Do you ever feel like you’re shaking with rage? Or do you tremble with anxiety? Because your body uses shaking as a means to release stress and trauma from the body! This is a normal response, but cultural conditioning has suppressed our natural inclination to shake off tension. It’s important to care for our bodies, just as we would for pets, and learn to close the stress cycle. Somatic shaking can help.
Take a breath, give yourself a little shake, and let’s talk about how:
🔹Neurogenic tremors occur in both animals and humans after stressful events
🔹Time does not heal wounds; it covers them with fascia
🔹Incorporating shaking into daily life can help manage stress
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#332 – 7 Ways to Release Anger & Grief Through Your Yoga Practice
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Transcript:
Brett:
Hello, my friends. Have you ever had a pet, maybe a pet dog or a cat, and maybe they’re scared during a thunderstorm and maybe they see another cat or another dog and they don’t like that animal and they hiss or kind of get in a kerfuffle or, you know, kind of smell the other animal and then they sort of shake it off, right? They shake. Or maybe you don’t have a dog or a cat, but you’ve seen ducks do this, right? A duck kind of gets in another duck space in the pond and they’re kind of circling each other and
I don’t know, they’re kind of fighting over a piece of bread or something like that. And then they both kind of shake it off and go their opposite directions. Well, this shaking that these animals are doing is a natural reflex that we all have. It’s actually a reflex humans have as well that enables us to release trauma, tension, stress from the body quickly, easily, and effectively. However, we as humans have been conditioned to not shake in meeting rooms and conferences. It’s just considered kind of socially unacceptable behavior. So it’s been trained out of us.
What this shaking is actually called, whether it’s happening in a human or an animal, is a neurogenic tremor. And animals exhibit these neurogenic tremors after trauma as just a natural response to stress. It basically helps them release all this pent up energy and tension that may be accumulated during the stressful encounter.
So let’s break this down a little bit. When we have a lion or a tiger coming at us or a stressful email, whatever it is, I always like to describe that while we think we’re these evolved humans and yes, we have these incredible brains, you actually are the owner of a pet that is your own body. So you might have a dog or a cat, but guess what? You have another pet.
which is your own human body, which needs to be fed, just like your dog or cat needs to be fed, needs to be taken out for walks, needs to be brushed, needs to be cared for. And a lot of us have this bodilessness that we’ve developed or in extreme cases, actually like a fear of being in our body or we see our body simply as a project, like we want to whip it into shape. We want it to be a certain weight or look a certain way. I mean, think about how much of the marketing messages we receive.
Even within the yoga community, that the body is a project. Like the body should be contorted into certain shapes. It should be able to do a forward fold with the belly on the thighs.
The idea I’m inviting in here is that your body is not a project or a thing to be whipped into shape. It is actually like a skittish horse. It is like an animal that you are the owner of that you might be ignoring more than actual pets that you have in your home.
Your body needs water. Your body needs eight hours of sleep. Your body needs downtime to just daydream and rest. Most of us think that we should just be able to go, go, go, go, go and execute constantly without going through cycles of restoration. And unfortunately, everything in our culture is set up to propagate that myth that we should just be able to work eight hour days, five days a week, nonstop.
That we should be able to tightly control our weight.
That our value is in how much we produce and how much we achieve.
So when a lion or a tiger is coming at us, our intellect, so when a lion or maybe just a scary email is coming at us, your intellect knows, this is just an email. Like I’m not physically under any kind of threat right now. But your body, your skittish horse of a pet body, your nervous system doesn’t speak.
The same language as our intellect. It has its own body language and something called body time, which is much, slower than our kind of time.
Maybe you’ve noticed that when your phone dings or that stressful email comes in, your body actually has a reaction that you’re not consciously controlling, like your shoulders kind of shrug up towards your ears or your stomach subtly clenches.
Or you tighten your jaw, just the tiniest little bit.
This is your body being an animal, having this natural response to stress.
When our body experiences stress, our pituitary gland, the master gland of the body, releases a certain hormone called ACTH. It tells the adrenal glands to start secreting adrenaline. That adrenaline goes into our bloodstream.
This can cause an accelerated heart rate, fast breathing. It increases our blood pressure. It slows down our digestion, because if your body’s like, under attack, we’re not going to focus on digesting our lunch right now.
