'Call Of The Wild' By Kimberley Ann Johnson
Please read this raw grounded body-led book on how to heal trauma
‘A body-up approach to healing allows us to move away from this fixation on thoughts and follow the body’s lead. When we get closer to our blueprint our motivation comes from the inside out, generated from genuine desire.’
Who is Kimberley Ann Johnson?
She’s a postpartum educator, somatic practitioner, sexological bodyworker, former yoga teacher and birth doula who specializes in helping women recover from all forms of trauma. She hosts podcasts, free online trainings and her ‘Activate Your Inner Jaguar’ course is bold and reputable. I believe her work has relevance and instinctive wisdom for everyone.
“Jaguar energy is fierce and decisive, and it may be the missing piece of your healing journey.”
Why Was I Drawn To This Book
As a therapist and healer I saw a recurrent conundrum in energy work - some clients were unable to ground and relax both before and during a session, and even with gentle breathing techniques and massage they often hit an unspoken heightened wall of nervous system activation or dis-associative ‘freeze’.
I also intuited that a lot of the trapped emotions I was psychically sensing in their energy fields - from all timelines and ancestral epigenetic coding - were related to events and experiences that had created these stuck somatic stories (what KAJ terms implicit memories or ‘imprints’).
There is a hierarchy of release within the human nervous system that cannot be bypassed. There are cycles of action that need to be completed. And there is often an inner ‘felt sense’, not cognitive, that needs to be expressed by the person themselves.
“Wild animals don’t experience trauma.”
Sensing the fragmentation between mind, soul and body I could still transmute some of these imprints through fully witnessing and channelling healing Source energy but my own inner-Jaguar told me for this new frequency to land safely - without creating more sympathetic ‘action’ in their system - I would need to find a way to help my clients land, integrate and be empowered in their spirit-body on a whole other level.
This required a form of instinctive listening of the deep animal wisdom held within us all, a subtle attunement to the foundational wild wiring inside.
And a long came somatic experiencing…
‘You will have to become a master tracker of your own system.’
Kimberley trained with Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, and this grounded body upwards practice threads tangibly throughout the book.
Here’s some of the core teachings that SE teaches us on healing trauma:
‘Story follows state’: our emotions and thoughts are highly impacted by our nervous system states and these are more complicated than the redundant often taught simplicity of fight/flight versus rest/digest.
There are safe sympathetic/para-sympathetic states and stress based ones. The former is what gets us up jogging, moving, making plans. We all need some!
Uncalibrated freeze responses can determine a lot of our life choices.
There are feeling safe ways to co-regulate and connect with the ‘social nervous system’ and under threat ones. Women can be more attuned/vulnerable to both.
Why looking at the profound disconnect between our instinctual body and rational mind is vital for personal and collective healing and the restoration of life force.
Titration (slowly increasing our capacity for awareness of what’s really going on inside) and Pendulation (moving attention between ‘red’ challenging/default and ‘blue’ pleasurable sensations is essential for safely building wider sustained nervous system capacity).
TIMES - Thought, Image, Movement, Emotion & Sensation. A great SE tool for listening to the body and how it processes information.
‘Your mind might have forgiven but your body has not’. We cannot bypass implicit memory.
Our past responses were highly functional and made sense at the time. The body doesn’t need more judgement!
These concepts are explained really well along with real life client examples and KAJ’s own infusion of her journey and Jaguar embodiment practices and are key for those interested in healing and sustainable energy work - which can be profoundly transforming and mystically inspiring, but also (especially when we’re highly sensitive or healing from any form of trauma) activating for the nervous system.
Like anything pleasurable and exciting, from dancing to orgasms, our bodies when unable to hold a certain nervous system charge can tip us over into activation (great example from the book - couples who get into big arguments hours after heightened new levels of intimacy - their nervous systems hadn’t experienced this level of love before and were activated into sympathetic fight).
“In general, the nervous system appreciates pacing.”
