Somatic Tao

16/02/2026

KUNG HEI FAT CHOI 2026 - THE FIRE HORSE

My life means attunement with my world.
Characterised by joy and happiness,
I enjoy high self-esteem, awareness and confidence.
For my good work
I receive the virtue of Love.

But beware!

If I become selfish my life becomes joyless.
I suffer a hidden loneliness
And use hysteria and euphoria
To overcome my low self-esteem.

HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR!

Welcome to the energies of the Fire Horse.

15/02/2026

SOOTHING SUNDAY – Time for Rebirth ...

Time for rebirth
For pride and dignity
And success.
Time for love and joy
For healing
And for prosperity.

Crocus flowers primarily symbolize joy, cheerfulness, youthfulness, and the arrival of spring, often representing hope and rebirth due to their ability to bloom through late winter snows. They are associated with the Greek myth of a mortal youth transformed into the flower, and historically symbolize love, prosperity, and the resurrection of life.

Color Meanings:

💛 Yellow: Represents joy and brightness.

💜 Purple: Implies pride, dignity, and success.

🤍 White: Symbolizes purity, innocence, and truth.

Folklore and Historical Uses:

🎊 Ancient Greece/Egypt: Used in garlands for weddings and celebrations, and to help with the effects of drunkenness.

❤️ Valentine’s Day: Often associated with St. Valentine, with folklore suggesting yellow croci were used to restore sight, symbolizing love and healing.

🐣 Modern Symbolism: Frequently used in spring and Easter to represent spiritual renewal.

14/02/2026

TAOIST ENERGETICS – OBSTACLES CONTAIN THE MEDICINE

A Somatic Tao / Emotology Perspective

We are taught symptoms are problems.
That obstacles are malfunctions.

But for Somatic Tao, every obstacle is emotion energy seeking completion.

❌ Not pathology.
❌ Not weakness.
➡️ Unfinished movement in the autonomic nervous system.

Emotion is energy expressed through the body.
When that energy cannot complete its cycle, it becomes an obstacle.
When it completes, it becomes medicine.

THE FIVE ELEMENTS AS EMOTION ENERGY PATTERNS

💚 WOOD — Stagnation
Early misattunement can inhibit forward impulse. Suppressed assertion becomes frustration or stuckness.
The medicine? Direction. Clear movement.

❤️ FIRE — Relational overwhelm
Inconsistent co-regulation teaches the heart to guard. Vulnerability feels unsafe.
The medicine? Safe connection. Regulated joy.

🧡 EARTH — Chronic worry
Without secure containment, the system overthinks and over-gives to stabilise.
The medicine? Nourishment. Boundaries. Support.

🤍 METAL — Contracted grief
Loss without safe holding turns emotion energy inward.
The medicine? Release. Value. Meaning refined.

💙 WATER — Imprinted fear
When early safety was uncertain, fear embeds in the autonomic baseline.
The medicine? Courage arising from embodied wisdom.

An obstacle is not “negative emotion.”
It is emotion energy that could not complete — often in babyhood, before cognition.

The nervous system protects first.
Completion can come later.

Somatic Tao does not fight symptoms.
It reads them.

The obstacle and the medicine are the same energy
at different stages of regulation.

Your system is not against you.

It is unfinished.
And unfinished energy is potential.

Within every obstacle lives the next stage of emoturity.

Nothing in you is random.
Nothing in you is wasted.

MORE INFORMATION:

📌 HOW TAOISM IDENTIFIES OUR EMOTIONS:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FmXgVBePY/

📌 HOW EMOTIONS MAINTAIN HEALTH:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/197UgirEPP/

📌 HOW EMOTIONS MODERATE HEALTH:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CDsN3PviX/

📌 TAOIST ENERGETICS OF NEEDS MET
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FiYxvSek4/

📌 TAOIST ENERGETICS OF UNMET NEEDS
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17ixsR9pjD/

12/02/2026

UNDERSTANDING BEN'S LINK TO TYPE 1 DIABETES

Please help Veronique Mead at Chronic Illness Trauma Studies increase understanding of the early life epigenetic factors that increase risk for childhood type 1 diabetes.

Please complete her survey:

https://chronicillnesstraumastudies.com/child-t1d-survey/

If you know of someone who has a child or adolescent with type 1 diabetes, please make them aware of this study to enable them to choose to participate.

🙏🙏🙏

Child T1D Survey for mothers of a child that either has type 1 diabetes or has no major health conditions. Research Study IRB approved 2025

11/02/2026

GABOR MATÉ – GET THE FIRST 3 YRS RIGHT

"If you get the first three years right you can relax.

If you don’t get the first three years right, you’ll be practicing remedial parenting for decades."

