The Embodied Medicine Pathway
Finding Safety, Connection, and Healing Within Yourself
The Embodied Medicine Pathway, developed by Dr. Becca Summers, MD, SEP, is a comprehensive care approach that focuses on increasing the body’s overall capacity for health. This pathway works by identifying and resolving major factors that cause and perpetuate disease and symptoms, while simultaneously supporting the body's natural healing processes. The Embodied Medicine Pathway cultivates the conditions for presence, connection, and embodiment to emerge.
Chronic illness often occurs when the body cannot return to a natural healing state. While modern medicine is highly effective at managing disease progression (pathophysiology) and alleviating symptoms, it frequently proves inadequate for complex, chronic conditions. In part, this is because it does not address some major factors that are known to cause and perpetuate disease.
The Threat Vortex
Dr. Summers’ term for the complex interplay of influences that keep the protective mechanisms of the body in response to threat. It is a physiologic dynamic created by infectious pathogens, the effects and expression of trauma, symptoms & disease, and the broader environmental influences. The Embodied Medicine perspective recognizes this dynamic and directly resolves components of The Threat Vortex.
There is a dynamic interplay between infectious pathogens, environmental exposures, and traumatic events (individual, collective, and ancestral) that can keep the body locked in a web of protective state as if it is continuing to react to threat. Dr. Summers describes this as the Threat Vortex (see diagram) which is an expanded scope of what Dr. Peter Levine (the creator of Somatic Experiencing®) calls the Trauma Vortex. When this is activated, even innocuous stimuli may then be experienced as life-threatening to the body. The reaction to The Threat Vortex is largely unconscious and deeply informs our physiology, emotions, behavior, and awareness which becomes a complex root of symptoms and disease. The effects can be perpetuated at the level of the nervous system, the immune system, the hormonal response, in the connective tissues, and in our cells at the level of the mitochondria . If the body continues to respond via survival mechanisms, healing can get blocked. When healing is blocked, there can be continuous reinjury. To heal and repair, the body needs to feel a sense of safety and to repattern the threat so that it knows the threat is over and in the past. In other words, it needs to complete what it did not have the opportunity to complete. From there, it can move towards coherence and flow.
The Embodied Medicine Pathway weaves medical care, with Somatic Experiencing & touch, myofascial regulation and other tools to build whole body capacity, to deactivate the influence of the Threat Vortex, and to support the emergence of healing and vitality. This path cultivates a felt-sense of safety within you, enhancing your personal agency and your ability to feel present, capable, and in control of yourself and your life.
The cell danger response (CDR) is an evolutionarily conserved cellular defense mechanism that protects against chemical, physical, or biological threats by triggering metabolic changes including altered mitochondrial function, inflammation, and tissue repair—but when this response persists abnormally instead of resolving, it blocks healing and drives chronic disease.
(The Cell Danger Response)
How The Embodied Medicine Pathway Works
The pathway unfolds in four stages. Each stage builds on the one before it. The pace is individualized, collaborative, and responsive to your capacity and life circumstances.
Core components used in the pathway
Many of these idea such as trauma physiology, embodiment, interoception, or physiological regulation are new for most people. Key terms will be available to explore more deeply through linked resources, videos, and handouts as you go.
Embodied Medicine is not linear. You may flow between the stages, revisit earlier supports, or pause when that feels right.
What matters most is that healing happens with connection to your body and that over time, you reclaim a felt sense of safety, choice, and belonging within yourself.
Getting Started
We will start enrolling patients in the The Embodied Medicine Pathway to start April 8, 2026.
If you’d like start on The Pathway, please fill out this form.
You’ll receive a welcome email with links to:
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An overview of the program
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Online intake forms
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Consent and logistics
Stage One:
Intake & Evaluation — Creating the Roadmap
1-3 Weeks
Purpose: To gather an understanding of you, your history, and current health needs in order to create a roadmap of how the Embodied Medicine Pathway will support your goals.
Stage Two:
Cultivating Flow, Capacity & Connection
~2-4 months
Purpose: To help your body move out of chronic dysregulation and build a foundational baseline that can support deeper healing. You’ll develop new connections to your body and learn practical self-regulation skills.
Stage Three:
Deactivating the Threat Vortex
~3-6 months
Purpose: To gently unwind the forces keeping your system stuck in a protective survival mode.
Stage Four:
Emergence of Vitality, Agency & Outward Connection
Ongoing
Purpose: To support the emergence of vitality.
As patterns of disease and reactivity recede, energy emerges. Here we are able to use our agency to connect more deeply with ourselves and with others as we creatively engage in our world.
Stage One:
Intake & Evaluation — Creating the Roadmap
Comprehensive Verbal History Intake
Gathering Prior Medical Information
Physical Assessment & Medical Evaluation
Creating Your Initial Roadmap: This roadmap is a living guide that helps you to subtly orient yourself to where you are, what has already shifted, and what is coming next. The initial roadmap will be developed from all the information gathered in Stage I. This will be shared electronically as a document that we both can modify and review.
Stage Two:
Cultivating Flow, Capacity & Connection
Introducing Foundational Health Cycle Principles: We will introduce some simple lifestyle, environmental, and behavioral interventions that can support your body’s terrain for capacity to heal.
Cultivating Regulation & Interoception: In this stage, using Somatatic Sessions, we focus on helping your body settle into a greater sense of safety, regulation, and connection. This is approached gently, supporting a growing sense of agency and allowing your body to reorganize toward improved function and resilience.
60 minutes Somatic Sessions will be 3–4 times per month (in person or virtual). Many sessions may include touch if it feels right for you and supports your process.
You’ll learn practices that support regulation of:
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The autonomic nervous system
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Hormonal rhythms
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Myofascial tone
We also cultivate interoceptive awareness which is your ability to sense what’s happening inside your body so you can recognize signals and stress earlier, before symptoms intensify.
Medical Care: Your medical care will be individualized and responsive to your unique needs. The focus at this stage is on calming the system, lowering inflammation, and allowing your body to function with more ease. There will be regular medical check-ins, separate from somatic sessions, as needed. At this stage, we often start or refine medical treatments.
Educational videos and resources will help you understand what we are doing as well as give you some supportive tools to use throughout the day.
Stage Three:
Deactivating the Threat Vortex
By this stage, your body has more capacity, regulation, and trust. This allows us to work more directly to deactivate Threat Vortex- the combination of trauma, illness, environmental stressors, and physiological reactions that continually reactivate protective responses.
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Somatic Sessions 2-4 times a month
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Continued myofascial work & medical care as needed
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Address infectious pathogens
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Understanding your unique threat patterns
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Resolving traumatic response patterns
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Continuing expanded ability of interoception
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Other supportive therapies will be thoughtfully introduced
The result is that you will feel less reactive, less symptomatic, and more present.
Stage Four:
Emergence of Vitality, Agency & Outward Connection
As patterns of disease and reactivity recede, energy emerges. Here we are able to use our agency to connect more deeply with ourselves and with others as we creatively engage in our world.
This stage focuses on:
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Continued somatic and medical support
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Mitochondrial support
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Myofascial and movement‑based work
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Using sound and the voice
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Group work for relational and collective repair
As you continue, you will find a deeper grounding of what is good for you, how connection feels in your body, and feel more like yourself.
As part of noticing ongoing shifts, throughout The Embodied Medicine Pathway, we will continue to update and expand your Roadmap and you’ll be able to complete standardized assessment tools to objectively evaluate the overall efficacy of the pathway and your healing.
We will start enrolling patients in the The Embodied Medicine Pathway to start April 8, 2026.
If you’d like to get started, please fill out this form.