I’m a sensitive soul who discovered, like a bee buzzing from one flowery life option to another, it was challenging to ground my own energy and feel safely rooted on earth in the present moment. Plus there was a ton of past stuff that I thought I had healed but was still imprinted in my own energy system.
When I began uncovering and using my psychic abilities this actually became more prominent - I was strengthening my crown chakra but leaving the root and pelvic floor behind. The result was often feeling depleted after session work and responding in codependent over-giving/under receiving ways in my personal relationships.
But I was motivated to tackle this issue head - or through the nervous system might be the better term - on. Learning to pace and track my own somatic experience gave me the foundations for building resilience within my own body first.
What Stands Out From ‘Call Of The Wild’
There’s a lot of juice and experiental wisdom in here that appears simple yet is rich in its potential to lead you to a revolutionary relationship with your own body (yes the revolution will be embodied!).
I thought I had some clarity on trauma and the nervous system through MA studies on collective and interpersonal violence, various body-led trainings, and understanding Polyvagal theory but I had several ah-ha moments reading this book.
Although this may sound a bit intense and ‘out there’ what this book illuminates is how being connected and building capacity for everyday embodied pleasure could radically change your relationship with and need for the sensory intensity of modern life. (I won’t run a spoiler but for me as a body worker and therapist the story of how she came to the Jaguar is fascinating).
It’s wildly simple because it returns us to the profound power of a grounded self loving acceptance we can experience right here, right now, by actually giving our own body a chance to speak to us.
It also offers a timely reminder of what visual ‘zooming in’ - the opposite of peripheral vision and back body sensing - and the constant use of hyper-focused screen time is doing to our nervous systems (nudge - putting us on chronic animal-alert mode).
As Kimberly beautifully describes ‘by developing our felt sense of knowing - in our bodies - beneath what our mind thinks or wants, we mark our territory with a new consciousness that transforms our experience of living in our bodies.’
The chapters on marking of healthy territory and descriptions of the female relationship to the social nervous system (when in fear/stress can result in ‘fitting in’ and ‘fawning/people pleasing’ as often unconscious autonomic strategies to stay safe), are two among several that I found tremendously useful about this book.
Breaking with the gender neutral mould of most trauma studies, KAJ alchemises her studies and experience to help us understand the gifts and challenges of our evolutionary wiring such as downplaying our individuality to avoid risking isolation alongside our tremendous and necessary ability to empathise and lovingly take care of others.
It allows for more compassion - and for me a sense of an ancient past where social mores allowed for female boundaries and fierceness to be expressed healthily (p.s. this doesn’t mean cultures and social expressions like this do not exist today).
Side note: the chapter on Predator-Prey dynamic reminded me a bit of the latest Avatar movie! If you haven’t seen it please do. Kate Winslet really has her inner-wolf on tap. It’s awesome 🐺
Do the exercises in the book actually work?
Yes. And I am still slowly exploring them.
One of the controversial points of the book (as KAJ acknowledges and offers advice on how to navigate) is the encouragement for readers to try this somatic experiencing for themselves.
Her reasoning is that the extent of trauma is so great in the world that embodying your inner jaguar and other exercises are vitally needed for democratising healing.
I 100% agree. I’ve discovered many times on my own healing journey that using various techniques such divine muscle testing with the Emotion Code, shamanic journeying and other somatic therapies safely alone at home was quite liberating.
But I also understand the power of being witnessed and supported by a skilled practitioner and maybe this is a form of healthy titration in itself - to go between solo practice and a supportive other, between self and co-regulation.
In summary - I would highly recommend reading Call Of The Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power And Use It For Good. Exploring the experiental exercises in this book in a way that is gentle, curious and unpressured is both a gift to yourself and the world.
Like a Jaguar…pace and rest, hunt and retract. Be fully alive in this precious body.
Enjoy.
Next Week: Healing Past Lives & The Nervous System
Photo on Unsplash by Bibake Uppal