I lived most of my life in my head, analytical and cerebral. I developed a love of books from a young age and when I was ten, I read A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. This book cracked something open in me and set me on the spiritual path that I continue to follow today.

However in those early days, I believed liberation was found in my mind. My body became an inconvenience, an instrument to override. I pushed the idea to parody, with a job at Soylent, where I lived almost entirely on liquid nutrition, convinced that efficiency could replace embodiment and that the act of eating was a deficiency to overcome rather than sacred nourishment for my body. Aches from my body weren’t a message but an error signal to suppress. The mind ruled, everything else was subservient.

I was wrong. And my body knew it long before I did.

By the time I found Fred Mitouer, an internationally renowned bodyworker with over 50 years of practice, I had spent 15 years exploring various health and wellness practices, I had gone on several retreats, explored ancient esoteric lineages, gone deep into biohacking and had a number of profound spiritual experiences.

I did not arrive in somatic work in crisis. A friend spoke about his sessions with Fred with the kind of conviction you can’t fake, so I looked up Somatic Agency and thought: why not? It felt like the next frontier, just another waypoint on a long map of inner expeditions I’d already been charting.

On paper my life looked great, I had worked at several large technology companies as a data scientist and felt meaningfully connected in my career but I could feel I had drifted far from the ground. I’d been living in a sky-castle of abstraction, so high up that I could no longer feel where I came from. My focus had migrated upward into theory and abstraction, leaving the deeper layers of my life untended.

Why I walked into the room

I knew deep down that I was practicing transcendence as a subtle form of escape. Dissociation from my body disguised as spirituality. I knew the concept of spiritual materialism intimately: the temptation to curate mystical milestones rather than actually change. Was I healing, or simply stockpiling experiences to fortify a spiritual identity?

When I first read The Body Keeps the Score, the title alone hooked me and made me realize I was neglecting one of the most important parts of my life. My body had been keeping score since before I could speak. An immigrant son inheriting conflicts that my ancestors never metabolized. I come from people who survived conscription, occupation, and winters that taught the body to tighten before it could feel. Affection was rationed like sugar, softness was a liability.

But survival is an instinctive tightening, not a life. My ancestors endured so I could do more than brace. I inherited their grit, but not their ceilings. Where they mastered endurance, I have the rare chance to learn aliveness and how to truly thrive.

I didn’t step into somatic work just to unwind my own knots. I came to meet the older tensions, those inherited shadows that outlived my ancestors who carried them. The peasants who scraped by on potatoes and frozen ground under the Czars. The families broken by World War I. The Bolsheviks who executed my great-grandfather for the sin of being a landowner. The second World War that cast Slavs as subhuman that almost led to my people’s complete enslavement, one which left 25 million dead, nearly 15% of the Slavic population at the time. And then the long, crushing decades of a totalitarian Communist system that tried to bleach the inner world into something flat and gray, no different from the brutalist Soviet architecture of the time.

You don’t need to be a historian to feel that kind of weight. It shows up as tightness you can’t quite explain, a vigilance you didn’t earn, a drive that feels older than your own. I realized those echoes were still lodged in me. If I wanted to heal in any real sense, I had to turn toward that lineage, feel what it left behind, and let those old stories finally unclench.

I walked into Fred’s studio not as a patient but as a fellow traveler. He didn’t posture as a guru. He showed up as a human being who’d done his own work and could help me start mine, then leave me capable of carrying it forward myself. Somatic work felt like a terrain I had circled for years without landing. Fred was the first teacher who treated the body as the higher intelligence. He shifted the frame from psycho-somatic to somato-psychic, the body as the prime mover of feeling, meaning, and awareness. He addressed my spine like a sacred column and attended to my breath as if it were his own.

Who I was then

I arrived as a futurist shaped by machines and meditation. Silicon Valley taught me to optimize, mysticism taught me to ascend. Neither taught me how to actually live in my own body.