Much of this is subtle, but what happens over time is that your body can end up being in what we call in yoga teacher training, orange alert, like this low state of chronic tension that you’re just saturating in because it accumulates and accumulates. And in animals, right, the same thing happens, but then once the duck realizes it’s safe or the dog realizes the thunderstorm has passed or the cat.
realizes it survived that scary, scary fall. Animals naturally shake to…
release the pent-up energy and tension that may have accumulated during that stressful event. And this process is thought to actually not just help them kind of reset muscularly, but to also help reset their nervous system and restore balance.
And in some of the research that’s been done about stress cycles, it’s literally the thesis is that that shaking is also then signaling to the pituitary gland, right? Like, okay, master gland of the body, you can secrete different chemicals now. Like we survived.
So these neurogenic tremors can happen after a stressful event or complex PTSD, which is basically just like a low grade stressor that’s happening over and over and over again. Say you’re in a really, really stressful job, having really difficult encounters with your boss over a period of five years, right? All of that tension is going to build up in the body. Your fascia will change. You’ll literally have a different body set and move through the world in a way where your shoulders are kind of like chronically elevated or your
fascia around your diaphragm will change. So your breath and the way your diaphragm moves is in a much smaller range of motion.
because you’re always just a little bit panicked.
However, a big place where we see these tremors happen is when an animal is coming out of a freeze or fawn response.
There’s a great video about this on YouTube. There’s a couple actually I’ll link it in the show notes. Don’t worry, I’ll narrate what’s happening in the video for you. So basically we have a leopard and it has a…
an elk, let’s just call it an elk because I don’t know how to pronounce this animal, but it’s like a deer-like prey, obviously, for the leopard. Literally, in its jaws. It’s like sitting on top of it.
So the leopard probably chased this elk, pounced on it, has it, and now the leopard is kind of catching its breath, just lying on top of the elk, and the elk is playing dead. Like it’s just pretending it’s dead. I mean, I have a cat who used to do this and like bring a mouse to me and I thought the mouse was dead and then my cat would get bored of playing with it. And lo and behold.
A couple moments later, you know, I’d come back and that mouse had vanished. It was gone because it had probably shaken. had these neurogenic tremors. It was playing dead to fool my cat. So my cat would get bored of playing with it. So similarly, this elk, the leopard’s sitting on the elk. I’m not sure why the leopard’s not digging in and eating. It’s breathing very heavily. So I think the leopard is probably catching its breath from the chase. It’s like, okay, I chased it. I got it. The leopard thinks the elk is dead and maybe he’s waiting for some leopard friends to come.
and sharing the feast, or maybe he’s just catching his breath before he takes this first tasty bite. Little does he know that the elk is actually in this survival response. We know about the fight response and the flight response, but there’s this freeze response where you basically play dead.
And the fawn response is where you’d kind of play along with your predator.
But here we see that elk in like deep freeze.
So the leopard’s just chilling. He’s like, okay, I’ve got all the time in the world to…
eat this elk. Meanwhile, what the leopard doesn’t know is that a coyote is walking up behind him. And the coolest part of this video, I think, is it’s really crazy. The leopard actually kind of has the the elk’s face right by its face and it’s kind of it’s about to chomp. And then the leopard notices the coyote. And so he turns around. He’s like, there’s a coyote coming. But the elk is like Oscar award winning actor in the freeze response.
and literally like lets his head drop as if he’s dead. So if you watch this video, like look for the head drop and I’ll link up a version of the YouTube video where someone even calls it out.
because the elk is literally just acting like a dead puppet.
So the coyote comes, the leopard realizes that there’s going to be some fight over the elk or whatnot. And then I’m not sure exactly what happens, but the freeze response that this elk had literally saved its life, right? Like the elk couldn’t fight the leopard and it couldn’t flee fast enough. So it resorted to freeze and in freezing, you know, it got lucky because some other animals came around and now it’s alone.
and it starts this process of the neurogenic tremor. So the first thing that we see happen in the video is that this elk, which basically looks dead, starts to do this incredibly deep, rapid breathing.
