Discovering Radical Self-Acceptance with Somatic Tracking

I lay awake as the minutes changed to hours and the hours moved up the number scale—11, 12, 1, now I'm at 4 (wow!) 5… Something was different. I wasn't struggling with my insomnia. Instead, I noticed myself looking at the time and then going back to whatever I was doing, as if the numbers were just a mundane shade of beige on the wall—something that was always there and would always be there, but not a significant factor in my actions.

It was different than the previous times I had been awake into the morning, when I would toss one way, check the time, hear some internal harsh voice reprimanding me for not having fallen asleep yet, telling me to "try a different method," and then either continue to listen to that sleep playlist, or choose to pick up that non-fiction book on my shelf instead. Some time would pass, I would toss a different way while reading the book, or stewing in my thoughts as the music played, and then turn back around again to check the clock—wow, it's already 45 minutes past the last time I checked? And the cycle would continue. When I got to a certain point in time (all pun intended) a voice would say, "What is wrong with you that you're still up? That you've tried everything and your body has still not hit snooze?"

That used to be my pattern of insomnia and the internal dialogue that used to accompany it before about a week ago (or longer based on when you're reading this) when a new voice that had slowly been making its presence known simply and gracefully took center stage and responded to this default pattern by saying, "Nothing is wrong with me. There may be many reasons why I am not asleep right now"—and then a few reasons popped through my thought clouds—"and it's okay. I accept it. I trust my body will fall asleep when it's ready to. I'll fall asleep when I am ready to, considering I've set the conditions in my favor"—and then I ran through a quick mental checklist of the conditions, both self-discovered and recommended, and noticed any discrepancies in my actions that might have made those conditions less powerful. My thought process would continue, “I am not doing anything entirely counter to these adopted conditions. I accept that this is where my body's at; I am not a perfect human, and all of my internal criticism about this is okay—it can stay, and all of my curiosity about it can also stay, and the self-compassion can also stay. There is no problem except the one I am creating in my head every time I check the clock and see that more time has passed."

Ah, that was the moment—the key to my internal liberation.

Yes, there is this concept of time, and there is a clock and an entire society that functions in a particular way based on this concept, and in this moment, I am not "fitting the mold" of the typical expectations of a pattern that would help me fit more easily into this mold the next morning. But do I have to give myself a hard time about falling short of this fitting? & is this expectation even real? Or imagined? Who ever said, directly or otherwise, that we must fall asleep during certain hours & wake up during others? And, more importantly, even if I wanted to fit this made-up mold, will self-reprimanding actually help me fit the mold better? No, because if it could, I would have already fallen asleep by now and this method would work on all those other times I found myself wide awake past my usual, planned, or desired hour for sleep. All I was doing by making myself feel bad for not having fallen asleep yet was just masochism, and another, gentler, more accepting, & dare I say even more practical approach took over- my own armor from these vulnerabilities began to slip away.

The more I let myself simply feel everything that came up, without trying to respond to it, even in a "constructive" or "positive re-framing” kind of way… the more I simply observed the different parts of me surfacing to have a say in the internal dialogue of being wide awake, the more relaxed I began to feel, and I began to feel better. I couldn't quite track, looking back, what exactly made the difference in these nights where I felt less resistance to my wakefulness, except that sense of self-acceptance. It was a complete self-acceptance stripped of any pretense or judgment of what could be deemed appropriate to accept and what could not.

In the context of somatic symptoms, the curious and non-judgmental self-observation I was practicing towards my insomnia has a name to it. It’s called somatic tracking. It helps people with chronic body-based symptoms observe their pain without getting caught in it. Although I learned about somatic tracking in its application to chronic pain, I discovered myself applying it to a chronic-body-state that didn’t feel particularly painful in the usual sense of the word- not being able to fall asleep wasn’t painful; it was just… not what I had planned. I'll share a more direct example of somatic tracking later on, but on a very subtle level, this is exactly what I was doing while lying awake—noticing the sensations in my body: perhaps some restlessness that turns into tiredness, then some self-criticism that I consciously observe without attaching my identity to it, and so on. I kept tracking what was going on for me internally without attaching any one story or meaning to it. Simply observing.

