A-Z Glossary.

NEUROCHEMISTRY.

2-AG: 2-AG, or 2-arachidonoylglycerol, is another major endocannabinoid. While anandamide is often associated with bliss, ease, and mood, 2-AG is strongly involved in stress response, immune signaling, pain modulation, and nervous system balance. Movement may influence both anandamide and 2-AG, but the response depends on intensity, duration, body state, and individual biology.
Adrenaline And Noradrenaline: Adrenaline and noradrenaline are mobilization chemicals. They prepare the body to fight, run, focus, react, and survive. When stress energy cannot complete, the body may hold this charge as tension, agitation, restlessness, or freeze. Shaking can give the body a physical pathway to move mobilized energy through instead of keeping it locked inside.
Anandamide / ANA: Anandamide, sometimes called the “bliss molecule,” is an endocannabinoid produced naturally by the body. Its name comes from ananda, meaning bliss. Anandamide is linked with mood, pleasure, pain modulation, stress recovery, and the felt sense of inner ease. Rhythmic movement, physical activity, breath, and embodied release may support anandamide activation, which is why this method can speak of Natural ANA Activation as the body’s own capacity to return to warmth, connection, and aliveness.
BDNF: BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, is a protein involved in neuroplasticity, learning, memory, and brain adaptation. Movement and exercise are associated with BDNF support. In Somatic Shaking language, BDNF belongs to the deeper biology of change: the body does not only release the old; it may also help the brain become more adaptable.
Beta-Endorphins: Beta-endorphins are natural opioids produced by the body. They are associated with pain relief, pleasure, emotional resilience, and the “I can handle this” feeling after movement or exertion. In shaking, dance, or rhythmic release, beta-endorphins may contribute to the sense of relief, emotional opening, and physical ease that appears after the body discharges tension.
Cortisol: Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps the body mobilize energy under pressure. It is not “bad”; it becomes a problem when the body stays in stress chemistry too long. Somatic Shaking may help the body metabolize stress activation and return toward regulation, especially when the practice is titrated, safe, and followed by stillness.
Dopamine: Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in motivation, reward, movement, learning, and anticipation. In Somatic Shaking, dopamine may be connected to the shift from collapse or numbness into movement, engagement, curiosity, and vitality. It is not simply a “pleasure chemical”; it is part of the biology of direction, action, and renewed life-force.
Endocannabinoids: Endocannabinoids are natural molecules made inside the body that help regulate mood, stress, pain, appetite, immune balance, memory, and homeostasis. Anandamide, also called AEA, and 2-AG are two important endocannabinoids. In Somatic Shaking, this system can be understood as one biological bridge between movement, relief, pleasure, emotional softening, and nervous system regulation.
Neurochemical Regulation: Neurochemical regulation means the body is not only changing emotionally or spiritually; it is also shifting chemistry. Through movement, breath, rhythm, discharge, and rest, the body may influence endocannabinoids, endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and BDNF. This does not mean shaking “forces” these molecules to activate on command. It means the practice creates biological conditions where regulation, release, pleasure, bonding, and adaptation become more available.
Oxytocin: Oxytocin is often called the bonding hormone, but it is more accurately a molecule of connection, trust, social safety, and relational regulation. Group shaking, synchronized rhythm, music, eye contact, voice, and shared emotional release may support oxytocin pathways. This is one reason community practice can feel different from practicing alone.
Serotonin: Serotonin is involved in mood, sleep, digestion, pain sensitivity, and emotional stability. Movement, breath, rhythm, and nervous system regulation may support serotonin-related pathways indirectly. In practice language, serotonin belongs to the chemistry of steadiness, emotional digestion, and inner balance.

NERVOUS SYSTEM.

