TRE & Neurogenic Yoga

But just as the capacity to respond is woven into the fabric of the body, so too is the capacity to let go. We don’t have to carry everything with us.

One way the body supports this is through neurogenic tremoring: the body’s natural capacity to shake as a way of unwinding protective contraction.

“We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.”

Mary Oliver (from Evidence)

The body already knows how to shake.

You may remember shaking or trembling before an important conversation, giving a speech, after a shock, after childbirth. In fear. In excitement. In joy. In grief.

We see it in young children, whose bodies have not yet learned to suppress these movements.

And we see it in the animal world.

The body has always known how to shake.

But along the way, often when we are very young, we learn that these movements aren’t welcome. We learn that trembling, especially in public, is associated with weakness, illness, loss of control or disorder.

What if it were something else?

What if shaking wasn’t malfunction, but an expression of the body’s wisdom? A completion, or a way back home.

This understanding forms the foundation of my work. It also reflects a wider philosophy: that we are not and never have been broken.

We are alive.

Trust

Our bodies know how to meet life in all its fullness. My work is not about fixing. It is about making space for the body’s innate intelligence to be recognised, trusted and freely expressed so that we can move through life with greater freedom, ease, and grace.

What to expect

As your facilitator, my perspective on this work is that tremoring is not a tool that we do to the body. It is something that emerges from the body when there is enough safety for it to do so.

Sessions move slowly and are guided by choice, curiosity and respect for your body’s pace. Sometimes that means that our first session – or even our first few sessions – may be less about tremoring itself and more about cultivating the conditions that allow it to arise.

Together we might explore grounding, interoception (our capacity to be with internal sensation), listening, attuning to impulse, and discovering what helps your nervous system to feel supported.  

This isn’t preparation.

It is the work.

When it comes to inviting tremors, there are different pathways:

Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) uses a simple sequence of seven highly adaptable exercises to create the conditions in which tremoring can emerge. Many people appreciate the clarity and structure of this approach, particularly when beginning.

Neurogenic Yoga weaves together an understanding of the body’s innate tremor response with the science and practice of yoga. Rather than following a fixed sequence, it draws on posture, breath, movement, meditation and embodied awareness to gently invite neurogenic tremoring to arise. There is space to follow sensation, instinctive movement and the body’s own impulses, allowing each practice to unfold in its own way.

Neither approach asks the body to perform. Both begin from the fundamental understanding that the body already knows what it is doing.

Throughout our work together, you remain in control. Tremors can be invited, paused or stopped at any time. There is no right way for the body to respond and no expectation that anything in particular should happen.

Our intention is never to make something happen.

It is to create the conditions in which the body can remember what it has always known.

Working together

My role is to meet you, and the life moving through you, with presence, curiosity and an unshakeable trust in the wisdom of your body. If trusting that wisdom feels difficult at first, my role is also to reflect back what I see until your own experience begins to make it feel real.

Over time, my hope is not simply that you develop a sense of ease and familiarity with tremoring. It is that you begin to meet your body with wonder.

Some of the most meaningful words I’ve heard recently from people I work with are simply:

“My body is amazing.”

“Yes,” I say. “It is.”