The next morning after I woke up (because I would eventually fall asleep of course) I would recall writing a poem as the last thing I did before snoozing. Other times the last thing I could recall would be listening to music, or asking AI about something, reading a book, or simply nothing—just being still with my thoughts and sensations. But what made the difference between the same recollection on two very different kinds of days had everything to do with how much acceptance I had of myself in all its different parts the night before, compared to how much deficit or illness-identity I was reinforcing by letting my inner critic take the lead in a story of what it meant to succeed or fail at sleep. I did not shun the inner critic or make it go away. Rather, I decided that it could stay… alongside a compassionate inner voice that could simply notice the inner critic without believing in all of its stories as the truth. The less I viewed my wakefulness as a defect or a bug in the system, the more empowered I became in finding and maintaining my own inner peace regardless of what I chose to do in my wakefulness.

It's not that I somehow fell asleep any sooner when I had this radical self-acceptance more cultivated, or even that I felt entirely "at peace" with myself with the practice. It was just that all of it became normalized. The insomnia became something I now believed I had capacity to move through with less energy spent on trying to self-correct without getting any closer to sleep but feeling bad anyway. Feeling bad now and then was not surprising—it was expected. Feeling worse for it was optional, and choosing to dwell on "how bad" any of it was only created more unnecessary suffering for myself than radically accepting all the voices in my internal dialogue that were competing for a lead. And once I stopped making an internal competition out of all of my inner parts, and simply allowed all parts to come and go as they pleased, a sense of true self-acceptance and clarity seeped through. This (insomnia) is how it is now; it won't be like this forever, and I don't need to give it any more attention than that. If I'm going to be up and unable to change it, I might as well embrace it, right?

The practice of noticing all aspects of a chronic body-state, & inviting a sense of autonomy and agency in relation to that state is how somatic tracking begins to shift our experience of something we may have previously deemed as unbearable. It helps us stay in our bodies and notice how our internal states ebb and flow without attaching our sense of self-worth to any aspect of those fluctuations—it helps us stay present with ourselves and accept all parts without fully identifying with any one part.

If the specific state you're hoping your body will take is not happening any faster no matter what mode of relaxation you try, and the only thing making your experience of the wait feel gruesome is your own internal resistance to being awake for as long as you are, then isn't letting go of all the resistance to what you're experiencing in those moments half of your liberation? Oftentimes, we don't realize that more than half of our life's battles and victories are about our own inner dialogues.

Once I realized this, I noticed the shift happening in other aspects of my life as well. The migraine I just started feeling? Instead of dwelling on it, I simply sent myself some compassion for the pain, took my medication, and asked my body what else it needed in the moment to feel better. Sunglasses for light sensitivity? Check. Put some essential oil on my forehead? Check. Anything else? And so on…

This takes me back to the serenity prayer, a message I’ve needed to hear since childhood, "Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." That sudden drop in energy in my luteal phase that makes me feel sleepier and more tired than the first half of the month? That's the wisdom of my hormonal fluctuations doing what they're designed to do, and I have the courage to adjust my exercise, productivity, and social life routines to a slower pace to match my body's needs during that time, and the serenity to accept that I won't physically, mentally, or emotionally be able to function at the same pace as I did in my ovulatory phase. And that's okay, because I'm learning complete self-acceptance.

So if you've read this far and can think of a few struggles in your body-mind that you have to cope with chronically, instead of fighting it or trying to "fix it," what if you fully embraced it as part of yourself? Not in a "woe is me," self-pitying kind of way, but in a non-judgmental, radical self-acceptance kind of way. What's one thing you could spend less time ruminating on how to fix about yourself and apply the serenity prayer to? That's my invitation to you this week. Track the internal sensations, thoughts, and feelings that your soma/body experiences and practice withholding judgment of any of it. Even when judgment does surface (as it inevitably will) just practice radical self-acceptance—even with the part of you that’s you that’s judging, attend to the internal judgment with love, attend to the pain in your head from the migraine with curiosity. Does the pain spike and then slow down? What's happening with it? See it as a wise messenger- a wounded part calling for your love—sometimes it screams for attention; other times, it's more subtle and might feel more like a dull pain in the background. Choose a chronic somatic symptom that’s affected your sense of self-worth or self-esteem this week, and just observe it with a loving and curious eye. Notice if there’s an internal story playing out, especially related to your identity. See if you can let go of the story without attaching or losing your sense of self to it. I promise you that there’s no right or wrong way of doing this as long as you’re simply noticing. Keep practicing this whenever the chronic symptom comes up, and see how you feel.