Freeze Response: Freeze is a survival state where the body becomes immobilized, numb, heavy, disconnected, or unable to act. Shaking may help the body complete the interrupted survival response, but it must be approached gently. Freeze does not need force; it needs safety, rhythm, and time.
Nervous System Regulation: Nervous system regulation is the body’s ability to move between activation and rest without getting stuck. A regulated nervous system does not mean a person is calm all the time. It means the body can feel stress, process it, discharge it, and return to presence. Regulation is flexibility, not forced calm.
Neuroception: Neuroception is the nervous system’s automatic detection of safety, danger, or life threat. It happens below conscious thought. Before the mind says “I am safe” or “I am not safe,” the body has already started responding. In Somatic Shaking, neuroception explains why safety, pacing, rhythm, voice, environment, and relational presence matter so much.
Polyvagal Theory: Polyvagal Theory is a framework that explains how the autonomic nervous system shifts between states of safety, mobilization, and shutdown. In simple language: the body is always asking, “Am I safe, do I need to fight or run, or do I need to disappear and conserve energy?” In Somatic Shaking, polyvagal language helps explain why some people tremble, freeze, collapse, cry, laugh, yawn, or suddenly feel warmth and connection.
Predictive Processing: Predictive Processing is a theory of how the brain constantly predicts reality based on past experience, body signals, memory, emotion, and sensory input. The brain does not simply receive the world; it actively guesses what is happening and updates those guesses through experience. In Somatic Shaking, new body sensations, tremor, breath, and safe completion may help the system update old predictions of danger, shame, freeze, or helplessness.
Vagus Nerve: The vagus nerve is a major nerve involved in autonomic regulation, digestion, heart rhythm, breath, inflammation, vocal expression, and social engagement. In Somatic Shaking, vagal language helps explain why breath, sound, safety, facial expression, stillness, and connection can change the body’s state. The vagus nerve is not a magic switch; it is part of a larger living regulatory system.

SHAKING TECH.

Dynamic Shaking: Dynamic Shaking is a stronger and more expressive form of Noogenic Shaking. It involves conscious, intentional movement through the whole body and can include bouncing, stamping, twisting, arms, sound, rhythm, and full-body release. Because it is initiated and shaped by awareness, it belongs under Noogenic Shaking, even when it becomes intense or emotionally expressive. It should still remain body-led, not forced.
Energetic Shaking: Energetic Shaking describes shaking that feels like heat, current, vibration, tingling, wave movement, or internal electricity. In this framework, energetic shaking belongs under the neurogenic field as a felt expression of release, activation, and life force movement.
Micro-Shaking: Micro-Shaking is very small trembling, pulsing, or vibration. It may happen in the jaw, belly, pelvis, thighs, hands, chest, or throat. For sensitive nervous systems, micro-shaking can be more powerful and safer than big visible movement.
Neurogenic Shaking: Neurogenic Shaking is involuntary or semi-involuntary trembling that arises from the nervous system. It is the body’s natural discharge mechanism after stress, fear, freeze, tension, or survival activation. In simple terms: the body shakes because it is trying to complete what it could not complete before. In this method, Neurogenic Shaking belongs to the biological body, the autonomic nervous system, and deep survival circuitry.
Noogenic Shaking: Noogenic Shaking is intentional, meaning-led shaking. “Noogenic” comes from nous, meaning mind, spirit, higher intelligence, or inner knowing. In this method, Noogenic Shaking refers to conscious shaking guided by intention, rhythm, awareness, prayer, sound, emotion, or inner direction. It is not only the body releasing charge; it is the human being participating with meaning.
Noogenic vs Neurogenic Shaking: Neurogenic Shaking is the body’s automatic release mechanism. Noogenic Shaking is conscious, intentional, meaning-led movement. One comes from the nervous system’s survival intelligence; the other comes from awareness, intention, and inner direction. Together, they create a deeper method: body mechanism plus spiritual meaning.
Rhythmic Shaking: Rhythmic Shaking is structured movement guided by tempo, music, counting, breath, or repeated motion. It belongs under Noogenic Shaking because awareness and intention shape the movement.
Shaking: Shaking is rhythmic, irregular, voluntary, or involuntary movement of the body. It may appear as trembling, pulsing, vibrating, bouncing, rocking, or full-body movement. In this work, shaking is not random movement. It is a doorway into discharge, circulation, aliveness, nervous system completion, and deeper contact with the body.
Shaking Dance: Shaking Dance is expressive, rhythmic shaking done through dance, music, breath, voice, and communal movement. It can be ritual, therapeutic, ecstatic, cultural, or personal. In this method, Shaking Dance can be understood as the bridge between release and celebration: the body is not only letting go; it is coming alive again.
Somatic Shaking: Somatic Shaking is body-based shaking used to reconnect sensation, nervous system regulation, emotional release, and embodied awareness. “Somatic” means “of the lived body,” not just the physical body as an object, but the body as it is felt from inside. Somatic Shaking is the larger umbrella: it can include voluntary movement, spontaneous tremor, breath, sound, stillness, swaying, and emotional integration.
Spontaneous Shaking: Spontaneous Shaking is movement that arises by itself once the body feels safe enough. It may feel like tremor, pulsing, vibration, rocking, or waves. The practitioner does not manufacture it; they allow it.
Swaying: Swaying is gentle side-to-side, forward-backward, or circular movement that often appears before deeper shaking. It is softer than tremoring and can help the body feel safe enough to move. Swaying often supports regulation because it gives the nervous system rhythm, orientation, and continuity without forcing intensity.
TRE: TRE stands for Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises. It is a structured approach that uses physical exercises to evoke neurogenic tremors. TRE is one of the best-known modern systems connected to therapeutic tremoring. Somatic Shaking may overlap with TRE through tremor and nervous system release, but this method can be positioned separately through its noogenic, polyvagal, energetic, emotional, and spiritual dimensions.
Voluntary Shaking: Voluntary Shaking is a form of Noogenic Shaking because it is consciously initiated. It is shaking you choose to begin through intention, rhythm, breath, posture, music, prayer, or embodied awareness. It can be athletic, expressive, devotional, meditative, or therapeutic. It is useful when the body needs movement but spontaneous neurogenic tremor has not yet appeared.

