The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes

“A grand accomplishment.” —Dr. Peter Levine, developer of Somatic Experiencing® and author of Waking the Tiger and In an Unspoken Voice

A body-based, science-backed method for regulating behavior, thoughts, and feelings and improving well-being--shown to shorten therapy time and improve emotional outcomes.


In the first book on Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP), clinical psychologist Dr. Raja Selvam offers a new, complementary approach for building more capacity to tolerate emotions using the body--especially emotions that are difficult or unpleasant.

The ISP model shows readers how to expand and regulate emotional experiences in the body to improve different therapeutic outcomes--cognitive, emotional, behavioral, physical, energetic, relational, and even spiritual--in life and in all types of therapies, including other body psychotherapy and somatic psychology approaches. You will learn the physiology of emotions in the brain and body and how to:

Access different types of emotions quickly

Facilitate embodiment and regulation of feelings

Process and heal different traumas and attachment wounds

A go-to guide for emotional integration, The Practice of Embodying Emotions is of value in the treatment of a wide range of clinical problems involving difficult emotions--from ordinary life events to psychosomatic or psychophysiological disorders, developmental trauma, prenatal and perinatal trauma, attachment disorders, borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, collective trauma, and intergenerational trauma--and in improving outcomes and shortening treatment time in different therapies including psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, and CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). 

RAJA SELVAM, PhD, is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP), an approach based on the paradigm of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior in cognitive and affective neuroscience. He is a licensed clinical psychologist and a senior trainer in Dr. Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing program. Dr. Selvam has taught for twenty-five years in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East. His work is influenced by psychoanalytic approaches, Jungian psychology, body psychotherapy systems, bodywork and energy work schools, yoga, quantum physics, and Advaita Vedanta. Selvam's publications include the 2013 "Jung and Consciousness," published in Spring; the 2008 study "Somatic Therapy Treatment Effects with Tsunami Survivors," published in Traumatology, about working with survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. His approach is also inspired by the work he did in Sri Lanka from 2012 to 2014 for the survivors of the thiry-five year civil war.