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Cherionna Menzam-Sills’ latest book, The Prenatal Shadow: Healing the Trauma Experienced Before and at Birth, offers an in-depth exploration of birth shadows, providing insights on how to address and heal these aspects to fully realize our inherent potential. The Prenatal Shadow is accessible to the lay reader and satisfying for the experienced practitioner in prenatal and perinatal somatics. For the lay reader just discovering the paradigm, Menzam-Sills has a friendly, gentle, and encouraging voice born out of decades of study and experience. Her authority is evident as she weaves a narrative of early development, autonomic nervous system states, trauma-informed care, embryonic development, prenatal and perinatal dynamics, and therapeutic interventions. Her ability to access research and quote pioneers who have influenced her work lends the narrative depth, while narratives from clinical studies provide the work with breadth. Her voice also illustrates the command of someone who has deeply explored the experiences of the “little one,” or the sentient baby. This is someone everyone can learn from.

With this issue, Volume 14, Number 2, Winter 2024, SPT Magazine celebrates its homecoming to the USABP. It is fitting that these two publications now reside under one roof. They share the same goals and principles. Both are community-generated and free to read. By bringing both publications, The International Body Psychotherapy Journal and Somatic Psychotherapy Today, together, we can now support a platform that offers a full range of information—from peer-reviewed articles that cover research, case studies, emerging clinical practices, and interviews with community leaders who are charting new paths, and spearheading new theories, to book and film reviews, important online webinars and events, and musings that light up our creativity. We look forward to writing together in 2025.

Increasing awareness and understanding of epigenetics and neuroplasticity in current research has resulted in a new perspective of psychotherapy that is integrated with neurobiological information. This information is at the root of an emerging paradigm shift in body psychotherapy that I call Evolutive Stage Neuromediator Vegetotherapy.

Beneath our “level of conscious awareness, our nervous system directs our movement toward and away from people, places, and experiences” (Dana & Rolfe, 2024, pg. 56). And this guidance is critical to our health and well-being. But we aren’t born knowing how to do it. Deb Dana, LCSW, and Courtney Rolfe, LCPC joined forces to write “Polyvagal Prompts: Finding Connection and Joy Through Guided Explorations.” They know we don’t innately know how to self-regulate our physiological and psychological states—we learn by co-regulating with attuned caregivers.

The Mindfulness and Character Strengths Workbook is everything I hoped for and more. It is a well-written, easy-to-follow, detailed to the nth degree workbook with extensive, free online materials to support the process including audio-guided meditations. Congratulations Ryan on a much-needed workbook to support people exploring character strengths and their integration with mindfulness.

SPT Magazine is pleased to announce the release of Volume 12, Number 1, 2022. If you missed any of our articles this year, you can now access the entire year in one downloadable PDF on our website.

In this article, I will introduce a set of grammar clarifying body psychoanalysis, which extends not only to psychopathology, itself primarily interpreted as being bottom-up in terms of evolutive time, but also, to clinical psychotherapy, that follows. Perhaps I am outlining a new position, certainly it takes the Reichian paradigm deeper, or is, rather, a "change in the visual gestalt" as Kuhn might put it. It represents a change in the mental architecture of observation which emerges from a different way of feeling, I might add. It is a paradigm which reads the unconscious in its entirety, because the unconscious is undoubtedly a "mirror" for what has been deposited in the body.

Peter Sedlmeier offers a representative overview of meditation with a scientific slant in his new book The Psychology of Meditation. Divided into four parts, the text guides readers through varieties of meditation, the effects of meditation, theories of meditation, and concludes with Part 4: Perspectives. He notes that the first 10 chapters build the foundation to support the endpoint, Chapter 11: Perspectives on Meditation Research.

Masks have fascinated cultures and individuals for centuries. In ancient Greek plays, masks were thought to embody the spirit of the character that the actor played. It was as if the mask itself used the actor to bring the character it represented back to life. The actor could often feel overtaken by the character of the mask. The voice of the actor in the here and now expressed the spirit of the character portrayed. But a mask is more than the physical material, be it leather, Papier-mâché, or terra cotta. It is a representation of the person in appearance and voice. How many disguises live in our voice, our sounds, and sayings?

Gravity matters. Not simply to keep us physically grounded here on Earth, but, at a fundamental level, our relationship with gravity affects our lives from start to finish. We start life floating in amniotic fluids. It's easy to assume a sense of buoyancy, free from gravity's impact. Yet, gravity is necessary for our physiological development during the second half of our lives in the womb.