GABOR MATÉ

MORE INFORMATION:

📌 Emoturity - Nervous System Emotional Maturity:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16Hh4tXebz/

📌 Emoturity Affects Life & Health:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19LN8uu4Pt/

📌 Emotional Intelligence Is Not Emoturity:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15HmjdyGMc/

📌 EMOTURITY IS BUILT ON NEUROPLASTICITY
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CFA4pMemf/

📌 THE THREAT IN BEN
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BHBRhLTpY/

📌 BEN CHANGES WIRING OF THE BRAIN:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A2TFYgTt6/

📌 BEN's NEUROINFLAMMATION:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Foy23rEjq/

📌 BEN's RISK OF ADHD
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EAaz3vLjR/

📌 BEN's RISK OF AUTISM
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C1dU9veUm/

📌 BEN's PROPENSITY FOR SYNDROMES
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19fbXzymQs/

📌 BEN’s RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DARK TRIAD:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AQqmsutyw/

📌 BEN’s LINK TO CHILDHOOD ASTHMA
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AAxB4Y5z2/

📌 MATERNAL STRESS & BABYHOOD ECZEMA
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Ccxntr6kQ/

10/02/2026

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CHRONIC DISEASE

“Apparently insulin resistance causes chronic disease.”

But pause for a moment -
🤔 What regulates insulin?
🤔 And what regulates that?

When you follow the chain carefully, you arrive at something we rarely name in medicine:

🎯 Emotions regulate the autonomic nervous system.
👉 And the ANS regulates the body.

Chronic emotional load doesn’t just affect how we feel.
It affects how the body functions over time.

🎵 Music: Cylinder Five — Chris Zabriskie (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0)

If this resonates, stay curious — your body already is.

Somatic Tao 👉 regular insights on emotions and health.

09/02/2026

NOT EVERYONE HAS BEN BUT…

Not everyone was emotionally neglected – but many were. For many parents, BEN will be new. For some, it may feel like too much: yet another unfamiliar way of understanding parenting.

Social media is saturated with advice that often pulls parents out of their bodies and into their minds: analysing, mentalising, worrying. Yet the only way to parent well is through somatic attunement to your baby’s nervous system state. Why? Because the state of the autonomic nervous system is the state of emotion in the body.

Somatic attunement is difficult for many adults who were themselves emotionally neglected – their own history of BEN. Many are unaware they are dissociated from their body’s felt sense. And it is impossible to teach what we do not know. BEN therefore operates as a largely unrecognised intergenerational trauma.

Stress and dissociation signal poor emoturity – emotional immaturity of the non-cognitive brain and body. Emotional maturity develops through safely experiencing emotion energy. When effective co-regulation is absent, emotions feel threatening inside [1] and the brain (not the mind) initiates freeze. Emotion stops moving, and emotional expertise cannot develop.

Research shows BEN alters brain wiring, heightening fear sensitivity and weakening impulse and social regulation [2]. 🏹

🎯 BEN increases the risk of emotional dysregulation and mental illness.

🎯 BEN sits at the core of Adverse Babyhood Experiences (ABEs) and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

🎯 BEN is a silent intergenerational force escalating lifelong illness and unhappiness.

Despite being identified by William James over a century ago [3, 4], BEN was never shared with parents. Instead, it remained academic and was later absorbed by Big Pharma and the DSM/ICD. But, big Pharma has no incentive to address emotion as a root cause of disease – because there is no pill for it.

🌟 Health can shift when we prioritise emoturity and nervous system balance in the youngest among us – in utero and in the first two years of life.

MORE INFORMATION:

📌 Introduction of BEN: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=894198262721482&set=a.457198723088107

📌 BEN & Caregiver History of BEN
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GLpM8h9sn

📌 EVIDENCE BEN IS INTERGENERATIONAL
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19qoVjjsmq/

📌 Emoturity - Nervous System Emotional Maturity:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16Hh4tXebz/

📌 Emoturity Affects Life & Health:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19LN8uu4Pt/

📌 Emotional Intelligence Is Not Emoturity:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15HmjdyGMc/

📌 EMOTURITY IS BUILT ON NEUROPLASTICITY
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CFA4pMemf/

📌 BEN CHANGES WIRING OF THE BRAIN:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A2TFYgTt6/

RESEARCH:

[1] Lyons-Ruth, K. (2025). Is neglect the first form of threat? Attachment & Human Development, 27(4), 511–538. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2025.2518687

[2] Tyborowska, A., Volman, I., Smeekens, S., Toni, I. & Roelofs, K. Testosterone during puberty shifts emotional control from pulvinar to anterior prefrontal cortex. J. Neurosci. 36, 6156–6164 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3874-15.2016

[3] William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. New York: Dover Publications, 1890, 1918, 1950, pp. 313-317.

[4] William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York, London, and Bombay: Longmans Green, 1896, 1899, pp. 32-62.

08/02/2026

SOOTHING SUNDAY – Welcome to Springtime ...

Welcome
To springtime
In the north.

06/02/2026

DEB DANA - Trauma compromises...

"Trauma compromises our ability to engage with other by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of projection."

