The air hangs thick with wildfire smoke in today’s classrooms. In Calgary, my students scroll through their phones with glazed expressions, processing a ripple of news alerts about another shooting in the US. Meanwhile, in the staffroom, teachers are conferring in hushed tones about looming book bans, wondering if a beloved work of fiction might quietly disappear from library shelves sometime soon. And so we teach, parsing poetry and tracing allegories in our classrooms, but we do so against a backdrop of hypervigilance, our students’ bodies primed for dangers both everywhere and nowhere, alert to the next crisis notification or lockdown drill.
Luckily, our bodies carry an intelligence that predates language, restoring us to equilibrium even when our thoughts are at their most scattered. Primordially, we find our feet moving to music without thinking, captivated by each other’s stories, luxuriating in the sun’s warmth. And when they need to, our bodies know how to shake off stress with the same instinctive wisdom of a wet dog, how to breathe deeply enough to telegraph safety to our scrambling nervous systems. This somatic intelligence is still there, just buried beneath countless attempts to steer us away from ourselves, the sediment of notifications and deadlines, a constant hum of information overload built to fracture our attention.
I wonder about how we disinter this embodied knowing in a world that profits from our disconnection. How do we offer students permission to trust their physical knowing in a culture of cerebral override and in spaces dominated by the blue light of screens? How do we slip somatic practices of settling and grounding in spaces that reward speed and urgency?
The answer may come from TikTok.
Dr. Gibson’s Approach
I’ve spent many years as a family physician to equity-deserving communities— people who’ve experienced extreme stress and trauma, the consequences ranging from debilitating physical symptoms to complex mental health challenges. I travelled from Nepal to South Korea, working alongside practitioners and communities to understand how mental wellness is maintained across cultures. In so many instances, somatic practices helped move individuals from pure survival mode to a place where healing could begin.
When young people were drowning in anxiety’s rising water during the pandemic, their lifelines weren’t in traditional spaces: they were connecting in the comments section over the seconds-long videos that were their means of escape. I was curious, so I followed them into the digital current.
On my TikTok channel and in my book, The Modern Trauma Toolkit, I teach practices I’ve gathered from around the world: tapping to ease the amygdala’s alarm, rhythmic soothing touch to create calm in the brain. I also teach breathwork, tremoring, and interactive guided imagery techniques to rewire neural pathways. These approaches are rooted in both our ancestral intrinsic knowledge and an acknowledgment of how systemic oppression takes up residence in our tissues. This is why healing must be available to all, so sharing on social media and writing became part of my professional intent to make these skills freely accessible.
Somatic intelligence is what the body innately knows. These evidence-based practices (EFT tapping, bilateral movement, gaze-related therapies) literally rewire the brain. They lower gamma waves (our stress indicator) while increasing delta and theta waves (our calming patterns). When your amygdala hijacks your system, your cognitive brain goes offline—but the body is an alternate doorway into healing. It’s our most reliable resource, our DIY healing kit.
For young people to build this toolbox early on is for them to gather the resources, throughout their lives, for post-traumatic growth rather than chronic stress. And as much as knowing these tools is important, so is putting them into practice until each individual discovers what their unique nervous system needs. This can happen through modification of the messages from the body (interoceptive awareness) or perception in the brain (which can be turned up or down, like a volume dial, or even rewired using neuroplasticity).
I’ve found that people don’t expect healing approaches to be as uncomplicated as the ones I share. Thirty seconds of bilateral stimulation (something as simple as tapping the alternate shoulder) or a minute of focused breathing (where lengthened exhales release tension and lengthened inhales add energy to a dwindling body) doesn’t seem like it will do much. But pausing to acknowledge, check in, and soothe the self, even briefly, can swiftly return us to baseline.
Now, I dream of every classroom becoming a space where students learn they have the power to regulate their own nervous systems. We can build both their self-awareness and their self-efficacy. We can teach them that healing is something they have the autonomy to access themselves.
Giants in the mental health field—from Gabor Maté to Stephen Porges— have endorsed The Modern Trauma Toolkit, and, as honoured as I am, the truth is these techniques are not mine to claim alone. Like all knowledge worth having, they reflect lifetimes of communal teaching, learning, and sharing. These are body-based healing practices that cultures have refined over more than 10,000 years. I’ve simply translated for a generation that seeks them out more than ever.
