Let it shake

Watch a dog after something frightens it. It shakes, hard, head to tail, for a few seconds, and then it's fine. Every mammal does this. Humans used to. Somewhere along the way we decided that trembling was weakness and taught ourselves to hold still, and the shaking, which was the body's way of finishing with the stress, had nowhere to go.

David Berceli is a therapist who spent years in war zones and noticed, in bomb shelters, that children trembled after the explosions and adults didn't. He built a method around giving adults the tremor back. Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, from the 2000s: a short sequence of positions that tire the legs until the body begins, on its own, to shake. You lie on your back, knees up, and let it happen. It looks strange. It feels, most people say, like relief.

The theory is that the tremor is the nervous system discharging what it's been holding. The research is early and modest. But the practice is safe for most people, easy to learn, and the reports from people who use it are consistent enough that I keep it on the shelf.

What I take from Berceli is the permission. For most of our lives we've been told to hold it together. Berceli says the body has a built-in way to let it go, that we've suppressed it, and that we can let it back. The shaking isn't you falling apart. It's you finishing.

That's a key for the second month because it's the body doing its own work when the mind gets out of the way. And it rhymes with the whole month: the exhale, the release, the standing down.