I began this series with the question: ‘Has somatics been debunked?’ It was a deliberately provocative question (a friend described it as “somatic clickbait”), but it emerged from a genuine concern about the scientific claims that some somatic modalities, practitioners, and products (often inadvertently) make about the body, stress and healing.

I have skin in the game - I come to this topic as a somatic practitioner and the director of an organisation (Collective Being) that delivers body-based and mindfulness group programs in community and clinical settings. And over the past decade, I’ve watched somatics hyper-boom its way into the mainstream, with a string of commercialised practices, claims, trends, and products emerging along the way. Most of these interpretations rest on assumptions about the vagus nerve, healing, and movement. Social media also has a large role to play in the promotion of certain theories and ideologies - which we’ll dive into in a later part.

On maps and territories

In the 1930s, the philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase “the map is not the territory”, speaking to the idea that any model of reality, however useful, is never quite the same as the reality itself.

When it comes to the brain and our bodies, much remains a mystery. Yet in many somatic and trauma-informed trainings, we are presented with a map of stress, trauma, and healing that appears more settled than the evidence suggests. This map commonly includes:

• theories of stress and trauma based on fMRI and brain imaging studies, particularly claims that trauma has definitive effects on brain structure, such as hippocampal shrinkage in PTSD;

• theories of trauma and healing that centre the autonomic nervous system, particularly the vagus nerve; and

• conceptualisations of trauma as being “stored” or “stuck” in the body.

Over the past decade, each of these claims have come under scrutiny from neuroscientists, psychiatrists, clinicians, and trauma researchers.

What exactly is being debated?

The answer is not somatic practice, in and of itself.

Somatics encompasses a broad range of approaches, including yoga, breathwork, dance, body awareness practices, mindfulness, bodywork, somatic therapies, movement rituals, and politicised embodiment practices. Many of these traditions predate contemporary neuroscience and trauma theory by centuries, if not millennia.

Over the past two decades however, theories associated with Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, Bessel van der Kolk’s interpretation of trauma as being ‘stored’ in the body, and particular analyses of brain imaging research have become deeply embedded within many forms of somatic education. They are now frequently presented not simply as frameworks, but as established explanations for why embodied and somatic practices work.

I feel a bit of inner turmoil speaking to this, because the work of both van der Kolk and Porges has significantly elevated body-based approaches to wellbeing, increasing public interest in previously fringe practices. However, the fusing of contentious neuroscientific frameworks and established practices has created a confusing mishmash of science and pseudoscience in our field.

At the centre of this discussion are questions about how the brain changes following trauma, how the autonomic nervous system functions, whether trauma is stored in the body, and what mechanisms underpin recovery. There is no single scientific position on these questions - researchers continue to disagree about many of the proposed mechanisms, and the gap between that scientific uncertainty and the certainty with which some of these ideas are taught has become increasingly visible.

Part of the challenge for those of us attempting to bridge that gap, is that different disciplines are asking different questions. Neuroscience is interested in biological mechanisms, whereas psychology and psychiatry ask what improves clinical outcomes. Somatic psychotherapy privileges therapeutic observation and lived experience, whereas feminist, liberation, and decolonial scholarship ask whose knowledge about bodies has been recognised, and whose has been excluded. Each produces a different map of bodies, trauma, and healing, but no single map captures the territory in its entirety.

As we move through this series, we’ll keep a few considerations in mind:

• Not everything that is helpful has a rigorous evidence base.

• Conversely, not everything presented as settled science is, in fact, settled.

• Some maps become dominant because of a unique combination of compelling stories, influential personalities, funding, and timing.

• The people and institutions invested in particular maps may have intellectual, professional, relational, or financial reasons for defending them. The same goes for those critiquing them.

To map or not to map?

I’m not suggesting that we discard maps altogether - they can be both helpful and healing. The challenge is recognising where they illuminate the territory, where they simplify it, and where they actually misconstrue or confuse the terrain altogether.

Some people assert that a map can still be valuable, even if it is not scientifically accurate. This reasoning was behind the dominance of the ‘triune brain model’ for a considerably long time. Others argue that using inaccurate maps only confuses our relationships with our bodies, minds and healing journeys. Whilst I align more closely with the latter camp, it might be helpful to pause and consider your own positioning - do you want your maps to closely resemble the territory they describe, or are you content with a more metaphorical, potentially inaccurate one?

