Peter Levine

Peter A. Levine developed Somatic Experiencing over some fifty years: an approach to trauma that works with the body's own physiological response to threat, rather than primarily through talk or cognitive method. He holds a doctorate in biophysics from UC Berkeley and a second in psychology, and traces the direction of the work to a meeting with Stephen Porges in 1978 and a shared interest in what the body does from the bottom up.

He founded the Ergos Institute of Somatic Education and is founder and advisor to Somatic Experiencing International, through which the work has reached more than thirty thousand practitioners in over forty countries. He has taught at UC Berkeley, Mills College, Antioch University, the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, served as a stress consultant to NASA during the early space shuttle programme, and sat on the American Psychological Association task force on the trauma of large-scale disaster and ethnopolitical warfare.

His books include Waking the Tiger, published in more than twenty-nine languages, In an Unspoken Voice, Trauma and Memory, and the recent An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey. He has received lifetime achievement awards from Psychotherapy Networker, the US Association for Body-Oriented Psychotherapy and the Association for Training on Trauma and Attachment in Children, and continues to teach trauma healing workshops internationally.

His work sits at the boundary of psychotherapy and contemplative body awareness rather than inside any one spiritual lineage.