THE FIELD ALMANAC

Bessel van der Kolk, MD

What it supports:

• The body as a repository of experience

• Nonverbal communication of threat and safety

• Why talk alone doesn’t resolve relational or emotional patterns

Evidence base: Neurobiology, trauma research, clinical studies

Peter A. Levine, PhD

What it supports:

• Nervous system literacy

• Sensation as language

• Regulation through completion, not analysis

Evidence base: Ethology, neuroscience, somatic psychology

Stephen W. Porges, PhD

What it supports:

• Social engagement system

• Safety as a prerequisite for communication

• Tone, face, posture as primary communicators

Evidence base: Neurophysiology (note: clinically influential, still debated in parts)

Emily Nagoski, PhD & Amelia Nagoski, DMA

What it supports:

• Completing the stress cycle

• Emotional processing in the body

• Women’s stress physiology

• Practical regulation tools

Evidence base: Stress physiology, behavioral science, health research

Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD

What it supports:

• Emotions as constructed meaning, not fixed reactions

• Context, body state, and prediction shaping experience

Evidence base: Affective neuroscience, fMRI research

Gavin de Becker

What it supports:

• Intuition as rapid pattern recognition

• Body signals as protective intelligence

Evidence base: Behavioral analysis, threat assessment (not academic neuroscience, but field-validated)

Tricia Hersey

What it supports:

• Rest as radical resistance

• Dismantling grind culture and productivity as worth

•The body as a site of liberation

• Collective and ancestral healing

• Imagination as revolutionary practice

Evidence base: Grounded in Black liberation theology, womanist thought, and the lived experience of Hersey's own radical rest practice as founder of The Nap Ministry.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

What it supports:

• Reciprocity with the living world

• Relational (not extractive) intelligence

• Knowledge through observation + patterning in nature

• Humility, gratitude, and earned belonging

• Integration of science + Indigenous wisdom

Evidence base: Ecology, ethnobotany, Indigenous knowledge systems (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), long-term environmental observation

Jennifer Armbruster

What it supports:

• Business as feminist practice

• New, values-driven economies

• Redistribution of power & resources

• Business as experimentation and art

• Feminine economic paradigm

Evidence base: Grounded in feminist economics and organizational research on power, leadership, and alternative economic models.

Jennifer Armbruster

What it supports:

• Embodied feminist healing

• Personal and collective repair

• Body as liberation site

• Earth and ancestral connection

• Feminist social change

Evidence base: Grounded in lived experience, feminist theory, and body-based healing perspectives.

Elyse Loehnen

What it supports:

• Releasing internalized "goodness" as self-erasure

• Reclaiming appetite, anger, ambition, and rest

• The body as the site of suppression

• Intergenerational feminine healing

• Transgression reframed as wholeness

Evidence base: Grounded in feminist theory, spiritual history, somatic awareness, and personal narrative.

Maureen Murdock

What it Supports:

• Integration over achievement

• Healing feminine–masculine split

• Cyclical growth patterns

• Inner authority + wholeness

• Descent as transformation

Evidence Base: Jungian psychology; Mythology and archetypal analysis