If you are currently relying on theories of the brain, the nervous system, and notions of the body ‘storing’ or ‘holding’ stress and trauma in your work, I imagine that this series might be both challenging and illuminating - as the research for it has been for me.

Next time, we begin with The Body Doesn’t Keep the Score? - an exploration of Bessel van der Kolk’s work, the concept of neurorealism, and the debates surrounding brain imaging, trauma, and somatic treatments.

In curiosity, Jo

An avid student and learner, I would be exposed to Polyvagal Theory again and again over the next five years, integrating it into my own teachings too. It was everywhere in the somatic world, and I spent a considerable amount of time (and money) learning the intricacies of the vagal brake, the vagal hierarchy, and blended states. I began to think of my own embodied experiences as ventral, dorsal, and sympathetic.

Simultaneously, the ‘mainstreamification’ of trauma accelerated. Terms like ‘nervous system regulation’, ‘trauma release’, ‘triggered’, and ‘embodiment’ seeped into dominant language. Polyvagal practitioner Deb Dana’s notion of ‘glimmers’ made it all the way into mainstream news and television. Friends and I would joke that we wished our bodies would “stop keeping the score” as we navigated the complexities of our early 30s.

Then, in 2021, rumbles of scientific scrutiny about both Polyvagal Theory and van der Kolk’s work made it out of academia and into the mainstream. And this, in my mind (and body), is where things started to get really interesting.

In my work and life, I had by this stage, built a worldview that centralised the body in healing from stress and trauma. I had taught somatic and trauma-informed practice to hundreds of students, and was leading an organisation (Collective Being) that was focused on somatic tools and practices for wellbeing. Most of my work revolved around the weaving of movement, breath, and meditation practices into community and clinical spaces.

When I initially encountered the scientific scrutiny about the major models we used in our work, I felt a mixture of panic (“oh no, this will compromise what is really, deeply good and effective about what we do”) and excitement (“new research = new insights!”). Five years on, I still feel both protective and curious.

And so, I’m working on a series of articles that will explore what exactly is being debated in the worlds of neuroscience, somatics, and trauma recovery. This series is not a purely scientific exploration, although some science will be included. Rather, it’s about my experiences of running an organisation focused on somatics for 9 years, and the adventure that we went on between 2021 and 2025 to clarify our own understanding and positioning.

For those of us who have been moving in this world for a long time, critiques of Bessel van der Kolk’s work in particular have been widely known since around 2017. I won’t be delving into the historical context there, but will link resources (like this one and this one) as I write, that are excellent reads and don’t require repeating.

If you are a bit newer to this debate, the main scientific critiques that I will be delving into are:

1. That trauma is not stored in the body (Michael Scheeringa, Karl Friston and others)

2. That the scientific foundations of polyvagal theory are flawed (Paul Grossman and colleagues)

3. That nervous system language is often used inaccurately to describe emotions, distress, healing, and wellbeing, leading to an over-identification of experiences as ‘nervous system responses’ (Lisa Feldman Barrett and others).

I have a rough map of what I’ll explore. At the moment, it looks a bit like this:

Part 1: When the map is not the territory - what exactly is being critiqued

Part 2: The Body Does Not Keep the Score?

Part 3: Polyvagal Theory - helpful framework or misleading map?

Part 4: What we miss when we hyper-focus on the nervous system

Part 5: The instagramification of somatics

Part 6: Beyond western trauma models

Part 7: Has somatics been debunked? Can somatics be debunked?

Finally, I want to state a brief personal positioning. Whilst I have spent the past few years delving into this deep and complicated debate, I don’t judge or begrudge Dr Stephen Porges, or his co-creator, Deb Dana. Science is always moving and changing, and even as PVT is being torn apart by critics, it really was only through the popularisation of it that our collective understanding of ‘safe and social’ states expanded. I have more complicated feelings about Bessel van der Kolk, and the dominance of white, male, privileged academic voices in general. There are many underrepresented voices, experiences, and wisdom systems in this debate, which we will get into as we go through the parts.

I have a bold goal of sharing one article a week, which is a classic Substack writer error… Life is full, and we’ll see how that goes. But if you’d like to come on this journey, I’d love to hear from you and connect through this exploration.

