I am a somatic healer in Aberdeen, and I work with people living with chronic pain, anxiety, and grief. Over the past few weeks, I have been sitting with a fear that a lot of us are carrying and not knowing what to do with it. The wildfires. The news. The feeling of not being safe in the body when something enormous is happening and there is nothing at all you can do about it. This is about what happens in the nervous system when we cannot fix the thing that frightens us, and about a simple grounding practice you can use anywhere.
It started with the news. Fires in Spain, where my auntie stays. Fires in France, where we have other family. On hearing from them, the reassurance came back: it’s scary, but they’re still a half hour from us.
It doesn’t matter what anybody says to make you feel better. It’s collective, you care, and you feel it. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. I felt it in my throat, because there was so much I wanted to say.
What it made me realise is how close everything can be taken away from us, just like that. We all have this lovely life with our families and our friends, and in a split second some people have nothing.
It bothered me for quite a few days.
One morning in Aberdeen we woke up to this horrendous smell of smoke. We hardly ever see fires in Scotland. The sky was hazy, you could hardly see, and it was strong. We were told to keep our windows closed.
That was as close to home as it could possibly be. And even though I kind of knew the fires wouldn’t hit Aberdeen, you don’t know anything really. A change of direction in the wind and it’s a different story.
Spain. France. The south of England. Aberdeen. There was a moment where it felt like the whole world was on fire, and I found myself asking what the message in that might be. Is it the Earth that’s angry? We’re not really taking care of this planet. I don’t have the answer. I’m not sure anybody does.
This is the part I want to be honest about. Most of what I do as a somatic healer is help people find their way into their bodies. But there was nothing to be done here. No action. No fix.
That’s an uncomfortable place for a nervous system to sit, and it shows up physically. In the stomach. In the throat. In the shoulders. In sleep. A lot of us are feeling uneasy right now, and part of that unease is exactly this: the caring with nowhere to put it.
So, the invitation is to be with the discomfort in the body, the pain in the body and the stress, precisely because we cannot fix it.
On thinking about this. It’s hard, because if a fire is coming your way, slowly or quickly, you could say don’t panic. But of course, we’re going to panic.
There is no point saying something ridiculous, like visualise it away, or it’ll all be fine. Because it isn’t fine. You’ve got flames at your front door.
“So, it must come back to the breath and the body and being as present as we can. I’m not saying that this is easy. Because it’s not. And I’ve struggled myself in various situations knowing what to do or what to say. Doing this work doesn’t make me immune to fear or uncertainty. I’m human too.”
I’m very aware that many people who need this most have never heard of Somatic work, or nervous system regulation – or any of this stuff – and so I’ve tried to make this simple.
As you do that, you may feel the energy move up through the head as you inhale, and on the exhale, you might notice a kind of letting go into the heart.
I can’t say it’s the only way to move through fear or trauma, because it maybe isn’t. It’s what I find works. Take it as an invitation to try, not as a prescription.
There’s something underneath all of this that I keep circling back to.
For most of my life, before I learned about any of these things, I had no idea I was probably living with generalised anxiety and all the stuff that comes with it. Things get bad enough that something bursts, something takes over. And that, I’ve come to believe, is an invitation to be curious. Sometimes the mind and the body can signal that something doesn’t feel right, before we’ve consciously worked out what that might be.
A teacher of mine describes it as welcoming what’s there, recognising it, witnessing it, and only then responding. The responding comes last, and it comes from a steadier place.
I want to be careful here in what I am saying, because this can be badly misheard.
If you have knee pain, that pain is real. It is never all in your head. Not every ache is emotional, and our bodies really are complex. I am not going to tell you that curiosity replaces medical care, because it does not. And I’m certainly not going to tell you to refuse an operation. You may well need that operation.
What I am saying is that there can be room to be curious before we do something drastic. That’s all. A pause, not a diagnosis.
The fires here are under control. I’m still sitting with the question of what the message is, and whether we human beings could be doing something different. I genuinely don’t know.
But what I keep coming back to is this. When everything is burnt down, there’s no other option but for new beginnings.
If you’re feeling uneasy just now, you’re not alone in it, and you don’t have to fix it to be alright.
Download the free Safe in the Body recording — it’s free, and it’s built for exactly these moments.
What can I do when the news makes me anxious?
Come back to the breath and the body. Feel your feet on the ground, feel what’s in your throat without trying to change it, bring your index and middle finger to your thumb, and place one hand on your heart. It takes under a minute and can give you something simple and tangible to come back to.
Why do I feel frightened by disasters that are far away from me?
Because it’s collective. You care, so you feel it, and it doesn’t matter what anybody says to make you feel better. That response is normal, and it lives in the body—often in the stomach, the chest, or the throat.