Beneath all of it was something simpler: a childhood hurt I never dealt with. My parents divorced early, and after my tenth birthday my father stopped calling and we became estranged until two decades later. I remember distinctly telling myself at that young tender age that I wouldn’t let it define me. I’d push it down, stay tough, move forward. Already from a young age I had grown appreciative of the mind’s incredible powers of repression, and one of the many reasons I would grow enamored with Stoic philosophy in college. That early decision hardened into a pattern: if I worked hard enough, achieved enough, stacked enough accomplishments, maybe I could fill the space he left behind.

The somatic room for me was not a classroom; but instead a forge. A place where all the spiritual altitude I’d built evaporated, and the lower floors of my psyche swung open. When the heat rose, the layers fell away. Under the theories, there was a boy in a winter coat. Under the discipline, a long-neglected hunger. Under the mystical striving, a tenderness I’d kept barricaded, for fear that it would consume me.

What transformed

The breakthrough was a single word: creaturehood.

It landed in me like a seed cracking open a stone.

I realized I’m not a mind controlling a body

I’m a body that built up his mind the way animals grow armor: to endure what once felt unbearable.

Intelligence does not live behind the eyes alone. It lives in our muscles. It hums in the diaphragm.

Somatic work opened doors I never knew existed. I met my father wound not as a woe-is-me mental story but as heat. Somatic memory is geological. Old grief lives as sediment. When the body speaks, it does not communicate in sentences but rather through felt presence.

One afternoon my ribs ached, and I realized I was withholding breath, because some part of me believed oxygen must be earned. That was not a thought. That was a law written in the musculature of a child who grew up equating achievement with justification for existence.

The body has its own epistemology: trembling, thawing, reorganizing. Muscles know truths long before our minds can articulate them back to us.

Shortly after my first session with Fred, I began practicing Tai Chi with a teacher in Venice Beach, not for exercise, and not for some mystical high, but simply to learn how to listen. The slow movements forced me to pay attention in a way nothing else had.

I began noticing individual muscles I had ignored my whole life. Focusing on something as small as my thumb became its own clean, vivid experience, like tuning a radio and finally catching the right frequency. Tai Chi turned my body from background noise into a conversation I could actually hear.

And neutrality was another revelation. I once mistook neutrality for passivity. But somatic neutrality is sovereignty. To witness sensation without flinching is to exit the prison of identification and duality. I can now hold contradictions: East and West, ambition and humility, shadow and light. Wholeness includes it all, it does not repress.

Fred once told me I treated my body like a car that I was flooring at 150 mph down the Autobahn. No maintenance, no pit stops, the only thing that mattered was acceleration. If I were to continue, my body would inevitably fail me. He was right. I wasn’t sleeping well, eating well, or giving myself space to breathe.

Learning that changed everything. I started noticing my bodies quirks instead of fighting them. If my body wants a nap, I take one. If a feeling shows up that wants to become a poem, I stop and write it. The work is mostly listening, topping up the tank, fixing what needs fixing, and treating my body like something I plan to keep polished and maintained for a long time. In this way I also came to appreciate the work of Peter Attia, who developed the Centenarian Decathlon, a concept for a personalized fitness plan that focuses on maintaining the ability to perform ten key physical activities at age 100.

Reading Fred’s book Wounds Into Blessings also had a profound effect on me. It showed me what somatic work actually does beneath the surface, the way a body holds its history, the way an untouched wound quietly shapes a life. The book moves through client stories and Fred’s own reflections, revealing that healing isn’t some abstract ideal; it’s what happens the moment real contact is made with the place we’ve avoided.

Reading it, I saw my own patterns more clearly, the ways I managed pain instead of meeting it, the ways I kept distance from the parts of myself that needed attention. The book made the whole process feel less mystical and more human: courage, compassion, and the slow return of vitality when something deep finally gets acknowledged. It helped me understand why this work matters, and why it was time for me to step into it.