In curiosity, Jo

Last week, whilst reading the devastating news about a young child who had been missing, I felt my front body open and liquify. Tears and grief rushed through my body, as I held her and her family in my heart. In many ways, this was a healthy response to the situation. But, when thoughts of her death returned repetitively, and the liquifying feeling and the tears kept repeating over a number of days, I took pause. Consciously, I firmed my body and rerouted the energy of my grief into action. Not because the opening was wrong, but because I know my own history with vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic distress, and for years now I have been working on how to process and honour the pain of others with deep respect, compassion, and most importantly, sustainability.

What I’ve learned along the way

When we engage in emotions or actions of care, we generally draw on one of two capabilities - empathy or compassion. Whilst distinct, the two are frequently confused, both in the research literature and in our own embodied understandings.

From a neurobiological perspective, empathy has two distinct expressions - affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Whilst cognitive empathy is anchored in thinking and perspective-forming about another, ‘affective empathy’ is an emotional response that features a significant measure of absorption. When we experience affective empathy, we can become highly emotionally attuned to another person’s experience, and the distinction between self and other may temporarily soften. This is a feeling that I know intimately, and can track memories of all the way back to early childhood.

Comparatively, compassion is an emotional response that features steadiness. When we feel compassion, we hold another person’s experience with warmth, concern and respect, without collapsing the self-other distinction. Whilst this will vary for each of us, the steadiness of compassion is an emotional state that personally, I had to learn, as my natural orientation is to ‘hang out’ in affective empathy and connect from that place.

Why are some of us (aka me) hardwired for empathic as opposed to compassionate responses?

Typically, we each have our own conditioned tendencies, meaning that we may subconsciously pivot towards empathy, compassion, or even disconnection during moments of secondary stress, grief or trauma. The reasons for this are complex and multifold, and will vary for each person.

In some cases, early experiences of trauma or attachment may have shaped our conditioned tendencies. For some people, traumatic experiences may heighten emotional attunement, whilst for others (particularly during periods of acute stress or post-traumatic activation,) empathic capacity may temporarily narrow or reduce. Pregnancy and birth can also significantly alter the brain circuits relating to empathy and bonding, elevating affective empathy.

It’s also important to note that neurodivergence impacts the embodiment and expression of both empathy and compassion: some neurodivergent people experience ‘hyper emotional empathy’ and/or variations in cognitive empathy.

Ultimately, knowing our own unique orientations and experiences of empathy / compassion strengthens our capacity to notice strain, fatigue, or overwhelm in both personal and professional settings, and to self-advocate when needed. In a dream scenario, conversations about conditioned tendencies, genetic differences, and trauma-impacted orientations happen in our relationships, our teams and our workplaces. More on that later though…

The neurobiology of empathy and compassion

Research by Singer and Klimecki (2012-2014) suggests empathy and compassion involve significantly different neural and emotional processes, which is why they feel distinct in our bodies.

When we engage in affective empathy (the more absorptive empathic response), overlapping neural networks associated with pain and distress are activated. Over time, repeated activation can contribute to emotional exhaustion and stress-system overload, particularly without adequate recovery or support. Compassion, on the other hand, appears to engage neural systems associated with warmth, affiliation, and care, and can be replenishing.

Informed by this understanding, Singer and Klimecki proposed a reframe: what we call compassion fatigue is more precisely empathic distress fatigue and it arises from losing the thread back to ourselves, not from caring too much. Follow-up research showed compassion training can actually reverse the neural effects of empathic distress. Research on the psychobiology of kindness further demonstrated that compassionate acts can also buffer against chronic stress and reorient the nervous system toward calm and connection. This means that compassion can be both healing and protective.

So… does this all mean that empathy is wrong and compassion is right?

Absolutely not. Both affective and cognitive empathy play important roles in human development and connection. It is through experiences of empathy that babies and children learn to self-regulate, emotionally respond to others, and build relationships. As Ruth Feldman writes, “empathy functions as a social glue by binding brains together.” When skilfully engaged, empathy allows us to resonate with another person’s emotional experience without losing our own sense of self.

For those who tend toward affective empathy, it’s really important that we learn to move between states of empathic resonance and compassion. This skill can help reduce our vulnerability to vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout - especially for those of us impacted by trauma and/or PTSD.

An important note: not all care-related distress is the same

One of the main challenges in conversations about compassion fatigue / empathic strain is that we often collapse very different experiences into a single category.