Deb Dana,
LCSW, Co-founder of the Polyvagal Institute

MORE INFORMATION:

📌Information about Adverse Babyhood Experiences, ABEs: https://chronicillnesstraumastudies.com/abes-introduction/

📌 Introduction of BEN: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=894198262721482&set=a.457198723088107

📌 Emoturity - Nervous System Emotional Maturity:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16Hh4tXebz/

📌 Emotional Maturity & Resiliency:
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Kkndgmhjd/

📌 Emoturity Affects Life & Health:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19LN8uu4Pt/

📌EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IS NOT EMOTURITY:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15HmjdyGMc/

📌 EMOTURITY IS BUILT ON NEUROPLASTICITY
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CFA4pMemf/

04/02/2026

SPRING: THE TAO OF SPROUTING: 生之道

The Chinese phrase 生之道 (shēng zhī dào), literally translates to "the Way of Life" or "the Path of Living/Growth". The character 生 (shēng) means "to be born," "to give birth," "life," "to grow," or "to come into existence", while 之 (zhī): is a possessive and modifying particle, similar to "'s" or "of the", and 道 (dào) means "way" or "path".

The three months of spring are called putting forth and displaying.
Heaven and Earth all sprout. The ten thousand things become lush.
At night to bed, early to rise.
Briskly walk around the courtyard.
Let your hair down and relax the body in order to make that which is of the heart/mind sprout.
Sprout but do not kill.
Give but do not take.
Reward but do not punish.
This is the Spring compliance of qi (and) the cultivation of the Dao of sprouting.
To oppose these principles injures the liver.
(Consequently) Summer will bring cold changes, (and) there will be little to offer one’s growth [1].

According to the Chinese agricultural calendar the first day of the qi of spring in the northern hemisphere is actually February 5th.

Image credit: College of Integrated Chinese Medicine

REFERENCE:

[1] Neijing Chapter 2.

03/02/2026

SITUATIONS OF RISK OF BEN 1 - 20

1. MATERNAL LOSS

2. IN-UTERO, BIRTH, SEPARATION EVENTS

3. MATERNAL COMPLICATIONS

4. FEEDING ISSUES

5. DISTRACTED BREASTFEEDING

6. CAREGIVER STRESS/LACK OF SUPPORT

7. CAREGIVER MENTAL ILLNESS

8. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

9. CAREGIVER SUBSTANCE USE

10. CAREGIVER POVERTY

11. CAREGIVER TRAUMA HISTORY

12. CAREGIVER BEN

13. CAREGIVER POOR EMOTURITY

14. CAREGIVER PRIORITISING SOCIOECONOMIC NEEDS

15. DIFFERENT PARENTING STYLES – BEHAVIOUR OVER EMOTION

16. CAREGIVER PRIORISTISING OWN DESIRES

17. CAREGIVER PARENTING – SCHEDULED FEEDING

18. CAREGIVER PARENTING – SLEEP TRAINING

19. BEN & CAREGIVER PARENTING STYLE – USE OF “CALM DOWN”

20. VERBAL ABUSE IN THE HOME

Links to each of the topics above can be found in the comments 👇

02/02/2026

“SURVIVAL ENERGY” – IS THIS TERM OUTDATED?

Understanding of trauma has advanced rapidly over the last 30-40 years. A major turning point was the inclusion of PTSD in the DSM-III in 1980 [1], influenced by the psychological needs of Vietnam veterans and increased public awareness of sexual abuse and r**e.

More recently, advances in neuroscience and neuroimaging [2] have reframed trauma as a physioneurosis: the persistence of biological emergency responses that affect brain function and structure, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus. Understanding has also expanded from single-event trauma to the cumulative effects of chronic exposure, including adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) [3] and babyhood experiences (ABEs) [4].

As understanding evolves, language also shifts. An example would be Peter Levine’s introduction of the term “survival energy” [5] to describe autonomic activation for fight, flight, or freeze. When this energy is not fully discharged after threat, it manifests as PTSD and other symptoms [6]. While the term is now widely used, is its lack of specificity limiting trauma resolution?

Research clearly shows inadequate early co-regulation to increase vulnerability to:

➡️ externalising behaviours (aggression, impulsivity); and
➡️ internalising behaviours (depression, shame, withdrawal).

Research is also clear that co-regulation supports secure attachment, emotional regulation, and resilience.

Taken together, the evidence above suggests a clearer conclusion: emotion energy drives trauma symptoms and behaviour. What is often called “survival energy” is more accurately the energy of specific emotions:

👉 anger drives fight
👉 fear drives flight
👉 terror drives freeze
👉 sadness reflects loss
👉 worry drives focus

Importantly, research also shows that naming emotions increases prefrontal regulation and reduces amygdala activation [7]. Naming emotions shifts the brain from alarm to reflection and choice [8].

It is time to update our vocabulary. Research shows healing of trauma to benefit from and even require improved awareness of specific emotions.

MORE INFORMATION and RESEARCH CITED can be found in the first comment, (if shared - on the original post here: https.www.facebook.com/share/p/17Tqn8WqL6/ ).