About This Episode

What if trauma isn't a story you carry in your mind — but a biological response still living in your body?

In Episode 70 of the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast, Dr. Abi Blakeslee joins host Luis Mojica for a rich, grounded conversation on the biology of trauma and how Somatic Experiencing (SE) helps the nervous system find its way back to regulation — not through talk, but through the body itself.

What You'll Discover

Dr. Abi unpacks how the autonomic nervous system responds to real or perceived threat — moving through sympathetic activation (fight, flight), freeze responses, and the parasympathetic rest-and-digest state. More importantly, she explores what happens when the body gets stuck in survival physiology and what it takes to help it move again.

You'll learn how interoception — conscious awareness of bodily sensation — acts as the bridge between the thinking brain and the body's deeper survival signals. When we bring awareness to sensation and companion it rather than avoid it, something remarkable happens: the nervous system begins to self-regulate.

Key Concepts to Explore

• Befriending your nervous system — shifting from "I am anxious" to "my body is in a sympathetically dominant state right now"
• Pendulation — the natural rhythm of expansion and contraction that makes healing possible
• Tracking sensation — noticing what's happening in the body in the present moment, not the past
• The freeze response — why it's not weakness, and how to gently move through it
• Uncoupling thoughts from survival states — recognizing when a belief is actually a frozen physiology speaking

Try This Simple Practice

Dr. Abi closes the episode with a grounding and movement exercise you can try anywhere. Start by feeling the weight of your body — your feet, your seat, the support of the earth beneath you. Then, before you lift your arms, notice what organizes in your body just before the movement happens. Feel the energy build. Then stretch outward, and sense the aliveness that follows.

That aliveness? It's already in you. This work helps you find your way back to it.

About the Presenter

Dr. Abi Blakeslee, Ph.D., MFT, SEP, CMT is Senior Faculty at Somatic Experiencing International and founder of Implicit Psychotherapy. Her work weaves neuroscience, Jungian depth psychology, and somatic practice into a deeply human approach to trauma healing.

A Conversation With The Holistic Life Navigation Podcast

Understanding that trauma is a biology, not a mindset, is what makes somatic therapy so unique and beautiful. Traditional talk therapies tend to focus on the events and identifying how we think and feel about them, but they don't ask us where we feel the events.

Trauma is not the event itself, it's the response to the event. I welcome Dr. Abi Blakeslee to my podcast to share her wisdom and insight around the biology of trauma and how that physical state of threat transforms into vitality through the practices of Somatic Experiencing.

 Listen to the full podcast here.