Sometimes the primary experience is empathic strain, often as a result of repeated affective resonance without sufficient grounding, regulation, or recovery time. In other cases, the primary experience might be chronic stress or moral distress driven by workplace pressures such as excessive workload, insufficient staffing, administrative burden, lack of autonomy, or systems that prevent people from working in alignment with their values.

Crucially though, many people experience a combination of empathic strain, moral injury and chronic stress simultaneously.

Because different stress states involve different causal pathways, they require different interventions. Being able to recognise the distinct characteristics of empathic strain, chronic stress, and moral injury can help us to respond more appropriately to each experience. For example, practices that support grounding, self-other awareness, and compassionate responding may help address empathic strain. Chronic stress and moral injury, however, may be better treated with rest, psychotherapeutic support, workload reduction, and structural change.

Why is empathic strain so common in the care sector?

The care sector asks us to remain emotionally present in the face of distress, trauma, grief, complexity, and ongoing human need, often over long periods of time and within systems under significant strain. The traumatologist Charles Figley described compassion fatigue as “the cost of caring,” defining it as “the deep physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion that can result from working day to day in an intense caregiving environment.”

Across healthcare, education, disability, aged care, and community services, many workers are operating within ‘intense’ conditions of chronic overload: excessive workloads, workforce shortages, administrative burden, emotional intensity, and insufficient time for recovery, reflection, or relational support. Compassion-focused researcher Paul Gilbert argues that under persistent conditions of threat, urgency, and stress, the nervous system becomes increasingly organised around survival rather than connection and care.

These stressors are compounded by the fact that care work is highly gendered. Women make up much of the care workforce and continue to carry disproportionate unpaid caring responsibilities, emotional labour, and domestic mental load outside of paid work. For many people, the demands of care do not end when the workday finishes.

To simplify, empathic strain doesn’t occur because individuals care too much, or are not able to activate compassionate responses. It emerges when the human capacities required for care (attention, emotional presence, regulation, and relational responsiveness) are relied upon without sufficient support, recovery, safety, or shared responsibility over time. This can be true in both professional and personal contexts.

Supporting staff and teams under stress

One of the most effective things leaders can do is recognise that distress in care work is not simply an individual issue to be managed privately. Supporting staff wellbeing means creating conditions that support regulation and recovery: manageable workloads, realistic expectations, reflective supervision, psychological safety, adequate staffing, transparency, and cultures in which people can speak openly about strain without fear of judgement or professional consequence.

Leaders can also play an important role in modelling sustainable care. In many care settings, overwork, emotional suppression, and self-sacrifice become normalised. When leaders model boundaries, rest, relational presence, and help-seeking, they help create permission for others to do the same. At Collective Being, we utilised the model of the ‘emperor penguin huddle’ (sometimes called ‘the wave’), to structurally support a collaborative team care environment. This model of care provides opportunities for intermittent rest or reduced responsibilities, and increased responsibilities, depending on capacity. For us, this model supported the team to acknowledge that stress and strain are often unavoidable components of work (and life), and to operationalise a non-punitive, healing-centred approach to rest.

As I mentioned right at the top, in the ‘dream workplace scenario’, conversations about empathy, compassion, conditioning, genetics and lived experience, are woven into wellbeing strategies. When leaders understand the unique ways in which different team members are oriented to empathy and compassion, there is much broader scope for personalised preventative and recovery work.

Ultimately, sustainable teams are built through cultures of shared responsibility, transparency, relational safety, and organisational practices that recognise the emotional realities of care work, in tandem with the emotional realities of our lives.

Practices for transitioning from empathy to compassion

For those of us who identify with the absorptive experience of ‘affective empathy’ as opposed to the steadiness of compassion, somatic practices may be especially helpful. This is because empathic distress is not only psychological; it is a felt experience. Restoring a clearer sense of the self-other distinction requires bodily practice.

Grounding and interoceptive awareness (attending to one’s own internal bodily sensations) can help re-establish the self-other boundary. Research suggests the insula of the brain, which is involved in both interoception and empathy for pain, may play an important role in this process. If you’re interested in trying this approach, the somatic process below is grounded in research, and may be supportive for those seeking to strengthen the self-other boundary.

A trauma-informed three-step practice for transitioning from resonance to response:

Step 1: Physical grounding and regulation

• Before engaging with emotionally demanding situations, grounding attention in the body through contact with the floor, chair, or breath can help maintain a clearer sense of self-other distinction.

