pull toward this person. My mind hadn’t yet processed who they were or what they did, but my body already knew this person mattered. I reached out to them in the following weeks, and we ended up becoming close collaborators on a major creative community project. Before developing interoceptive sensitivity, I would have dismissed that initial bodily response as random or meaningless. Now I trust it as data.

Each time I enter a somatic session as a client and verbally explain the content of my life, I’m asked to become aware of what sensations arise in my body, to describe them in detail, including where they are, their intensity, how they relate to emotions, and how they’re changing. By repeatedly bringing attention toward sensation, whether in my stomach, feet, chest, or head, I notice these sensations over time with more nuance and refinement. Suddenly, when I feel constriction in my stomach, I might notice that the experiences on the right and left sides of my belly are actually different, and that when I breathe into my belly, this difference becomes even more apparent. What I’ve found is that as I’ve mapped my own bodily terrain with more discernment, my ability to understand the affective experience of others has also increased. My bodymind seems to mirror aspects of their experience in my own. Whether it’s the closing of their throat, joy in their heart, or a wave of energy traveling down their arms, I often feel sensations in my own body in similar locations to where they report experiencing them.

This mirroring has multiple physiological bases. Research on therapeutic relationships suggests several mechanisms may be at work: mirror neuron activation, physiological entrainment between practitioner and client, and skilled attention. Expectancy effects are also involved, but the specificity and consistency of these experiences I’ve had suggest they involve far more than expectation alone. The outcome I’ve had reliably confirmed by clients is that I’m picking up what’s happening in someone else’s system within my own, sometimes with me feeling it first, before it becomes conscious to them. This embodied understanding shapes how I work with clients.

I can use my body map as a compass to support someone in becoming more conscious of their own experience and, in that process of bringing attention toward their experience, allow movement and change to take place. To feel ourselves more fully, especially what we had previously suppressed and hadn’t been fully conscious of, is transformative. However, I’d like to add that for some clients, the challenge isn’t developing more sensitivity. Some clients may already receive abundant somatic information. Instead, they need nervous system regulation that allows them to stay present with their intense sensations. In these cases, breathwork and attentional practices create safety rather than enhanced perception, expanding their window of tolerance for the sensitivity they already possess.4 But this extends beyond the therapy room. This capacity for viscerally understanding others’ experience inside yourself supports a sense of interbeing that is vital to cultivate in this time of deep separation in the modern era. When you can feel another person’s grief in your chest, the intellectual understanding that we are interconnected becomes lived knowledge in your body.

Cultivating interoceptive sensitivity offers three interconnected capacities. First, it allows us to perceive reality more directly, wedging open the predictive filters that keep us living in expectation rather than experience. Second, it grants access to embodied cognition, the bodily knowing that precedes and often surpasses purely mental decision-making. Third, as we map our own somatic landscape with greater precision, we develop the ability to feel others’ experience within our own body—the tension held in their jaw, the softening in their shoulders. These benefits are a progressive deepening: the more clearly we feel ourselves, the more we can feel each other.

These individual capacities point toward something larger. When you viscerally experience another person’s pain in your own body, interconnection goes from being a philosophy to a somatic truth. Charles Eisenstein writes in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible that the idealism needed for the changes our world urgently requires is a matter of the heart, not the mind. This is the idealism that moves us beyond self-interest, that makes the environment, other species, and distant strangers matter enough to inconvenience ourselves, to change how we live, to act for collective benefit even at personal cost. By developing our capacity to feel ourselves and each other, we build the embodied foundation for that idealism. From this space of direct knowing—where another’s suffering is something we feel in our own chest and interconnection is lived experience—we can create the world our hearts are dreaming of: one where we respond to each other’s needs as readily as we respond to our own.

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When I think of the ocean while sitting in my apartment on the corner of one of the busiest streets in my neighborhood in Berlin, tears come to my eyes. I'm filled with longing and recognize the hole that remains in my heart, the emptiness and separation that are soothed by the rocking of the waves and the feeling of the sun's heat on my skin. Is it just nature I long for, with its aliveness and nurturance? Or something deeper?

Thailand is sacred land. God and Goddess lie thick there, a dance between the gold-adorned temples and meditation halls and the jungle whose roots constantly find new earth and territory to reclaim. I first arrived in Thailand because I was searching for a soft landing from my own critical mind that drove me to perfectionism and never felt that what I had to give was enough. Thailand held me in its gentle embrace for almost 8 years and asked for nothing. This was the space I needed to find myself again.

Recently, during an afternoon walk, I expressed to my partner the feeling that I didn't know how to actualize my creative impulse or make it productive so it could be received by the world.

"What would you do right now if money was no issue now or in the future?" they asked.

