Climate change is often framed as an external crisis: rising seas, hotter days, stronger storms, failing systems. But there is another terrain where the climate crisis is already unfolding quietly and persistently: the human body.
You can feel it in the tight chest when reading the news. In the dissociation that creeps in after too many catastrophic headlines. In the fatigue that makes it hard to imagine a future, let alone fight for one. These are not personal failures. They are physiological responses to prolonged stress, uncertainty, and grief.
If climate change is a survival challenge, then resilience cannot live only in policies, infrastructure, or emergency kits. It must live in our nervous systems, our breath, our capacity to stay present and connected when things get hard. In other words, climate resilience must include the body.
The What: Climate Change Is a Nervous System Event
Research increasingly shows that climate disruption affects mental and physical health through chronic stress, trauma exposure, and anticipatory anxiety. Climate anxiety, eco-grief, and solastalgia (a form of existential distress) are not abstract emotional states. They are embodied experiences shaped by prolonged nervous system activation.
As somatic practitioner Resmaa Menakem reminds us, “Trauma lives in the body, not the story.” Long before we find the right words for climate grief or fear, our nervous systems are already responding — tightening, freezing, dissociating, or bracing for impact. These states shape behavior. They influence whether we can plan, collaborate, imagine, or act.
When preparedness ignores the body, it asks people to act from a place of chronic stress. When resilience includes somatics (body-based practices that heal the mind-body connection), it creates the conditions for clarity, choice, and sustainable action.
If communities are dysregulated, preparedness plans fail at the human level.
The Why: You Can’t Think Your Way Out of a Survival State
Much climate education seemingly assume that if people just have the right information, they will act. But information does not override a nervous system in distress. When fear and grief are stored somatically, logic alone cannot resolve them.
Somatic practices work because they address the body directly: breath, sensation, movement, grounding, orientation. They help the nervous system shift from threat to safety, from paralysis to presence.
This is not about bypassing grief or fear. It is about building the capacity to stay with reality without shutting down.
Climate scholar Britt Wray notes that collective action requires emotional capacity, not just moral clarity. When movements ignore the body, they risk burnout, fragmentation, and harm. When they include somatic care, they build endurance.
Even from the great and late Assata Shakur, we are reminded that “It is our duty to fight for our freedom… but we must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” And we must love ourselves and each other enough to do something, to protect, to re-embody and make a plan—from your household to community-wide scale.
The Where: Climate Stress Lives Everywhere, Especially Inside Us
Climate disruption does not only fracture ecosystems; it strains relationships between neighbors, within families, and across movements. In moments of uncertainty, people often retreat inward, believing resilience is something they must carry alone. But healing justice organizer Prentis Hemphill offers a different truth: “Healing does not happen in isolation. Healing happens in relationship.”
Climate resilience, then, is not only about individual coping skills. It is about restoring our capacity to be with one another—to regulate together, to prepare together, and to imagine futures that are rooted in shared care rather than survivalism alone.
Climate stress does not only appear after disasters. It shows up:
- In communities facing slow violence: heat, pollution, flooding, food insecurity
- In frontline workers responding to repeated emergencies
- In young people carrying anticipatory grief for futures they fear may not exist
- In activists and organizers cycling through urgency and exhaustion
- In individuals quietly disconnecting to cope
The impacts are both literal and figurative. Bodies tense. Sleep shortens. Attention fragments. Creativity narrows. Over time, this shapes culture.
Somatic resilience asks us to notice where we are holding the crisis. Not to pathologize ourselves, but to listen. The body is a messenger. From smells and senses to tension and disruption, it tells us both when our internal and communal / collectives systems are unsustainable long before collapse becomes visible.
The How: Somatics as a Climate Survival Skill
Somatic practices remind us that resilience begins with the felt sense of safety; not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection. When we learn to track breath, ground into the earth, and regulate our nervous systems alongside others, we reclaim agency. We move from reactive survival into intentional preparedness.
This is where embodied climate resilience becomes a strategy, a cultural shift, and a hard skill for hard times.
1. Regulation Before Action
Before we can respond to emergencies or engage in adaptation work, we need nervous systems capable of clarity. Simple practices like extended exhalation breathing, orienting to the environment, or grounding through the feet can reduce threat activation within minutes.
This is not self-care as retreat. It is self-regulation as readiness.
Try this practice:
When stressed, gently name 5 things you can see, 3 things you can hear, and 1 thing you can feel in your body. This practice helps you orient by restoring cognitive function and brining you back into the body for action.
Like muscle memory we build in the gym, regulation takes practice before crisis strikes so we know where how to respond under pressure. Breathwork, mindfulness, and orientation give us those tools.
2. From Freeze to Choice
Many people are not unmotivated; they are frozen.
Somatic practices help restore a sense of choice by reconnecting people to sensation and agency. Movement, shaking, vocalization, and putting your barefoot or hand on the ground can gently thaw immobilization.
Try this:
Stand up straight. Raise your heels and drop them back down. After you’ve done this a few times, add in your arms. Raise them up when you come up on your toes and let them drop down to your feet when you bring your heels down. Take deep breaths in through your noise and out through your mouth throughout. Repeat 10-15x or until you feel a like you can move again.
When the body remembers it can move, the mind remembers it can act, image and create.
3. Community as Regulation
Nervous systems regulate often regulate in safe shared relationship. Circles, shared rituals, synchronized movement, and collective breath create safety cues that no individual practice can replicate. This is why community-based somatic work is especially powerful for climate resilience.
Preparedness is relational. We survive together. This is why we have our Climate Resilience Through Embodied Preparedness™ program. It’s a grassroots, community-based model that integrates somatic regulation with emergency preparedness, hazard-specific readiness, and resilience hub development.
Learn more about our workshops here.
4. “What If” as a Somatic Question
Somatic work supports a shift from “What if everything goes wrong?” to “What if we are more capable than we think?” This reframing opens creativity, visioning, and adaptive problem-solving.
Try asking yourself this:
What if I could meet this moment without panic? What if adaptation felt connective instead of isolating? What if the future required more presence, not more speed?
Let sensation guide possibility. Creativity emerges when a fear of how to respond to a crisis like climate-related disasters loosens its grip.
Integrating Somatics Into Climate Preparedness
Somatic resilience does not replace traditional emergency planning. It strengthens it.
Imagine preparedness workshops that begin with grounding before go-bag education. Resilience hubs that include breathwork alongside evacuation routes. Climate adaptation meetings that acknowledge grief before strategy.
These integrations help people retain information, collaborate under stress, and respond adaptively when plans inevitably need to change.
Want to host our Climate Resilience Through Embodied Preparedness™ in your community? Contact us to learn how.
A Closing Reflection
The climate crisis is not only a test of technology or governance. It is a test of our capacity to stay present in the face of loss, uncertainty, and transformation.
The body is not a side note in this work. It is central.
When we tend to the nervous system, we expand our collective bandwidth for courage, care, and creativity. We remember that resilience is not just about surviving what is coming, but about how we choose to be with one another while we do.
References
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Hemphill, P. (2024). What it takes to heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world. Random House.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Wray, B. (2022). How to bring your whole body to the climate justice movement. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com
Wright, E. (2021). Embodying the climate crisis. Medium. https://medium.com
Yes! Magazine. (2020). How to nourish resilience through trauma and somatics. https://www.yesmagazine.org
National Center for Biotechnology Information. (2023). Climate change, stress, and mental health. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Shakur, A. (1987). Assata: An autobiography. Lawrence Hill Books.