• Slow, rhythmic breathing can support physiological regulation and help shift the nervous system out of states of heightened threat activation.

Step 2: Compassion-based attentional practices

• Loving-kindness and compassion practices can help strengthen capacities for warmth, care, and emotional steadiness without requiring emotional absorption.

• Brief daily practices that orient attention toward phrases of care, safety, or wellbeing may help reinforce compassion rather than distress-based responding.

• Some contemplative traditions also use visualisation and breath-based compassion practices to cultivate a more grounded relationship to suffering.

Step 3: Turning feeling into action

• Curiosity and perspective-taking engage reflective capacities alongside emotional resonance.

• Adopting a supportive, boundaried stance, rather than experiencing oneself as responsible for carrying another person’s distress can reduce helplessness and support resilience over time.

• Asking “What is one useful action I can take?” can help shift attention from passive overwhelm toward active care and agency.

Some final words on compassion, empathic strain and sustainable practice

I want to acknowledge that any emphasis on individual practice, particularly within contemporary wellbeing discourse, runs the risk of reinforcing the idea that distress is primarily an individual responsibility to manage. It’s really important to distinguish the difference between self-care as responsibilisation, and self-care as sustainability. Whereas the first treats wellbeing as an individual obligation despite structurally stressful conditions, the second understands care for self as part of sustaining presence, discernment, and effectiveness within the challenges inherent in life and work.

Based on my own experiences, but also those of hundreds of care workers I have worked with over the past 9 years, I deeply believe that we need both self-care and structural change processes. We all deserve to be well - and this requires both self-awareness and broader relational and systems work.

Part of my curiosity in launching this project (How we change), is to explore what changes neurobiologically when we go through stress and trauma, and what becomes possible when we begin to heal.

Three years ago, my life changed lightning fast when my daughter came bursting into the world — almost four kilos, bright, warm, and loud. Life changed again two years ago when my relationship broke down and I suddenly became a single parent.

Somatically, both my body and mind felt deeply altered by the experience of single parenting a baby. With support and other adults in the home, a parent’s body has structure it can lean on and open towards. In the grief and isolation of separation, I felt my body harden and shield, save a soft, permanently gooey space for my daughter.

I spent most of my first year post-separation, stumbling, rocking, juggling, and swaying. My new, stiffly guarded body stumbled in the dark toward my baby’s cries, again and again, and again. It rocked and swayed through most of the night, continuing the rhythm at work and in meetings — always in motion. Sleep deprivation created a blurriness to perception, and a dullness to proprioception. My pelvis and spine contorted into strange shapes, my shoulders pouring forward as if eternally breastfeeding.

Cooking, walking, and cleaning with a baby on my hip, and later a toddler at my ankles, I learned to juggle spoons, toys, plates, and attention. Collapsing lopsided into bed each night, I tried to claw my way through the fog to remember the meaning of it all. In between making lists of everything I needed to do (reports, budgets, doctors appointment, immunisations, call X, buy yoghurt, fix phone, check grant rounds, meditate — make time to meditate), I tried to metabolise the grief, the fear, and the anger.

I imagined that my new life was reshaping me in some permanent, awful way. That my body had hardened like steel and cartoonishly reformed to curve over a baby, a stove, a mess of toys, a computer, and a phone. All of the vulnerable organs were protected by this stance— which felt good. But my new body could not open to others, it simply wasn’t designed to bend that way.

There is often grief in change and transition. As parents, we learn to de-centre ourselves in order to take care of our young, but deep down, we know that wild oceans, nights out, and long hikes are still there when we can, or want to, return to them. Trauma though… it moves differently.

Trauma is clunky, messy, disruptive, and unyielding. It gets stuck in uncomfortable places, and sometimes, it guides us to act in ways that feel unfamiliar or painful. Mostly though, trauma makes us feel alone. Even when support is there or nearby, it misreads almost everything as a risk, and produces isolation as a result.

And it takes a lot of energy. Processing big changes is hard enough, but navigating trauma is like weight-lifting and running a marathon simultaneously, in wet clothes. Because what heals feels antithetical to the traumatised, ultra-protective soma, it is near impossible to be in the process of healing all of the time. It’s simply too exhausting to constantly reroute the nervous system. Part of the challenge with recovery is accepting the staccato, stop-start nature of it.