PROCESS AND SOMATICS.

Completion: Completion is the moment the body finishes a cycle that was interrupted. It may be subtle: a breath, a sigh, warmth, tears, stillness, softness in the belly, or a sense of “I am back.” Completion is not dramatic; it is biological truth returning to peace.
Discharge: Discharge is the release of stored survival energy from the body. It can appear as shaking, trembling, heat, breath changes, crying, laughter, yawning, sweating, or spontaneous movement. Discharge is not performance. It is the body finishing a biological process.
Feel It First: Feel It First means sensation comes before explanation. The body is located before the story is analyzed. Pressure, heat, tension, vibration, numbness, and movement are named before emotion, memory, or meaning. This keeps the practice grounded.
Heart Opening: Heart Opening is the state where release becomes love. The body has moved enough charge, fear, control, or numbness that the chest softens and perception becomes warmer. Heart Opening is not emotional performance. It is the body remembering connection.
Integration: Integration is what happens after release. The body needs time to reorganize, settle, and make meaning. Without integration, shaking can become just intensity. With integration, shaking becomes transformation.
Interoception: Interoception is the ability to sense the inner state of the body. It includes signals such as breath, heartbeat, temperature, pressure, hunger, nausea, tension, vibration, and emotional body sensations. In Somatic Shaking, interoception is essential because the method begins with felt sensation, not mental explanation.
Pendulation: Pendulation means moving attention gently between intensity and safety. Instead of forcing someone to stay inside pain, the practice allows the body to touch sensation, then return to resource, breath, ground, or calm. This keeps the work safer and more digestible.
Proprioception: Proprioception is the body’s sense of position, movement, balance, and orientation in space. It tells you where your limbs are, how much force you are using, and how your body is organized. In Somatic Shaking, proprioception helps bring the person back into the body through movement, weight, rhythm, stance, and grounded awareness.
Sensation: Sensation is the raw physical language of the body: heat, cold, pressure, tightness, vibration, heaviness, tingling, movement, numbness. Sensation is the entry point because the nervous system speaks through the body first.
Titration: Titration means working in small doses. In Somatic Shaking, this means we do not force a huge release just because the body can access it. We let the nervous system open gradually, so the person can integrate what is happening.

BODY AND FASCIA. MECHANICS.

Connective Tissue: Connective tissue is the body’s living web of support, communication, and continuity. It includes fascia, tendons, ligaments, and other tissues that help hold, transmit, protect, and organize the body. In Somatic Shaking, connective tissue matters because tension is not held only in muscles; it can also live through the wider body matrix as stiffness, restriction, numbness, or stored protective patterning.
Fascia: Fascia is a continuous connective tissue network that surrounds and interweaves muscles, organs, nerves, blood vessels, and joints. It helps transmit force, shape posture, and carry sensory information through the body. In Somatic Shaking, fascia can be understood as one of the living tissues through which vibration, tremor, release, hydration, and embodied awareness travel.
Mechanotransduction: Mechanotransduction is the process by which cells respond to mechanical forces such as pressure, stretch, movement, vibration, and load. In Somatic Shaking, it offers one possible biological lens for understanding how movement and tremor may influence tissues, nervous system feedback, and the body’s internal sense of organization.
Psoas Muscle: The psoas is a deep core muscle connecting the spine, pelvis, and legs. It is often associated with posture, walking, hip movement, breath mechanics, and survival readiness. In Somatic Shaking language, the psoas can be understood as a deep bridge between movement, fear, grounding, and release, but it should not be reduced to one simplistic idea like “the trauma muscle.”
Tensegrity: Tensegrity is a model of structure based on tension and compression working together. In the body, it helps explain how one area of tension can influence distant areas through fascia, posture, connective tissue, and movement chains. In Somatic Shaking, tensegrity supports the idea that shaking in one part of the body may affect the whole system, not only the local muscle.