And this breathing is really happening in the abdomen, in the belly. You see it. It’s like a balloon inflating and deflating, like big, big breaths.
then it starts doing this weird shaking. Like it’s not graceful, it’s not pretty, it’s literally like…
this ugly, weird left and right dance as if it’s being moved from inside itself.
It does this for a little bit and then it keeps shaking and shakes more and shakes more and then boom, it just leaps up and gallops away gracefully.
So basically your body, your pet body, your animal is just like this elk that’s encountered a lot of leopards in its lifetime. But unlike this elk, it has not done this neurogenic tremoring process and kind of shaken off that stress intention. Instead, we’re just holding it in and suppressing it and suppressing it and suppressing it. And one of my favorite quotes, I saw this in some of the slides from the 200 hour teacher training yesterday, but it’s that time does not heal wounds.
It covers them with fascia. So it’s like all this stuff we’re suppressing, it doesn’t go away. Oftentimes, you know, we have this body armoring through the fascia building up that happens, or, you know, because we’re saturating in these stress hormones and not closing the stress cycle.
like our animal friends know how to do, as we saturate in these stress hormones for years and years and years and years, we start seeing most of the chronic diseases we’re suffering with today. IBS, infertility, headaches, migraines, fibromyalgia, digestive issues.
IBS, and when we wonder, like, well, why don’t humans just do this thing that animals do if it’s a natural reflex, which it is, the reason is, as I said before, we have more complex social and psychological mechanisms as humans, especially in the frontal part of our brain that kind of inhibit this natural shaking response. Our cultural norms discourage overt expression of vulnerability, so that’s probably one reason we don’t do it.
humans have a tendency to overthink things and suppress or inhibit these natural responses basically because of societal expectations or learn behaviors. Like how many times were you told to sit still as a child?
So all of this leads to a greater likelihood of holding stress and trauma in the body.
I personally believe that in cultures long ago, like hunter-gatherer cultures, cross-culturally, that a lot of the tribal rites and rituals that we see with people dancing or stomping or using drums or howling around a fire,
that a lot of religion or festivities that would happen in the town to pray to the rain god or the sun god or goddess
that cultures back then really built in a lot of opportunities for people to kind of let loose and shake it out or stomp or scream. Shaking isn’t the only way to close the stress cycle. There’s so many and that’s what somatic or embodied yoga is all about. You how do we move the body in a way that closes these stress cycles? There’s so many postures and ways to do it.
But every time I post or seem to talk about shaking, all of you seem to really like it. It’s like a very popular topic, which is why I wanted to dive deeper into it.
Interestingly enough, we see shaking in the Kundalini yoga tradition from like day one, yogi bhajan, controversial figure, of course, but he, I’ve seen transcripts of lectures of his that say that every Kundalini yoga class should involve shaking.
We do not see this shaking and courage so much in the Hatha Vinyasa lineage from the text that I’ve studied. That lineage seems to be more about, okay, let’s move the body through these asana, these yoga poses so we can be still, so we can transcend the physical body and achieve enlightenment in order to escape the cycles of karma, birth.
life, death, so a very different approach.
I think it’s important to make a distinction that when you shake either with me doing somatic yoga in the uplifted yoga membership, which I hope you’re doing, we have a whole somatic yoga category now that’s really robust, or in a Kundalini yoga practice, or just on your own. And we’ll talk a little bit more about how to shake and what that might look like in a moment. But if you’re doing that, you’re not having like a true…
neurogenic tremor. Now, is it helpful and good to do and help enclose the stress cycle? Like 100 % yes. Fantastic to do on a variety of levels. But my understanding of the neurogenic tremors is that it’s a reflex, just like if you gag, like that’s a reflex. It’s not something I’m controlling. There is a form of therapy called TRE in which, you know, you work with a practitioner who’s trained specifically just in this, like all they do is help try to trigger people’s
neurogenic tremor reflex, just like, you know, there might be some specialists out there who helps and, you know, very specifically triggers people’s gag reflex. I don’t know, but they just focus on that. And you’re lying on the floor and they work with you kind of over 20 minutes doing some exercises to try to trigger your own kind of shaking reflex. So kind of more like the elk in our video story. When you’re shaking in classes of mine,
we’re much more in control, right? It’s not like a reflex is taking over.
