This isn't a quippy answer. @ryanorrico asked me this last week, and my first impulse was to say a lot more. But after relentlessly thinking about it, I can boil everything I do with people down to delivering the right stress, at the right time, to the right part of their system. But let's get clear about the word. Stress is just something that asks something of you. It's a situation that mobilizes you to respond, and it only becomes “bad stress” when there's a mismatch between what's being asked and what you're able to effectively respond to. But when there's a match between the demand and the response – that's exhilarating and what makes life worth living. Where I think a lot of wellness-y approaches go wrong is they think the “healing” is in the rest. Healing is not in rest. Recovery is in rest, which is important but not complete. Healing comes from successfully engaging with demands that at one point used to overwhelm you, followed by successfully disengaging from it. In physical rehab, we use recovery techniques to give short-term pain relief and then appropriately stress the troubled area with movement and exercise. In somatic therapy, we help the nervous system register feelings of stability and comfort, and then we touch the closest edge of the difficult material while staying grounded. Recovery + Stress. When you can both effectively rise to a new demand, not get stuck or defeated there, and then shake it off and come back out – that's when you will feel healed in a deeply sensed, visceral, know-it-in-your-bones way, because you just proved it.