I would learn new skills, knowledge, techniques; I would teach, serve, and hold space for others; I would continue to explore my own consciousness through meditation and other psychosomatic techniques; and I would make art.

"Would other people need to see it?" they asked.

"No," I said, "they wouldn't need to."

I became emotional as I said this, realizing that this feeling that my art needed to be out there in the world, received positively by others, was tied firmly to my stories around money and the sense of worthiness bound up in the idea of earning money from my skills and talents. In this stage of late capitalism, my art—like me—needed to prove it was something of value. With money taken out of the equation, I saw the truth that I would make art for the joy of the process. Not for anyone else, not needing to even be seen by another—just for me.

I invite you to consider what you would do with your time if money were no concern, if all your basic needs were met indefinitely. Really, I mean it. Stop and take a moment. Connect to yourself and notice, what comes up?

Returning to our first question, notice any tension or discrepancy between your answers—or perhaps their alignment. This dissonance, if you feel it, between what we think we should want professionally and what truly fulfills us reveals how deeply we've absorbed society's measures of success. For me, and I imagine for others, these expectations become inseparable from our relationship with money.

In the world of social media, our reasons for production are getting confused. We hold massively tempting devices in our hands or pockets most hours of the day, and I know how tempting they are. I spent the summer meditating three to four hours a day while living at a meditation center. Yet, despite whatever focus or discipline you might think I would have built up, I still have to drag myself away from my screen. The sites that connect me to friends and family in other countries have become increasingly stocked with content designed to lure me into endless scrolling.

Social media shows me the image of what I "should" be. As a painter, it shows me prolific artists constantly creating beautiful work and seemingly making their livelihood solely from their craft. It shows me people who create perfect narrative hooks, timelapses, reveals, and cuts with high-end devices, compressing hours of meticulous work into deceptively simple, bite-sized chunks—almost as though they could have been made by anyone. It gives us a constantly false ideal of what we should be capable of making, and it pushes us to think of art as something that should be productive, pieced and parceled into video clips for competition in attention economies.

The proliferation of platforms like Substack and the surge in video podcasts speak to a growing cultural impulse to transform our thoughts and creations into public-facing content. As I draft these words for my own Substack, I feel the tension of participating in the very ecosystem I'm critiquing.

Social media has created a system of consumption that hinges on the commodification of personal identity. This is a more insidious evolution than the previous era of impersonal corporate branding. Even mega musical artists now face demands for constant content creation; promotional lifestyle reels have replaced the traditional cycle of interviews and posters. You can't disconnect for long anymore, as there is no separation between the work and the individual creator. Now we are the product we sell to the world. Our looks, charisma, and life stories become the goods themselves, though mostly what we're trading is attention. More than ever, our money stories have become inextricably bound to our sense of identity: are we likable enough (getting enough likes <3) to accumulate the social capital necessary to secure our economic needs?

Some people may be more sheltered from this emerging collective money story, but as a self-employed, creative freelancer, I feel it acutely. Young children are now saying their dream job is to be a YouTube star or an influencer. It has become a new "American dream," one in which gaining views and other engagement metrics translate directly to perceived worth. Our value becomes wrapped up in our ability to be liked and therefore make money, echoing America's Puritan roots where material success was seen as a sign of divine favor. This belief in worthiness through prosperity continues to shape our culture, though its forms have evolved from religious doctrine to digital metrics.

After years in Thailand, my arrival in Berlin marked a return to the Western world. My time in Thailand wasn't just an escape from the performance metrics of New York or the perfectionism that drove me in earlier years. In Thailand, I discovered the "sabai sabai สบาย สบาย" way of being—a sense of ease and openness to life as it comes. It's embedded in everything there, even the language itself, with its simpler tenses and dropped pronouns reflecting a culture where constant self-assertion isn't necessary. Though Berlin offers a gentler pace than American cities, it still represents an intensification of rhythm compared to my life in Asia.

Though I'm stronger and more ready to face Western society without losing myself, I'm confronted by all the stories of money and self-worth that remain frozen within me. The ocean and its healing rhythms feel distant here. I sense there's work I need to do that was only accessible by leaving Thailand's warm embrace, by stepping back into a world where value and productivity are more tightly entwined.

How can I meet my needs in this new place? I consider how I can make the money I need to support myself without part of myself sinking back down to the depths, waiting for another soft landing and receptive space where nothing is asked from me.

I'm searching again, not for escape this time, but for balance. How can I find those rocking waves and rays of heat that once held me in Thailand and integrate them into my life here in Berlin? How can I trust in the perfection of life as I breathe into the sounds of city sirens, processing the stresses and uncertainties of my new freelance life? I don't have the answers, but I trust my longing to guide me home.