What my system could manage, it turned out, were what we call ‘micro-practices’ — short, simple somatic practices oriented toward the felt sense, often with a grounding or anchoring quality. These emerged from my work with Collective Being, and for most of the past two years, they were the extent of what I could sustain.

Until very recently, I couldn’t imagine returning to meditation. Prolonged silence and stillness felt terrifying — they were oppositional to my coping mechanisms. But inch by inch, I have begun returning to the practices that once felt so deeply part of who I am. There is relief in the return to a changed, but familiar sense of self, and to feel the window of capacity widening again.

My deepest learning has been that the practices that served me in wellness, are different to those that serve me in times of hardship, trauma and pain. Because continuous trauma and chronic stress create allostatic load, intense exercise, sustained focus, and future thinking can be exhausting and depleting. Healing requires rest and lowered stress levels, which is by far the hardest state to find your way back to. What I try to return to again and again, are practices of restorative breath-work and loving-kindness.

I shared these words from Audre Lorde at the beginning of this piece: ‘Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.’ My experience of trauma has forced me to confront the ways that I evade, succumb to and deal with pain.

In somatics, we interpret practice as key to change — that we become whatever we practice the most. We also know through neuroscience that it’s small, repetitive actions that generate real change, as opposed to infrequent but more sustained actions. I.e. 5 minutes of gentle movement once a day has more benefit than 60 minutes once a month. Through the difficulty of it all, I like to think that I have been micro-dosing transcendence via small repetitive acts of presence, gratitude and wonder each day.

For me, knowing that regular micro-doses of somatics, loving-kindness, and rest, are enough, has been transformative. And wonder, at least, has never been hard to find… it has a three-year-old’s face.

Over a decade ago, I worked in the run-down office of a social justice organisation. On the rooftop, there was a caged area with a few seats, which is where those of us not eating lunch at our desks or in meetings would sit on sunny days. It was grimy, with an unflattering view of city buildings, grey on grey. One warm afternoon, someone suggested a meditation club, and for a brief and beautiful moment in time, a handful of us gathered once a week on the steel benches for 15 minutes of meditation. It didn’t last long—winter weather, competing priorities and looming deadlines quickly swallowed summer’s more hopeful attempts at ritual. But while it lasted, it was genuine and it felt good.

When I think about wellbeing at work (specifically in my pre-Collective Being days), this memory and a few others come to the surface. There’s an especially good reflective practice session, a great manager in the earlier part of my career, and a few roles with perks that went some way to balance out their inherent precarity. But mostly, I think about stress, overtime, porous boundaries, compassion fatigue and burnout.

This is often the way with work and wellbeing. They are inherently an awkward pair, at odds with each other in many ways. When we bring them under the same banner (‘workplace wellbeing’), the strongest expressions tend to emerge from within: from shared experience, mutual care, and genuine intention. But even the most organic efforts are hard to sustain in environments shaped by neoliberal logics such as surveillance, competition, precarity, and an unrelenting focus on productivity.

The corporatisation of care

I remember reading the term carewashing for the first time during the heightened wellbeing-aware years of the pandemic. It was in a research paper by Andreas Chatzidakis and Jo Littler of The Care Collective that laid out the ways in which corporations use (and abuse) notions of ‘care’ to improve their image, often without making meaningful changes to how they treat their workers or communities. The authors suggested that the biggest risk with carewashing was a Gramscian ‘passive revolution’ whereby corporations become the accepted providers of care, shifting expectations away from collective or public responsibility and reinforcing existing power structures. Think employee ‘wellbeing packages’ that emphasise individual responsibility, private health cover, branded care initiatives like R U OK Day, and other strategies that normalise the corporatisation of care.

The bandaid approach

At Collective Being, from the beginning of the pandemic and every year thereafter, we received requests from companies for ‘workplace wellbeing’ or ‘lunchtime yoga’ programs. More often than not, these requests were an attempt to put a very small bandaid on a much bigger issue. We knew from experience that in the worst case scenario, a workplace wellbeing program could actually cause more stress—especially if scheduled during working hours, or if the workplace didn’t feel safe enough for employees to engage in anything related to personal wellbeing. Over the years, we became very discerning about who we partnered with, requiring organisations to ensure that any embodiment programs within work hours were employee-led and determined.

What we knew through experience was later captured by André Spicer in a piece for The Guardian with the title ‘Work wellness programmes don’t make employees happier — but I know what does‘. Even before reading it, I could guess the argument: truly caring work environments are not defined by the wellness packages they offer, but by the quality of working conditions, i.e. secure contracts, good pay, flexibility, and opportunities for professional development.