Our bodies aren’t problems requiring solutions to be fixed. They are resources, and trusting their wisdom is an organic, built-in way to manage distress. We just have to remember the way home.
Lesley’s Reflections
I’m in my thirteenth year of teaching, and I’ve seen my fair share of students who feel stressed pretty much every day. I came across Dr. Gibson’s work, and I was struck by how well she makes her ideas uniquely accessible to teens and adults alike. Hers was content they already consumed—TikTok-fluent, bite-sized—but with substance that could alter how they understood and connected to themselves.
I set to brewing ideas about how to bring her book into my classroom, and as it turns out, it’s easy enough to weave them into a lesson plan with a little bit of creativity. We ended up moving through Dr. Gibson’s book one chapter at a time. I steered our focus toward the practical techniques that would become familiar, because the more intimately we know these tools, the more easily we can reach for them when they’re needed.
In English class, we linked reflections on these somatic tools to our analyses. First, we’d work primarily with the text at hand (big shoutout to Fredrik Backman’s My Friends for giving us plenty to work with—such a stunning novel), after which we’d reflect on which tools from Gibson’s book might help a given character. Students pulled quotes to reveal the nuances of characters’ embodied struggles, examined how particular events shaped their responses, and developed a support plan grounded in their interpretation, sometimes in writing but occasionally even by making their own TikToks.
Working out that Macbeth could use a bit of bilateral stimulation and Lady Macbeth some box breathing may seem like an odd exercise at first glance. But I’ve found that this activity normalized mental health conversations among my students. They could practise emotional regulation through literature’s proxy. This was safer and less vulnerable for a classroom exercise than diving straight into their own experiences, yet still a means of learning the tools in application. This distance gave them permission to explore without feeling too overexposed.
In psychology class, we constructed pipe cleaner models of the vagus nerve, tracing its meandering path from brainstem to gut, understanding how this “wandering nerve” orchestrates our entire somatic experience, from our facial expressions to our stress responses. Students built polyvagal ladders from dowels and coloured tape, each rung representing a different nervous system state; they mapped their own somatic strategies onto the rungs, creating a personalized toolkit to reach for when needed.
They also crafted two playlists for easy access (have you ever seen a teen without an AirPod in their ear?): one for the collapse state (rhythms that support recovery from energy depletion) and another with driving beats to discharge stuck muscle tension. For our Rivers of Life project, students chose their own currents or borrowed someone else’s to narratively trace—a character, an ancestor, anyone whose story felt safe to navigate. They took the clinical language of the DSM and used its paragraphs to spin poems that captured the emotional experiences beneath these diagnoses, knowing that trauma lives in the body, not just in the mind.
Back to the Body
The body knows—how to find balance like sunflowers turn toward the sun, how to discharge activation like lightning strikes the ground. In a world that profits from our disconnection, teaching somatic intelligence is revolutionary. It’s a way of returning students to themselves, to the wisdom that lurks in their bones. The wildfires will return, the alerts won’t abate anytime soon, but when students understand their nervous systems, they’re developing embodied resilience to face whatever comes next.
Reference
Idea and activities to bring The Modern Trauma Toolkit into your classroom/ school: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1beIyHJySGs5xgd2-mLKSyqccnM5pZ6dg?usp=drive_link
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Christine Gibson
Dr. Christine Gibson (BSc, MD CFPC, MMedEd, DProf, DipABLM, CITC) is a family physician, trauma therapist, author of The Modern Trauma Toolkit, and educator based in Calgary. Her practice is in refugee health and addiction medicine, but her passion is to bring nervous system science and skills to greater public awareness. A 2xTEDx speaker, she runs a global education non-profit and a corporation Safer Spaces Training to educate organizations and individuals about trauma and toxic stress. She writes, hikes, and kayaks with her dog Fife when she’s not globetrotting (or making TikToks).
Lesley Machon
Lesley Machon strives to bring her sincere curiosity and care to everything she does, from sparking lively discussions in Calgary classrooms to serving as an interfaith chaplain at local hospitals and hospices. She believes the best parts of education and spiritual care overlap; both invite us to explore what makes us human and gives our lives meaning. Guided by her conviction that we can imagine and build a kinder, more connected world, Lesley helps people mine the depths of their experiences, especially during life’s most vulnerable moments.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Winter 2026 issue.
