The Secret Language of the Body: Regulate Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, Free Your Mind Paperback – July 9, 2024

I bought this book because of hyper vigilance due to PTSD from my Mom's heart attack. It has done more to help me than anything else. I treasure this book and will be coming back to it again and again!. It is well written, and contains powerful exercises that really work. While I have been doing some of the work (e.g. inner child work), many of the tools in this book were new to me. A must-have for anyone with trauma of any kind, and that's everyone.

I first got it from my local library and read it over 3 weeks and tried out all the exercises in the book. I liked it so much that I ordered a copy for myself after returning the library book. Before I came upon this book I was already on a self-healing journey; I had been practicing meditation, qi gong and yoga regularly, was aware of polyvagal theory, read books on emotion, sought multiple types of holistic medicine and had already resolved a lot of my symptoms, so when I read this book everything made sense and allowed me to not only connect dots between a lot of scattered knowledge and beliefs from my own felt experience but also gain new insight and missing pieces. I like how the book is organized, it's easy to read and provides such a clear and gentle guide to a self-discovery journey. I highly recommend it to anyone with chronic physical symptoms and/or mental struggle, or a simple curiosity about cultivating higher mind-body awareness. If you're new to a lot of the concepts in the book and feel skeptical, I recommend that you don't try hard to accept it but don't dismiss it either. Take a pause, try other things, maybe do your own research, then maybe come back to it later.

This book summarizes decades of work in the field of neurology and somatic providing a strong rationale for the use of mind/body tools in healing. They presented many helpful frameworks and gave wonderfully illustrated tools for regulating the nervous system. As tempting as it may seem, don’t rush through the book or jump ahead to the exercises. Read it a little at a time allowing the content to marinate within yourself. PS: I’m a somatic experiencing practitioner and therapist. This book is a must read for anyone engaged with this type of therapy. Very grateful for the addition of breath awareness as a component of healing.

Wow! This book has been an incredible manual to help guide me in getting relief from chronic migraines, food sensitivities, and the on-going overwhelm of life! The info presented in this book is insightful and just makes sense. Each section practically walks you through step by step on how to regulate your mind/body. I love how organized and easily laid it all is. And the practices are sooo easy to implement! And miraculously over time and you included these practices daily, your symptoms start to lesson. I highly highly recommend this book to anyone suffering with any unwanted symptoms! The only part I disagree with in this book is the authors take on how we “evolved” I just disregarded that part and found everything else so helpful!!

I work in mind-body health and one of my clients recommended that I read this book. I found it to be very easy to follow, with plenty of depth regarding the concepts and supporting science. The A I R model of nervous system healing provides you with a perpetual way of living rather than a short-term forced attempt to get past something. The somatic practices provide a quick pattern interrupt, with guidance taking you beyond just pausing—into the root causes themselves. As an author myself, I was very impressed by the authors' ability to deconstruct lofty scientific jargon into easy to grasp, useable models. Really nice.

This book is a slow read.It contains excellent information, is full of quotable text, and is a great start to the mind-body/trauma theories out there.But, this book is not, in my opinion, a one-stop-shop. It can start you off with excellent exercises (BASE is great) and give you the information you need to buy into the concepts that are the starting points of entering the mind-body/trauma theory space, but you'll likely need several something elses not in this book, too, such as emotion processing theory, etc.

A wonderful book that did not disappoint. Recently, I have really started to delve into the nervous system and how our inner self controls our life in many ways. Through this book, I learned so much more in depth about the nervous system and how I can work on regulating this amazing system myself. The book is very well done and goes into depth, something I like. Recommended!

This book is full of so much amazing information and is thick with cover to cover practices and education on the mind and body. So so glad I bought this.