All of this is to say that we often distort what ‘care’ means in workplaces. Workers are often rightly suspicious of wellbeing initiatives like sleep pods, wellbeing surveys, or lunchtime yoga, especially when working conditions are poor and power dynamics are elevated.

‘More than policy’ approaches to care

As a somatics practitioner and a non-profit leader interested in organisational development and design, I became deeply curious about where somatics fits into this picture. Whilst supportive and flexible working conditions are primary, there are also more subtle producers of stress: pace, pressure, relational complexity, compassion fatigue, secondary stress, and vicarious trauma. Additionally, there are ways that we can practice, individually and collectively, to regulate our nervous systems, build emotional recovery time into our work, and embody steadiness and connection.

This tension, between what care looks like and what actually produces it, shows up clearly in systems change literature. For close to a decade, a ‘more than policy’ approach has been widely accepted. In their seminal 2018 paper ‘The Waters of Systems Change‘, John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge advocated for three dimensions of change: structural change (policies, practices, and resource flows), relational change (relationships, connections, and power dynamics), and transformational change (mental models). More recently, through his work at Collective Change Lab with Louise Marra and Laura Calderón de la Barca, Kania has added a new layer to this model — embodiment.

Embodiment at work?

In most sectors, the inclusion of embodiment in workplaces is a pretty terrifying concept. Immediately, people picture flowing skirts, incense and yoga mats. In contrast with the whitewashed variations of embodiment we are familiar with, what Kania, Marra and Calderón de la Barca are putting forward is an anti-colonial challenge to the corporatisation of our lives and our work. Their work at Collective Change Lab views systems change as multidimensional and grounded in nervous system awareness, relational awareness, and connection to the earth, ancestry, and — importantly — love. They see collective healing as foundational to truly sustainable systems change. At its most practical level, this looks like attention to how stress moves through bodies and relationships, not just policies and processes.

For many, this is a significant leap from lunchtime yoga and wellbeing surveys. Most workplaces don’t yet have the psychological safety, staff consent, or capacity for such deep work. But it presents a genuine alternative, and in doing so, creates a vast space of possibility between carewashing and decolonial collective healing models.

Crucially, Collective Change Lab isn’t the only organisation grounding systems change in embodiment. Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Institute and Theory U model blends systems thinking with awareness practices that aim to slow down processes, centre people in presence, and facilitate connection through increased regulation and trust. Guided by the words ‘settled bodies, settled systems’, Refugia provides a digital space for healing-centred ecosystem work. Decolonial systems change is also an established practice, anchored in the acknowledgement that systems thinking is embedded in First Nations culture and ways of being and seeing the world.

The bridge between carewashing and collective healing

Despite our best attempts, sustained, people-centred workplace wellbeing is near impossible without a willingness to challenge the neoliberal values that underpin the practices, processes, and mental models of contemporary work. For those navigating the space between carewashing and collective healing, there is no shortage of models, ideas, and practices to draw on. The question is not what, but where to begin.

Grounding principles for care-centred workplaces

The principles below are not designed to orient workplaces to collective healing processes, but rather to ensure that the scaffolding for deep systems change work is carefully laid. They are grounded in my experiences of delivering workplace wellbeing programs over 9 years, the broader research landscape, and trauma-informed practice — an evidence-based framework that applies not just to client-facing work, but to how organisations are structured and led. I’ve applied a trauma-informed lens because this anchors the work in the nuances of wellbeing, and provides grounding for efforts that go beyond harm prevention.

1. Working conditions are the foundation of care

The evidence is clear: employee wellbeing is supported by secure contracts, above-award pay, flexibility, and opportunities for professional development. Not every workplace can offer all of these at once, particularly in under-resourced sectors. What matters is transparency: being honest about what is possible, what is not, and the structural constraints that shape those limits. Clarity creates the conditions for genuine engagement with wellbeing, whereas opaqueness tends to generate distrust. Structural conditions are not the ceiling of care — they are the floor.

2. Wellbeing is not experienced equally

Race, gender, culture, ability, class, and other dimensions of identity shape who feels safe, who is heard, and who holds power within a workplace. The default model of work still tends to assume a narrow kind of worker, generally able-bodied, white, neurotypical, male, and unencumbered by care responsibilities. This means many workplaces are not designed with the full range of human experience in mind. An intersectional lens is essential to equitable organisational and workplace wellbeing design. This includes interrogating norms and ensuring that we approach psychosocial safety with an ‘expectation of difference’ when it comes to employment conditions.

