The Elemental Soma: The Book My Body Taught Me to Write
A Somatic Path to Healing, Coherence, and Self-Connection
There are books we decide to write.
And then there are books we realize we have been living long before we knew there were words for them.
The Elemental Soma is the latter.
I did not begin with a framework. I did not set out to create five Soma Bodies or develop a new language for coherence. I certainly did not imagine that some of the most painful years of my life would eventually become part of a body of work I would share with others.
I began with loss.
After Tony, the father of my son, died, grief did not simply enter my life.
It entered my body.
I cried without warning. I struggled to eat and sleep. I went to work, sat in meetings, answered calls, mothered my son, and attempted to continue with school, while increasingly feeling as though I were disappearing from my own life.
People who loved me told me I needed to be strong. That I needed to pull myself together. That Dylan needed me.
I knew they meant well.
But somewhere inside me was a question I could barely express:
How?
How do you pull yourself together when you cannot locate the pieces?
At the time, I thought I was simply failing at grief.
Years later, I would understand that experience very differently.
Grief Was Happening Everywhere
I did not only feel sad.
I felt ungrounded and unsupported.
Emotion either overwhelmed me or seemed inaccessible altogether.
My breathing became shallow and heavy.
Clarity disappeared.
And perhaps most profoundly, I lost connection—to myself, to my sense of direction, and to the deeper signals that had once helped me recognize who I was.
I did not have this language then.
Today, I understand those experiences through what I call the Elemental Soma.
Soma refers to the living body as experienced from within. The Elemental Soma is my framework for understanding the body as a sensing, responsive system—one through which we experience stability, emotion, breath, vitality, perception, and connection.
Within it are five interconnected expressions of embodied intelligence:
EarthBody — stability, safety, and grounding
WaterBody — emotional flow and release
BreathBody — rhythm, regulation, and response
LightBody — clarity, energy, and direction
FieldBody — connection, sensitivity, and presence
Looking back at my grief through these bodies allowed me to see something I could not understand while I was living through it:
I was not experiencing five separate problems.
My entire system was trying to respond to an experience it did not yet have the capacity to integrate.
That realization changed the way I understood healing.
What If the Body Is Not the Problem?
For decades, we have been taught to relate to the body as something to manage.
We manage weight.
We manage stress.
We manage sleep.
We manage emotions.
We manage symptoms.
Even healing can become another project of management.
But what if the body is not an object waiting for us to control it?
What if it is already responding intelligently?
This became one of the central questions of The Elemental Soma.
The book does not ask, How do I fix myself?
It asks something different:
What is my body communicating?
And perhaps even more importantly:
What does my body need in order to respond differently?
That distinction matters.
Because healing began to change for me when I stopped trying to force myself back into the person I had been.
My Return Did Not Happen All at Once
There was a night during the deepest period of my grief when I experienced what I understand as an after-death communication, or ADC, from Tony.
I share the full experience in the book.
I do not ask the reader to interpret that experience as I do or to share my beliefs about what happened.
I only know what it changed in me.
Something shifted.
For the first time in a long time, I felt hope.
That experience became a catalyst. It moved me toward seeking support and eventually toward meditation, movement, and a more intentional relationship with my body.
And slowly, something began to happen.
I felt the ground again.
Emotion could move without drowning me.
My breath deepened.
Clarity returned.
I began to feel energy, direction, connection—and eventually joy.
Daily movement became especially important. Exercise gave my body somewhere for its energy to go, and through consistent movement I experienced something I had almost forgotten was possible: feeling fully alive inside myself.
I was not becoming someone new.
I was returning.
From Healing to Coherence
That return eventually gave me another word:
coherence.
I use coherence differently from the idea of being calm, positive, or in a permanently elevated state.
Coherence does not mean feeling good all the time.
It means the different expressions of our embodied experience can communicate and respond proportionally to what is actually happening.
You can grieve and be coherent.
You can be angry and be coherent.
You can experience fear and remain connected to yourself.
Healing, then, is not the elimination of difficult human experience.
It is developing the capacity to remain present within it.
This is also why The Elemental Soma challenges some of the language surrounding high vibration.
I am less interested in whether an experience feels high or low than whether it is true, moving, integrated, and coherent.
Grief does not make us less whole.
Anger does not make us less evolved.
Rest does not make us less purposeful.
The body contains contraction and expansion. Stillness and movement. Tears and laughter. Fire and quiet.
Wholeness requires room for all of it.
The Body Already Knows the Elements
The elemental language emerged because it describes experiences we already recognize.
We know what it means to feel grounded.
We understand emotion as something that can flow, flood, or become stagnant.
We describe ourselves as having a spark, losing our fire, or feeling illuminated by an idea.
We experience life through breath.
And we sense the atmosphere of people and places before anything is spoken.
Earth.
Water.
Fire.
Air.
Field.
The language may be elemental.
The experience is profoundly human.
Elemental intelligence is not something I believe we need to acquire.
It is something the body already speaks.
The practice is learning to listen.
This Book Is Personal, But It Is Not Only My Story
Tony's death is the throughline of The Elemental Soma, because it was through losing him that I came to understand so much of what I now teach.
But this is not only a book about grief.
Loss was my breaking.
Yours may have another name.
Burnout.
Divorce.
Illness.
Caregiving.
Transition.
Anxiety.
A relationship in which you slowly disappeared.
Or perhaps there was no singular event at all. You simply woke one day and realized you had become disconnected from yourself.
Our stories are different.
Our bodies are different.
Our paths through healing will be different.
That is why this book does not offer a formula for becoming well.
Instead, throughout the book I invite you to notice.
Where am I now?
What am I feeling?
What is my body communicating?
Where is there movement?
Where is there holding?
What might coherence feel like here?
There are reflections and integration practices throughout the book, followed by a Soma Rituals Archive for continuing the exploration beyond its pages.
This is a book to read.
But I also hope it becomes a book you inhabit.
The Book I Needed Then
There is something tender about holding a finished copy of a book born from an experience I once thought might consume me.
I wish I could place it in the hands of the woman I was then.
Not to tell her how the story ends.
Not to tell her to be strong.
Certainly not to tell her to pull herself together.
I would simply tell her:
Your body is responding.
Listen.
Support it.
Stay.
There is still life here.
Perhaps that is ultimately why I wrote The Elemental Soma.
Not because I discovered a way to avoid breaking.
But because I discovered that breaking and being broken are not the same thing.
The body can become overwhelmed.
It can protect.
It can contract.
It can lose access to things that once felt effortless.
And it can return.
Not necessarily to who we were before.
But to presence.
To connection.
To the capacity to feel our own lives again.
The Elemental Soma: A Somatic Path to Healing, Coherence, and Self-Connection is now available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook.
And wherever you are when you meet these pages, my invitation is simple:
You do not need to become someone new.
You may simply need to return to yourself.
