The Secret Language of the Body : Regulate your nervous system, heal your body, free your mind

This is a wonderful book to learn about the connection and co-relation between our mind and body. Also, how anxiety and stress can affect our body. Written by Health Research professionals: Jennifer Mann and Karden Rabin.

I wrote a very detailed review but Amazon said it breached their guidelines, I think possible because I talked too much about my past & why I've got a disregulated nervous system so here is my brief review. This book is excellent, very informative with thorough explanations together with practical exercises. If you want to know how to heal your nervous system & have tried conventional therapies & they haven't worked this book explains why & gives you the way out/the path. The first time I read it I was a bit overwhelmed as it contains a lot of information, the second time I understood it & made my own notes referencing page numbers to refer back to. As Jen & Karden say, pick the parts that speak to you, resonate with you & go with the practices. For the first time I am listening to my body & what it is trying to say to me instead of focusing on what my mind & thoughts are telling me. I'm trying not to ignore the whispers of my body, if you truly listen your body has all the answers. This book will show you how. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to heal their nervous system, you may have felt like this for years, I know I have & this book will show you how. After a week of reading it and doing some of the practices I already feel better. I'm on a journey to get to know me & my body & again this book has the answers. Reading Jen's own story & the other real life stories really resonated with me. There is hope, you are not stuck & you are certainly not broken. Thank you Jen & Karden for writing, this book will help a lot of people. I highly recommend this book.

I finished it yesterday!! It’s amazing! Definitely really excited for the practices. So helpful to read the explanation of nervous system dysregulation. It was extremely motivating to read the experiences and wins from other people. It’s a very well written book, and it’s not complicated which is very helpful when English isn’t your first language. I loved the illustrations which makes the practices easy to understand. Also the summary’s at the end of each chapter. I guess you can tell that I really liked this book! I’ve recommended it to lots of people already and some of them are hoping for a translation in German or Dutch so maybe that’s coming some day as well! It’s really going to change peoples lives!!

I loved this book because it not only teaches you how your nervous system works but also gives you lots of practises to influence the phases that you're in. English isn't my first language but I was still able to understand it all. I find that the practises really work if you put the effort in, some feel quite silly and others will bring you great relief. I'm very glad I found this book and I've been trying all of them in the hopes of healing my (as I found out; severely dysregulated) nervous system.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is suffering from long-standing physical ailments that traditional medicine has not been able to adequately address. The book is an easy and engaging read, with clear explanations for why our body presents itself the way it does and with practical solutions to address our physical ailments. The authors clearly care about our well-being, and I suggest you gift yourself this book to begin your journey to self-healing.

This book is a GAME CHANGER. I’ve been are able to apply it’s guidance from the beginning, and though I’ve only gotten through the first quarter, it is already making such a difference in my day to day life. I rarely leave reviews, but after yet another very meaningfull passage of the book I felt compelled (again) to put it down and write this to express my gratitude to the authors and their publisher. No healing knowledge, tool or approach is a universal remedy that will solve everything, but boy, does this address a hugely important piece of the puzzle that I had been missing. I have done a fair amount of healing and work on myself for the last 13 years, through therapy, reading, connecting with others and my work (I am blessed and lucky to be able to make art for a living). Through all of this, I have been able to successfully deal with much trauma, discover neuro diversity and understand specific mental traits of mine which didn’t need fixing as I had always thought. Despite all this work and healing, (done primarily on the mind side of things) I was quite perplexed as more and more serious symptoms of physical exhaustion gradually started arising in my body for the last 4 years. So I guess I was more than ready to discover the wisdom and teachings in this book. As the budists say, « when the student is ready the master appears » and so Jenn appeared in my instagram feed. Who knew that we are not just the thinking voice that speaks with words in our mind? We are also the feeling and perceiving creature that lives in our body, like russian dolls ! Who knew we have more than just our word-based languages; and that feeling, emotions and perception are not just fluffy, weak, encumbering and dismissable parts of our existence? (not my true beliefs but certainly borrowed views I had internalized growing up, sigh!) It is not like I had never heard about intuition, or read about many of these topics before, but never had I read things explained and connected in this particular way. It just clicked and made so much sense to me. It also provides a super interesting framework for me to understand many experiences I have had through making art or writing poetry. I used to say that it was such a relief to connecto to my « art making state » that it felt like it «connected me to a different tv channel of existence ». With this book I understand better why I feel this. Finally, let me say that I particularly appreciate that the book is written from both a professional practitioner’s knowledge gained through client work (which is very valuable in itself), AND also complemented by the real life experience and hard-earned wisdom of a human that has gone through some of the gravest and most difficult consequences of not understanding your nervous system. Jenn, I am very thankful that I have found this before my symptomps evolved into a full-blown, mind-and-body-crippling burnout, and I commend you for having been able to overcome yours. You guys have reminded me that no one is irreparably broken, there is so much we can do, at so many levels, and this book can help with an essential part of anyone’s healing journey. It gives me so much hope for the future. I wish to complete this review when I have finished reading, but let me say that just what I have learnt so far makes it totally worth buying it. I have already started gifting it to friends, so that when they feel ready, help will be waiting for them in their library, at their fingertips. I hope this review will help you give this gift to yourself too.