Trauma-Informed
"The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk
Book
A foundational text that explores how trauma reshapes both body and brain, and how healing involves restoring a sense of bodily safety and ownership. While popular, it’s rooted in decades of clinical and neuroscience research.
Link to book
"Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services" (SAMHSA TIP 57)
Free government-published guidebook
A detailed and highly practical document outlining the principles and implementation of trauma-informed care in clinical and community settings.
Link to book
"The Wisdom of Trauma" — A film featuring Dr. Gabor Maté
Documentary Film
A deeply human and heart-opening documentary that explores the roots of trauma and the paths to healing, through the lens of renowned physician Dr. Gabor Maté. It weaves together stories of individuals navigating addiction, stress, and pain with insights from neuroscience and compassionate inquiry. A powerful invitation to look at trauma not as pathology, but as a portal to wholeness.
Link to Film
✺ Curated Wisdom: Resources on Trauma, Embodiment & Somatics
Sacred Embodiment is grounded in the deep understanding that the body is not a passive vessel, but an intelligent and expressive center of experience, memory, and healing. To support your exploration of this work, we have curated a set of high-quality, research-based resources. These include books, academic papers, and documentary films that offer a solid foundation in the core themes of trauma, embodiment, and somatics.
All selections are informative and grounded in neuroscience, psychology, or therapeutic practice — with an emphasis on rigour, clarity, and relevance to the lived experience of healing.
We have grouped them into three categories:
Trauma-Informed
This section helps illuminate how trauma shapes the nervous system and behavioural patterns — and how healing is possible through safety, co-regulation, and reconnection. It also supports a crucial distinction that is often overlooked in wellness and care spaces: the difference between being trauma-aware, trauma-informed, and trauma-trained. This clarity is especially important for facilitators, educators, therapists, and anyone holding space for others. These resources will support you in practicing with care, attunement, and ethical grounding.
Embodiment
Here you'll find academic and scientific perspectives on the body-mind connection, including how consciousness, memory, and perception arise through embodied experience. These readings are particularly valuable for practitioners who want to bridge lived bodily practice with cognitive and neuroscientific understanding.
Somatics
Somatics focuses on the body as experienced from within — as a field of sensation, self-awareness, and transformation. These resources explore interoception, neuroplasticity, and somatic education as key to restoring agency, presence, and integrated selfhood.
Embodiment
"The Feeling of What Happens" by Antonio Damasio
Book
A neuroscientific deep dive into how consciousness and emotion are intimately tied to the body. Ideal for bridging embodied practices with academic research.
Link to book
"Grounded Cognition" by Lawrence W. Barsalou (2008)
Peer-Reviewed Academic Article
A seminal paper that challenges the traditional idea of the mind as separate from the body. Barsalou proposes that all cognition is grounded in bodily states, sensory experiences, and motor systems. This article offers a clear and compelling theoretical framework for understanding how thinking, remembering, and feeling are deeply embodied processes.
Link to Article
Somatics
“Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health” – Thomas Hanna
Book
Hanna coined the term “somatics” — this is a great introduction to somatic education, neuroplasticity, and the body's ability to unlearn chronic tension patterns.
Link to book
"The Body in the Mind: On the Relationship Between Interoception and Embodiment" by Herbert & Pollatos (2012)
Academic Article
A well-cited paper on how interoception (awareness of inner body sensations) plays a crucial role in emotional and cognitive processes.
Link to Article
