Around a bright burning fire on the edge of the Kalahari Basin, a San Shaman begins to move. He breathes deeply and quickly. His people sing and clap and join him in dance. Then begins the trembling, the shaking. It is hypnotic, deliberate, intense, and, for the experienced dancer, an entryway into trance.

This is the !Kia dance, and, according to the rock art found throughout southern Africa, has been an important healing ritual for thousands of years. The San- also somewhat controversially called the Bushmen- belong to one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world, tracing their lineage in this region back over 20,000 years. And their famous “trance dance” is one of the oldest continuous healing practices on the planet. When there is illness or conflict, the San shaman will decide the dance is needed, and dancers will shake and tremble with n/um energy,  working themselves into a hypnotic state.  The dance is believed to help them transcend and heal whatever afflicts.

According to modern day neuroscientists like Peter Levine that is exactly what this kind of movement supports.  Like the San, somatic therapists now believe shaking and trembling are essential to healing on a neurological level.

In the 1970s, Peter Levine started watching wild animals coming out of life-or-death encounters. Antelope chased by a lion, trapped or caught, then escaping with their lives at the last second.  What they did, every single time, before running to rejoin the herd: they shook. Hard. Whole-body trembling, sometimes for minutes. Then a deep breath, and then back to grazing with the herd.

Humans, Levine noticed, do not finish that shake. We repress it. We brace through it, push past it, rationalize over it. And the energetic charge of the threat response stays in the tissue. Years later, that undischarged charge has a name. We call it trauma.

His method, Somatic Experiencing, became the foundation of an entire field. David Berceli later codified it further in TRE (Tension and Trauma Release Exercises), which is now taught to military personnel returning from combat zones, to humanitarian workers in disaster relief, to refugees escaping war zone, and to therapists witnessing people’s pain. The mechanism is the same one the San have been working with under the stars: induced tremoring discharges activation, completes the stress response cycle, and brings the parasympathetic nervous system back online.

Add to that the rhythmic, communal element — co-regulation through entrainment — and you have a stunningly complete nervous-system intervention. Sound, breath, movement, touch, community, meaning. Many layers of deep healing.

We tend to think of "ancient healing" and "neuroscience" as occupying opposite paradigms. They don't. Neuroscience is the lab research catching up to what people deeply in touch with their spirit and bodies already worked out a long time ago.

The San healers were inducing controlled tremoring for healing. Levine and Berceli rediscovered the same mechanism in a Western clinical frame. Thousands of years apart. Same body. Same nervous system. Same medicine.

You don't need a fire, a shaman, or a circle of singers to access this. Try the gentle, at home version:

Stand with your feet hip-width apart, knees softly bent. Drop your tailbone slightly. Let your knees begin to bounce — small, easy, almost lazy. Continue bouncing, finding a rhythm. Within a minute or two, your legs will likely begin to shake on their own. Let them. Don't perform it. Don't push it. Don't make it bigger than it is. Two to five minutes is plenty.

Notice what shifts. Notice what releases. This is not a workout. It is your body releasing stored energy it has been carrying far too long.

Pro tip: if you feel called to do so, you can use music to support your practice- rhythmic drums or chanting are best.

One of the oldest healing traditions on Earth is, by any modern measure, a somatic trauma-release practice. The San Bushmen of the Kalahari were tremoring as medicine long before trauma therapy had a name. Now neuroscience is recognizing the power in what ancient people and animals alike have naturally done, something that has allowed them to heal in ways we have forgotten. We are now relearning this form of deep healing and, best of all, it is something you can do in the comfort of your own home.