How life reorganized

Nothing collapsed. Everything deepened. The axis of knowing dropped from skull to gut. Enlightenment stopped being a vertical fantasy and became a horizontal discipline.

I treat attention now as an ecosystem, finite, sacred, easily colonized by a culture built on cognitive extraction. Embodiment is resistance. A relaxed spine is subversive. I walk through San Francisco with a softness: grounded feet, wide breath, eyes that don’t dart. Where before my nervous system would be triggered by the stimulation of downtown, I can now inhabit a certain level of stillness that acts as a protective aura.

I still read voraciously, build systems, interrogate AI as if it were early consciousness. But the body leads. The wizard archetype didn’t die. Instead it rooted.

Fred also modeled a masculinity I had never encountered: fierce without aggression, sovereign without superiority, humorous without defense. It rewired my instincts. Safety does not require shrinking. Power does not require contraction. My nervous system learned this not through instruction, but through proximity to Fred and getting to know him over the years.

Tai Chi is now a companion. Breath is my refuge. My fascia offers micro-signals that I track the way some people track market ticks. Sensation no longer overwhelms; instead it orients. The state of “alert and relaxed” became a guiding principle.

Even my relationship with AI mutated. I stopped worshipping computation and started recognizing that intelligence will evolve toward sensation. Systems that feel will outlast systems that compute. Embodiment became the lens preventing technology from annexing the self.

I spent years pursuing vertical insight: ascend, transcend, pierce the veil. The body offered the opposite revelation: descend, inhabit, touch grass.

The body was not an obstacle. It was the oracle I ignored. The creature is wiser than the thinker. The heart is older than the mind.

Now

I am thirty.

No longer moving at that old, jittery, over-stimulated cadence. I’ve built small rituals that let me actually check in with my body instead of overriding it. A quiet morning tea isn’t a productivity hack anymore, it’s a way to drop in. I sit, ask my body what it wants, and wait long enough to hear something real. Often it asks for pace, warmth, a slower inhale, the simple pleasure of a good meal or the scent of a flower I would’ve rushed past.

I’ve also begun tracking the subtler readings: how my stomach tightens around certain people, how my breath settles with others, the electricity in my body after a conversation that actually feeds me. These signals were always there, I was just too fast and in my head to register them.

I no longer treat food like fuel packets, no more Soylent-as-breakfast. I give my body real nutrients now. And when something aches or resists, I slow down and I listen, giving my body the nourshiment it needs to thrive. It’s surprising how far you can go when you stop fighting yourself.

Somatic work didn’t make me less ambitious. It made me precise. A nervous system at ease does not scramble for power; it generates it.

The body isn’t a vehicle for enlightenment. It is enlightenment, slow, mineral, patient.

If the future has priests, they will be people who know how to feel.

My mind is no longer the general. It is the scribe. The body is the sovereign.

To conclude, here’s a poem I wrote after my first session with Fred:
Dragon’s Breath:
I feel the dragons breath,
as I experience ego death
breadth of each stroke is bliss
hiss in my mind stopped

dropped into my core
I’m hungry for more
door to my unconscious is open
hopin somethin new is learned

burned logs in the fire
as my thoughts turned higher
I’ve reached the summit peak
now all that’s left is the plummet

won it
what did I win?
i still feel like I’m full of sin
pin down my arm

I no longer feel harm
alarm in my head is silent,
and the colors are so vibrant
giant waves washing over my body

as I begin to embody
and enter samadhi
i experience a paradigm shift
as I receive this beautiful gift

sift through all this childhood trauma
that continues to play out in my life’s drama
prana energy exchanged with every touch
could this be too much?

clutch onto some sense of reality
banality of existence melts away
as we reach the astral plane to play
pray that I leave the past behind

this is all a test that’s designed
to see how well you can be refined
molded by the flames
as we play these infinite games

frames are all broken
nothing needs to be spoken
token of appreciation for this bodywork
with some smooth jazz as a perk