Two weeks ago I sat down for lunch with Peter Levine, Diane Heller, and the executive directors of Somatic Experiencing. Simple enough on the surface. A meal, some conversation, people who have dedicated their lives to this work sitting around a table together.

But nothing with Peter is quite simple. And if you’ve seen the photos, if you’ve wondered what it’s actually like to be in the room with him — I want to tell you. Not to name drop. But because what happened at that lunch, and what has happened across nearly two decades of being in his Somatic Experiencing community, doing personal sessions with him and meeting him over the years, says something important about the nature of transmission itself. About what great teachers actually do. And about what might be getting between you and your own version of it.

Peter recognized me as I walked in. Warmly said my name. And immediately I walked over and undersold myself in the introduction. Assumed he wouldn’t remember me. Positioned myself smaller than I am, smaller than our history together warranted.

There was learning in just that.

A few moments later, without quite knowing what I’d just done, I made an unconscious gesture, a reach toward his side and back as I pointed forward with my other hand gesturing to something else. Most people don’t notice these things. Peter almost flinched. His awareness of it showed me something about my own internal landscape that I’m still digesting. A reach like that can be warmth. It can also be a subtle power move. Mine was probably a little of both, and not entirely conscious.

Shortly after, Peter stood up to address a room of 450 people at the Somatic Experiencing conference and talked about how when an interaction feels off, the practice is to look inside yourself. To ask what structures live in your body that created that moment.

He wasn’t talking to me directly. Or maybe he was. I still don’t know. But that’s part of what I want to say here.

Peter Levine has a quality of perception that I have only encountered in a handful of people in my life.

One of them is a Native American medicine man named Jeff, who I spent years learning from beginning when I was 14 years old and getting clean from heroin for the first time. What’s striking, and I’ve thought about this a lot, is that Peter and Jeff carry an almost identical energetic structure. They even look alike. Both of them see things that aren’t visible through ordinary perception. Both of them seem to pick up on everything.

Jeff once told me that some of his medicine you are born with. That it’s virtually impossible to verbally describe certain aspects of what he does. Peter Levine holds something similar. I’ve heard that even Bessel van der Kolk, who deeply respects Peter’s work, has wondered whether what Peter does can really be taught to everyone. Whether it’s transferable at all.

I think there’s something to that.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand, sitting at the feet of both of these men across many years —

Jeff worked with groups, with group energy fields, and did individual energetic healing work. He taught. He used words. He just protected certain things, not out of gatekeeping exactly, but because some of what he does resists verbal transmission. You don’t explain it. You transmit it, or you don’t.

So early on I had to get creative about how I’d learn. I stopped trying to extract the teaching through words and started putting my empathy to work instead. What is he experiencing right now? How does he hold himself as he works? Can I feel what he’s feeling? Can I quiet my intellect enough to actually see into what he’s doing?

I learned more from being with him and feeling what he did than from the explicit instructions he gave me, which were real and specific and not nothing.

The same has been true with Peter. Early in my training I stopped taking notes during demonstrations and sat as close as I could so I could feel it more. His presence in my life has probably taught me more than the formal three-year training itself. Not because the training wasn’t important, it was. But after you’ve integrated all the intellectual pieces it really does become a practice of presence. Your presence, yes. But also what you are present to.

Being tracked by someone with a wider perceptual range than your own is both a little scary and a little exciting. I didn’t fully understand that until I sat in front of Peter and Jeff. And it gave me a lot more empathy for my own clients.

What I feel when I tune into Peter is something like deep oceanic water — or more accurately, the quality of space itself. A kind of voidness. For virtually everyone I feel into I get a clear sense of where their mind is. With Peter I feel something closer to what I find in certain meditative states, an emptiness that doesn’t feel empty. He seems to have moved out of the noise of convention. Not unaware of it. Just not obligated to it.

With Jeff it’s different. More like a blissful summer day, a flower opening, an awareness of the consciousness in all things, with a quality of reverence underneath everything.

Different medicines. The same fundamental freedom in perception.

What I think these teachers actually do, what the greatest teachers do, is see something in you that you can’t yet see in yourself.

Not always with words. Jeff told me at 14 that I could do this work too. For years I thought he was just giving a troubled kid a reason to live. Maybe he was. But he was also right. And Peter, addressing that room of 450 people, looked right at me after I’d sent him my book and said, almost as an aside, “sometimes someone sends me their work and they really get it.” Then moved on.

I still don’t know if he was talking to me. But something in my body knew how to receive it. Barely. And imperfectly.

Because you have to be able to receive it. And that’s where most of us get stuck.

My own pattern, and I’m naming it because I suspect it’s yours too, is one of inflation and deflation. Overfunctioning and shutdown. Feeling briefly like I am better than, then collapsing into feeling like I am less than. A cycle I’ve lived inside for most of my life. My solution for a long time was to stay small. To remain humble almost as a defense. To preemptively deflate before the world could do it for me.

But here’s what Peter and Jeff and years of this work have slowly shown me —

The answer isn’t in the inflation. And it isn’t in the deflation. It’s in neither pole of the swing.

Genuine power, your actual greatness, lives at the still point. Not performing capability. Not hiding from it. Something quieter and more durable than either.

This is a pendulum, not pathology. The cycle isn’t evidence that something is wrong with you. It’s evidence that something is trying to find its center.

What gets in the way of finding that center usually isn’t a lack of information. It isn’t technique. It’s the structures that live in the body, the patterns laid down long before we had words for them, that keep pulling us back to the familiar poles. The reach that was meant to be warmth but carried something else in it. The introduction that undersold, automatically, before the mind had time to intervene.

This is the territory I work in. VOSESOMATIC draws from nearly two decades in the somatic field, personal transmission from teachers like Peter, and many other healing traditions and approaches I’ve spent years studying, including time with indigenous healers like Jeff. It’s rooted in that lineage and moves into its own territory. Less a delivery of any one method and more an encounter with the body’s actual intelligence.

If you want to go deeper into Peter’s work directly, he now teaches through ERGOS rather than Somatic Experiencing. His private practice is closed but his teaching continues.

If you’re curious about my work, the simplest place to start is free.

The pendulum finds its rest. The work is learning to stay there a little longer each time.