When Every Stick Becomes a Snake

Peter Levine’s iconic metaphor cuts to the heart of our collective dysregulation: “Trauma is not the story of what happened, but our body’s inability to distinguish the stick from the snake.” 

If you are unfamiliar with the metaphor of the stick versus the snake, it illuminates a critical aspect of how our nervous system responds to perceived threats. This metaphor, rooted in our evolutionary biology, offers profound insights for navigating today’s hyper-stimulating world while honouring ancestral wisdom and somatic awareness.

The Metaphor Explained

• The Snake: Represents a real, immediate threat to survival—like a predator. Biologically, encountering a snake triggers our fight-flight-freeze response, priming the body to act swiftly.
• The Stick: Symbolizes a misperceived threat—harmless stimuli mistaken for danger. After trauma or chronic stress, the nervous system may overreact, interpreting everyday stressors (e.g., emails, social conflicts) as existential threats.

In today’s world—where climate grief, systemic injustice, and digital overwhelm flood our senses—our nervous systems can get trapped in a perpetual hiss of false alarms. Colonial capitalism profits from this confusion, keeping us too exhausted to discern real threats from shadows. But what if recalibration isn’t about “managing stress,” but reclaiming our ancestral capacity to feel safe amid chaos?

The Colonial Wound in Our Wiring

Modern life bombards us with psychological sticks masquerading as snakes:

• Doomscrolling as “vigilance”
• Productivity guilt as “motivation”
• Isolation as “independence”

Our bodies, wired through generations of ancestral survival, can’t parse these colonial inventions from true danger. The result? A nervous system stuck in the smoke of a fire that never quite ignites—until we burn out.

Four Practices for Somatic Recalibration

Ground Before You Grieve

“The land remembers how to hold what humans forget.”

• Somatic Ritual: Press bare feet to earth (or floor) and breathe:
• Inhale: “I release what isn’t mine to carry”
• Exhale: “Land, transform this into compost”

Ancestral Pendulation

If we were to decolonize Levine’s method: 

1. Identify a “snake” (acute stressor): The news of another Indigenous language becoming extinct
2. Find the “stick” (neutral reality): Your ability to learn and share words from your own ancestral language
3. Bridge them with body awareness: “My throat tightens hearing of loss, but my tongue remembers how to form sounds of my ancestors.”

Community as Nervous System

Our ancestors relied on embodied discernment to survive. This included tuning in and trusting communal wisdom to distinguish threats. 

• Practice: Share “threat audits” with trusted circles. Collective discernment softens hyper-individualized stress.
• Share one “stick” mislabeled as a “snake” this week
• Co-create somatic responses (e.g., touching shoulders as you sit next to each other to help each system regulate)

Snake-Speak as Sacred Data

When true snakes appear (protests, personal betrayals, ecological collapses):

• Body First: Perform a decolonial body scan.Why? Body tracking reconnects you to your somatic “compass” 
• Close eyes, inhale, exhale 
• Ask: “Where is this ‘snake’ living in my body? Jaw ? Fists? Belly?”
• Note sensations without judgment
• Activate: Channel energy into protective action vs. paralysis. 
• One practice could include: Ground Through “Both/And”:
• Affirmation: “I am frozen AND I am safe to thaw”
• Action: Hold a cold stone (freeze) in one hand, warm cloth (mobilization) in the other. Pendulate focus between them and track what happens in your body.
• Rest After: Honor the snake’s teaching with a trauma-informed rest ritual. Looking for ideas? Check out an upcoming blog post that highlights different options. 

Relearning the Land’s Language

Our ancestors discerned threats through:

• Bird alarm calls
• Shifts in wind patterns
• Community storytelling

Modern parallel: Unfollow accounts (news, social media)  that breed helplessness. Train your algorithms to show mutual aid efforts. Let your digital “birds” signal real snakes.

Decolonial Integration

This approach dismantles colonial patterns by restoring communal rhythms that counteract isolation, which can feed freeze responses. It also honours natural cycles of action and rest—mirroring Indigenous concepts of time that flow with seasons and moon phases, not capitalist linearity. Through somatic sovereignty, we can begin to reclaim our body’s innate wisdom to both confront threats and return to safety. This allows us to begin to transform survival instincts into sacred dialogue between ancestral resilience and present-moment needs.

Remember: Regulation isn’t calmness—it’s the capacity to tremble and act. Colonial systems want you numbed or frenzied; somatic sovereignty lets you dance between.