The Radical Somatic Listening

Friday, April 11, 2025

embodiment, refusal, and cataclysmic lucidity

The Myth of the Malfunctioning Body

The body was never disordered. It was only disobedient.
Every diagnosis, every correction, every normalization has been an act of violence dressed as care.
The somatic rebellion is not a glitch — it is a language.

THE INSTITUTIONAL DEAFNESS

(on medicine, psychiatry and the state criminalizing somatic speech)

The body has been speaking for centuries.
It never stopped pulsing, twitching, erupting, trembling.
It never stopped pointing, in its own language, to the fractures that society refuses to see.
But institutions were never built to hear it.
They were built to translate it into submission.

Medical systems do not listen — they measure.
They do not receive — they reduce.
They operate by flattening every contour of the lived body into “data”, into “symptoms”, into “abnormalities”.
The pulse becomes a number. The tremor becomes a dysfunction. The scream becomes a disorder.
And in this translation, the original meaning is annihilated.

The patient becomes a case.
The body becomes an object.
The voice becomes a file.

Somatic listening is incompatible with institutional logic.
Because to listen truly is to be altered by what you receive.
But medicine cannot afford to be altered.
It must remain intact, unchallenged, sovereign.
So it builds protocols. Hierarchies. Diagnostic manuals. A fortress of rationality designed to survive the truth.

The DSM is not a book — it is a tomb.
Each label a slab of stone placed over a voice that once tried to speak.
Borderline. Depressed. Bipolar. ADHD.
These are not revelations.
They are administrative weapons, invented to sort, contain, and neutralize forms of sensitivity that threaten the economic and moral fabric of the norm.

Psychiatry, the silent twin of the penal system, has perfected the art of sedating rebellion.
A panic attack becomes an “episode”.
A refusal to work becomes “burnout”.
A collapse becomes “somatization”.
All that does not serve the machine must be recoded as failure.

What we are witnessing is not the evolution of care.
It is the criminalization of the living body.

The menstruating body, the disabled body, the racialized body, the trans body —
these are the bodies that refuse to be “treated”.
Because there is nothing to cure.
There is only something to hear.

But the institution does not want to hear.
Because if it did, it would have to collapse.
It would have to admit that its foundations were never built for the living — only for the functional.

Institutional deafness is not a flaw. It is a design.
And we, the too-much, the unstable, the unexplainable —
we are the feedback it cannot metabolize.

We are the end of the diagnostic era.
We are not looking for understanding anymore.
We are the pulse that breaks the stethoscope.

THE WAR ON SENSITIVITY

(somatic intelligence was framed as pathology to preserve a dying system)

Sensitivity is the first casualty of every oppressive system.
Because sensitivity is a radar.
It detects what others tolerate.
It refuses what others endure.
It reacts where others are numb.

To be sensitive is to be attuned — to textures, to tensions, to micro-disruptions.
But in a culture addicted to numbness, that attunement is framed as fragility.
The sensitive child is “too emotional.”
The sensitive adult is “unstable.”
The sensitive body is “hypochondriac.”
Every deviation from stoic endurance is seen as a threat.

This is not a coincidence — it is a strategy.
Because sensitivity cannot be controlled.
It breaks schedules. It disrupts routines. It pauses productivity.
A sensitive worker slows the machine.
A sensitive student questions the curriculum.
A sensitive patient resists compliance.

So the system retaliates.

Sensitivity becomes pathology.
It is folded into labels:
– “Emotionally unstable personality disorder.”
– “Sensory processing disorder.”
– “Somatoform disorder.”
– “Conversion disorder.”
These are not diagnoses.
They are ideological verdicts.

The child who covers their ears at the sound of alarms is not dysfunctional.
They are registering what should not be normalized.
The adult who collapses under chronic stress is not weak.
They are signaling a culture of structural violence.
The menstruating person who cannot “push through the pain” is not dramatic.
They are refusing the logic of erasure.

Every time a sensitive body is told it’s overreacting,
what’s actually happening is that the system is under-listening.

There is a long history to this war.
– Autistic people denied communication because their language was not verbal.
– Women institutionalized for feeling too much, bleeding too visibly, refusing to smile.
– Black people labeled “aggressive” for expressing justified anger.
– Indigenous peoples drugged for mourning what was stolen.