SPIRITUAL AND ENERGETIC.

Life Force: Life Force is the felt vitality moving through the body. It may be experienced as warmth, current, breath, pleasure, vibration, aliveness, tenderness, or inner strength. In this method, Life Force is a functional translation of deeper vitality language, including but not limited to n|om-inspired frameworks.
Light Strings: Light Strings are your relational vocabulary for the felt lines of connection in life. Individual Strings relate to the self. Horizontal Strings relate to others, community, and life. Light String relates to Source, Pure Love, prayer, and higher orientation. Shaking can clean, heat, or awaken these strings as felt relationship.
N/om: N/om, often written as n|om in San/Bushman contexts, refers to a life-force or spiritual potency described in some Kalahari San healing traditions. It is associated with heat, activation, dance, song, healing, and transformation. In this method, it can be referenced carefully as an inspiration for “Life Force,” but it should not be presented as identical to the method or as a medical mechanism.
Nominal: The Nominal is the named world: body, language, identity, action, relationship, role, memory, and ordinary life. It is where experience becomes form. In this framework, the Nominal can also be understood through the language of Tonal: the organized, named, structured expression of the self. The goal is not to escape the Nominal, but to let the Numinous live through it.
Numinous: The Numinous is the formless field: unnamed, unmanifest, fluid, sacred, potential. It is the place before fixed identity and story. In this framework, the Numinous can also be understood through the language of Nagual: the mysterious, ungraspable, formless expression of the self. In method language, shaking helps soften the fixed form enough for the numinous to be felt again.
Nomic Point: also called “the asseblage point”, an energetic focal point where perception, consciousness, and reality are assembled. Popularized in modern anthropology and alternative medicine, it originates primarily from the teachings of Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus. This is the point where the Numinous becomes the Nominal.
Spanda: Spanda is a Sanskrit term often translated as sacred vibration, pulse, tremor, or subtle movement of consciousness. In Kashmir Shaivism, it points to the living pulse through which consciousness expresses itself as life, perception, sensation, and creation. In Somatic Shaking language, Spanda become “Sha” and can be used carefully as a spiritual bridge: the body does not only shake mechanically; it may reveal the deeper pulse of Life Force moving through form. Spanda should be treated as a philosophical and spiritual reference, not as a medical mechanism or a replacement for neurogenic explanation.
Sha: the universal pulse, vibration, frequency behind the movement and endless changing. Same as “the spanda”, this is the term we are using in Somatic Shaking.

TRADITIONS AND INFLUENCES.

Kalahari Bushmen / San Peoples: “Kalahari Bushmen” is an older common term often used for San peoples of southern Africa. A more respectful framing is “San healing traditions” or “Kalahari San traditions.” Their trance dance and healing practices involve rhythm, community, song, heat, altered states, and embodied transformation. For this work, they are a cultural and spiritual reference point, not something to claim as ownership.
Shuckling / Shokeling: Shuckling is the Jewish practice of rhythmic swaying, often during prayer or Torah study. It is usually understood as a devotional movement that supports concentration, prayer, and embodied engagement with sacred text. In this glossary, Shuckling is best treated as a respectful example of spiritual rhythm in the body, not as a direct source or something to appropriate.

Somatic Shaking is a body-based method that uses voluntary and spontaneous shaking to support nervous system regulation, emotional discharge, embodied awareness, neurochemical balance, and reconnection with Life Force. Neurogenic Shaking explains the biological release mechanism. Noogenic Shaking gives the practice direction, meaning, intention, and spiritual intelligence. Natural ANA Activation points to the body’s own anandamide system: the chemistry of warmth, ease, pleasure, and inner safety that may become more available through movement, rhythm, breath, discharge, and rest.