Instead, we’re simulating in a safe environment where we’re conscious and have control the same type of bodily actions.
If you’re following along with all of this, that’s awesome. If you’re not, I did ask chat GDP, just because I thought it would be fun, how it would explain neurogenic tremors to a six-year-old. And I actually really love what it told me, so I’m going to read it to all of you.
Sometimes when something really scary or stressful happens, our bodies can feel all wiggly or shaky afterwards, kind of like how a puppy might shake when it’s excited or nervous. This shaking helps our bodies feel better and let go of all the big feelings. It’s our body’s way of saying, I’m okay now. It can happen after things like a fall or a big surprise. It’s like a little dance our bodies do to feel better. I love that. It’s like a little dance our bodies do to feel better because…
You know, I’m saying so much of this episode, I’m saying, well, humans don’t experience these neurogenic tremors. Sometimes people do. And usually it’s in a hospital setting after they’re coming out of anesthesia. Like as the anesthesia wears off and they kind of wake up after surgery, which obviously is a huge trauma, which the intellectual mind is asleep for, but anesthesia does not knock out your body’s wisdom.
There’s this other intelligence that we have, this more kinesthetic intelligence that knows that it was cut open and what happened.
And so this kind of shaking is often seen post-op in hospitals.
It makes a lot of sense, right? Like if the body’s been anesthetized, like literally cannot move while scary things are being done to it, it makes sense that your body would want to shake that off and that for some people, they have that neurodrenic tremor reflex as the anesthesia wears off and is able to do that. It’s like coming out of a deep freeze.
a freeze that you were forced into because of the anesthesia.
going down this whole somatic shaking rabbit hole, I became reminded of when I used to work as a myofascial release therapist, actually doing body work on people. And one technique that I was taught was this technique called rebounding. And rebounding in massage is basically where the massage therapist uses kind of a rhythmic bouncing movement to stimulate the patient’s body tissues.
And this can enhance circulation, it can release tension, sometimes it feels relaxing. But during rebounding, I’d basically bounce or jiggle specific areas of someone’s body to create like a light kind of oscillating effect.
I would usually go to this or do this when all the other techniques that I might use, like my elbow or trying to stretch it or, you know, massage it in all the traditional ways would fail. I would use rebounding as a way to kind of invite chaos into the system and see if my patient’s body kind of wanted to reorganize itself. If I just introduce some rhythmic bouncing, kind of like shaking into their system.
So if you want to start working with this, I would of course invite you to do somatic yoga with me. And I incorporate shaking into almost every single class. And there’s a couple of different ways that you can approach this shaking and even kind of take it with you throughout your day. So one way that’s really easy to incorporate somatic shaking into your everyday routine is just to use the hands and the wrists. So just to shake the hands, shake the wrists.
And I’m doing this right now and it’s all you can probably hear it in my voice. Like the more I shake the hands on the wrist, it’s getting my arms involved. My shoulders are starting to shimmy a little bit. My chest is starting to shimmy and it’s, it’s moving up that way. I love the hands cause you can take that with you anywhere. Like someone cuts you off in traffic. Like once you get out of the car, just like shake your hands. I do this in the grocery store. I do this all the time. Maybe your partner or someone says something that irritates you instead of holding onto that and making it mean something and going into the story and the program.
and all the things that traditionally trigger that loop of stress or irritation or whatever, just see what it’s like to shake it off, like shake it off, or maybe you want to even pound. I don’t know if you can hear, pound on the chest a little bit. I love using the voice too, unstructured sound. Right? So just like shaking the tongue, essentially. These are little hacks that you can take with you. If you’re doing a more full body type of yoga practice,
you can start with the wrists and then let that move the chest and then go down to the lower body. If you’re teaching a group of people, if you’re a teacher, I often find a nice way to teach shaking is to do one limb at a time. So folks are often a little self-conscious to do this. So I’ll invite them to like just shake their left wrist and then let that take over and shake their whole left arm. And then I’ll let them do it on the right. So I’ll say, okay, now add the right arm. And then I’ll say, now add the chest. So I kind of layer in
parts of the body gradually. So I start with a hand, then the arm, then the other arm, then the chest. Then I’ll say, shake your right leg, shake your left leg, shake everything, shake your booty, right? So we get to go through the body kind of part by part. And this helps make sure that all the different parts of the body get shook. But I also feel like it kind of eases people into it.