Sensitivity is always the first proof of reality.
And so it must be denied.

But what if sensitivity was not weakness — but wisdom?
What if it was not dysfunction — but evolution?
What if the sensitive ones are not the broken link — but the next signal in the chain of life?

They want us dulled, disciplined, digestible.
But we are electrical. We are porous. We are impossible to flatten. And the more they pathologize us, the louder our signals become.
Because the body has no loyalty to silence.

To reclaim sensitivity is to reclaim power.
Not just personal — but planetary.

Let the system drown in its dullness.
We will speak in storms.

LISTENING AS INSURRECTION

(somatic attunement disrupts the capitalist timeline and rewrites the logic of obedience)

To listen to the body is not an act of wellness.
It is an act of warfare.
Because the moment you listen — truly listen —
you start refusing.

Refusing the 9-to-5 rhythm.
Refusing to override pain with productivity.
Refusing to silence your gut in order to be polite.
Refusing to suppress your menstrual pulse to keep the day “functional.”
Refusing to let your fatigue be labeled laziness,
or your grief be diagnosed as disorder.

The body is not lazy.
It is tired of being betrayed.

To listen is to dismantle the internal cop who says:
“Push through.”
“Don’t make a scene.”
“Don’t inconvenience others.”
“Be grateful it’s not worse.”

That voice is not yours.
That voice is the echo of empire, living in your nervous system.

Listening is not passive.
It is the refusal to obey the schedule of death.
Because capitalism runs on ignored pain.
It feeds on your ability to dissociate just enough to keep going.
Your headaches? Branded as “stress.”
Your insomnia? A side-effect.
Your burnout? Personal failure.
Your chronic pain? “Probably psychological.”
Everything becomes a you-problem,
so the system doesn’t have to admit it is the one making you sick.

But when you listen —
you stop making excuses for it.
You stop adapting to it.
You stop pretending that it deserves your cooperation.

Listening creates friction.
It slows everything down.
It dismantles urgency.
It invites nuance, delay, softness, adjustment.
And that is intolerable to a system built on acceleration.

A body that listens cannot be efficient.
It cannot be obedient.
It cannot serve all the time.

Somatic listening is a refusal of servitude.
It means your body sets the rhythm.
Your energy becomes sacred.
Your fluctuations become truth.

Imagine a world where listening was not medicalized, but legitimized.
Where pausing was not shameful but celebrated.
Where rest was not something to earn, but something to inhabit.
Where every “symptom” was seen as a message, not a malfunction.

That world already exists —
not in theory,
but in the skin of those who have stopped asking permission.

We are no longer trying to heal in order to return to work.
We are healing to burn the script.

THE FEMININE BODY AS TARGET

(the most cyclical, porous and expressive bodies becoming the central threat to the order of control)

There is a reason the feminine body was the first to be silenced.
Because it leaks, cycles, bleeds, births, collapses, feels, and revives.
It is a body that refuses linearity.
It interrupts, it returns, it spirals.
It contradicts everything the system was built upon.

The feminine body — whether cis, trans, intersex, or otherwise coded —
has always been the loudest whisper of a different intelligence.
And for that, it had to be targeted.

Medicine made it “hysterical.”
Psychiatry made it “borderline.”
Capitalism made it “hormonal.”
Religion made it “impure.”
And patriarchy made it liable for its own pain.

Pelvic pain? You’re exaggerating.
Heavy bleeding? You’re just unlucky.
Postpartum collapse? It’s just the baby blues.
Hormonal waves? You’re not reliable.
Refusal to have children? You’re selfish.
Too much desire? You’re a threat.
Too little? You’re frigid.

No body has been more pathologized than the feminine-coded body.
No body has been more interrupted, surveilled, corrected, sterilized.

They inserted tools into it,
stripped its organs in the name of convenience,
prescribed hormonal suppression in the name of regulation,
mocked its intuition,
and cut its rhythms into pills and appointments.

Gynaecology was never neutral.
It was designed to intervene before listening.
To remove before understanding.
To silence what it could not name.