3. Trauma-informed practice is an orientation, not a program

Trauma-informed organisational design is a holistic orientation — not a standalone training or initiative. It shapes how decisions are made, how policies are applied, how work is structured, and how people are treated in everyday interactions. This includes being strengths-based in how people are supported, culturally safe in how difference is held, and anchored in disability justice. Dissonance between how an organisation presents itself and how it treats its people is, in itself, a source of harm.

4. Regulation is collective

Regulation is often framed as something individuals manage on their own, but it is shaped by the environments people are working within. Clear communication, predictable processes, and consistent follow-through contribute to a sense of collective steadiness. Uncertainty and reactive decision-making tend to produce the opposite. When leadership is settled, transparent, and able to remain present under pressure, it creates a baseline that others can orient to. Settled bodies and settled systems are not achieved through policy alone. They are shaped by how leadership is embodied in everyday decisions, and how that steadiness is modelled and sustained across the organisation.

5. Learning opens the door to change — but doesn’t walk through it

Professional development and education can build shared language, deepen understanding, and support people to work in more considered ways. At the same time, learning alone does not shift workplace conditions. Too often, training becomes a proxy for change rather than a pathway into it. For professional development to be meaningful, it needs to be connected to how work is actually structured and practised — with space for ideas to be applied, tested, and embedded over time. Without this, education risks remaining at the level of awareness while the conditions shaping people’s day-to-day experience stay the same.

6. Harm reduction is an organisational responsibility

If people are persistently overwhelmed or burning out, the system is not working. Harm in workplaces is rarely random. It tends to be structurally produced: through chronic overload, moral distress, unclear roles, poor management, and organisational cultures that ask people to absorb what should be redesigned. Psychosocial risk — the kind that produces psychological injury over time — is now recognised in Australian workplace legislation as a genuine safety issue, requiring the same systematic attention as physical hazards. This shifts harm reduction from a wellbeing aspiration to an organisational and legal responsibility. Understanding what is causing stress, mapping psychosocial hazards, and taking practical steps to reduce their impact is foundational work, and it has to come before additional layers of support can be genuinely effective.

7. Move at the speed of trust

When introducing change processes, those directly impacted must be involved in the decisions that affect them. People can feel the difference between symbolic inclusion and real influence — and are often watching to see whether things actually change. Trust is built slowly and lost quickly, which means that transparency is not a one-off gesture but an ongoing practice. Leadership accountability requires naming what an organisation is working toward, measuring it honestly, and reporting back to the people it affects.

8. Change is something we practise together

Systems change rarely happens through a single intervention. More often, it emerges through repeated efforts to work differently, with space to reflect, adjust, and learn. Approaching change as a practice allows for things to feel unfamiliar or imperfect at first, and acknowledges that new ways of working develop gradually through shared experience. It is this repetition and refinement, not any one policy or program, that begins to shift how systems actually function.

I still think about that rooftop. Not as a model, it was too fragile for that, and too dependent on the particular warmth of that particular summer and those particular people. But it points to something true about how genuine care takes root: it came from within, and from shared intentions. What extinguished it wasn’t a lack of goodwill, but the weight of everything the broader structure didn’t provide.

I hope that this exploration has provided some kind of food for thought or motivation to reimagine how we define and ensure psychosocial safety and wellbeing within workplaces. I’d love to hear your thoughts, ruminations and reflections.

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I’ve been interested in change for as long as I can remember. Questions about change - how, why, whether we really can, and what happens when do - have permeated my thinking ever since I was a kid.

In my teens and early twenties, I spent a lot of time working out how to cope with change. I tried pretty much everything on the smorgasbord of coping mechanisms, but it wasn’t until I encountered contemplative practices and social justice ideologies that I found a footing that felt supportive and generative.

Fast forward many (many) years, and questions of change are now central to my work, my spirituality, and my life. I’ve also always loved writing, research and rumination, so How We Change is intended to be a home base for any musings around change that I can only get out, by writing down.

I’m still working out the cadence, and the audience for ‘How we change’, but if you’d like to come along for the ride, you can subscribe for regular updates, newsletters, and publication archives.

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