Another type of shaking that I invite you to explore, which is a little bit more advanced, but if you stand up right now or later, is to actually try to initiate the shake from thinking of it, initiating from the sacrum and the tailbone. So instead of kind of starting with the hand, you’re starting with the central column. And I find that this is in some ways deeper, more therapeutic. It’s a little bit harder to get into.
I know that I do teach this in at least two or three of the somatic yoga classes that are in the membership and we kind of warm up to get to that point, but you’re thinking of shaking the spine, initiating at the base. And then it’s kind of like your extremities, your arms and legs move from that place.
If you’re like, nope, I don’t want to shake this way, another invitation I have for you is to lie down on your back and just shake your legs like crazy. It’s really fun in in the somatic yoga life coaching program that I run. have a pose manual and one of my favorite pictures in the pose manual is, the one of me lying down. Cause I have all these poses kind of itemized.
and shaking the legs because I worked with the photographer and I was like, want it to look like the legs are really shaking or that the arms are really shaking. So he and I actually worked to have like a blur effect on a lot of these photos. So I love the one with the shaking legs and you can just do this lying down. So this is a nice way where you can lie down on the ground and actually really feel supported because your entire back body is supported and held by the floor, but you can really let it rip and shake and kick the legs as much as possible.
And then maybe you end up wanting to get the hands and wrists involved as well. But again, your whole back is on the floor.
I find that once I start shaking, I end up just wanting to make noise. So if that’s also you, it’s like, go with that, right? Allow yourself to vocalize the weirder sounds that you can make the better.
Most of the day we move through kind of the same body sets, like standing at a stove, sitting at a computer, sitting in a car. Similarly, we tend to just move through the same vocal ranges. We always are talking to the same people in the same typical tone of voice. So anytime that you can increase your vocal range by making really low notes or really high notes or just speaking gibberish in the car, if you’ve seen the somatic yoga classes I teach,
I’m doing this a lot or I’m encouraging sound a lot and I’m encouraging what I call unstructured sound. Mantra is great. Love mantra. Love yoga. But mantra is still usually keeping many of us in our same vocal register. It’s not taking us up and out of that vocal register.
So think of siren-ing or trying to make a wooing noise like an ambulance or a super low growly noise.
When we make these different noises, it also starts changing our face. And we have so much tension held in our face, not just in our jaw, but our actual face, because it’s making the same types of sounds and notes all day, every day. So shaking your face or even fluttering your lips is like a lip shake, like a
All of these are little ways that you can incorporate.
somatic movements to help you release stress throughout the day.
If you take anything away from this episode, let it be that your body is an animal that really needs as much care and attention from you as your actual physical breathing pets do.
Know that while your traditional yoga practice is phenomenal and you should keep doing it, beyond stretching and deeply breathing, there’s so many other powerful ways you can close the loop on your stress cycles. Kicking, punching, shaking, and we’ve really dived into shaking in particular in this episode and these kind of movements you can experience in what I call embodied yoga or somatic yoga.
And I would love for you to join me and take all these classes inside the Uplifted membership.
If you have any additional questions that I didn’t cover or things you’d like to have me cover on the podcast, I would love to hear from you. You can always send me a DM on Instagram at Larkin Yoga TV. And as always, your ratings and reviews here on the podcast mean the world to me. It helps people find the show. It’s free for you to do. So it’s an easy way to support the program.
make some time to shake today. It’s funny, one of the students in my somatic coaching certification for her practice teaching, we were incorporating and practicing teaching a lot of these poses to others and she played that Taylor Swift song, Shake It Off for shaking. So you do not have to incorporate Taylor Swift, but just an idea, know, finding whether it’s that song or a different song, music is really going to help you let loose and move your whole body in a profound way and do it for longer.
So maybe make yourself a playlist.
This isn’t something you need to do for a long time. Two or three minutes or like the length of a song is absolutely perfect.
Take some time to shake between today and the next episode and I’m sending you lots of love. From my heart to yours, namaste.