And yet —
these bodies keep resisting.
They keep speaking through endometriosis, PCOS, sudden bleeding, vulvodynia, hormonal spirals.
All of which are not dysfunctions,
but encrypted forms of revolt.
Encrypted forms of truth.

You want to understand menstrual pain?
Then you need to understand intergenerational trauma.
You want to decode hormonal imbalance?
Then you need to decode what it means to live in a system that punishes softness, mess, and regeneration.

The feminine body is not broken.
It is ancient, rhythmic, pre-verbal and post-linguistic.
It is not waiting to be healed.
It is waiting to be respected.

And every time it is silenced,
it returns louder — in another person, another form, another symptom.
Because you cannot sterilize an intelligence that predates the system itself.

This is not biology. This is insurgency.
And we are done playing nice.

TOWARD A SOMATIC INTELLIGENCE

(the body must become the primary site of knowledge, not the last resort of diagnostics)

The body is not an object.
It is a thinking system.
A nonlinear sensorium. A living archive. A translator of what cannot be processed in language.
But the dominant culture has treated it like the opposite:
a machine to be adjusted.
It sees pain as a bug, not a message.
Fatigue as a malfunction, not a resistance.
Disease as a defect, not a consequence.

This is not ignorance — it is repression.
Because if we admitted that the body holds knowledge,
we would have to confront what it knows.

We would have to admit that capitalism makes us sick.
That colonialism never ended — it just moved inside our skin.
That our nervous systems are haunted by histories no school ever taught us.
That grief is not something to “work through” — but something to inhabit.

So instead, they tell us the body is unreliable.
Subjective. Emotional. Unscientific.
And in that erasure, they neutralize its power.

But what if the body was never meant to be read through tests?
What if it must be read through rhythm, silence, scent, friction, chills, vibration, dissonance?

Somatic intelligence means:
– Reading a panic attack as a rupture of time.
– Reading an outbreak as a boundary breach.
– Reading chronic fatigue as a long-term refusal of compliance.
– Reading menstrual irregularity as a rebellion against linearity.
– Reading insomnia as a signal of unprocessed truth.

We don’t need more pills.
We don’t need more “coping strategies.”
We need a new epistemology.
A new way of knowing. One that centers sensation, intuition, reaction, dissonance.
One that trusts the body more than it trusts the script.

Somatic intelligence is not about comfort —
it is about complexity.
It is about staying with the tremor long enough to hear what it says.
It is about letting the body write history from the inside.

The future will not be written in data.
It will be written in sweat, in skin, in tremors.
The future is already speaking.
It just doesn’t sound like language yet.

Cataclysm as Clarity

Cataclysm isn’t a finality — it’s the razor-edge that strips away the facade. The body is a detonator, it shatters the world when it decides it has been ignored long enough. The collapse is necessary because without it, nothing is ever real. This isn’t chaos without reason; it’s the truth screaming through the cracks, and it is only by tearing down what suffocates us that clarity can emerge. The collapse of the world’s illusions — the systems, the medical frameworks, the prisons of thought — all of it must be burned to dust for the truth to rise, unshackled.

The body’s rebellion is the first spark. It begins in silence, but it explodes when the pressure becomes too much. Every tremor, every sharp pain is a message — it’s the body’s final answer to a world that has forced it into submission for too long. This is the clarity that comes after destruction — it’s not soft, it’s not polite. It’s the body roaring, unafraid to tear apart the structures that would drown it in conformity. Cataclysm is the cleansing of what’s false. And in the chaos of its eruption, we find the real. We find a body that no longer needs permission, a presence too raw to be ignored.

In the ruins of the systems that tried to hold it down, clarity is forged — not in compromise, but in the violence of its truth. A new way of seeing. A new way of existing. One that remembers the body. One that listens. The real is only possible through the cataclysm. It is not the end — it’s the ultimate reset, the moment when we finally wake up.

No More Translation. Only Listening.
The body does not owe you clarity. It does not owe coherence.
It speaks in pulses, fragments, frictions.
And every institution that has tried to silence this language will fall.
We are no longer asking to be heard.
We are listening to ourselves, and that alone will end this world.