Winter 2026
Welcome to my new quarterly newsletter Coming up for Air. This is the first edition, and I’m excited to share it with you.
selkasoma (sel-ka-SO-ma) n. v.
Etymology: selkie (a shapeshifting creature of Northern folklore, seal in water, human on land) + ka (initials, K.A. Rupp) + soma (Greek: the living body)
Definition:
A practice of embodiment and nervous system recovery that treats the body as a shapeshifter, able to take on and move fluidly between different states. Transformation, rather than rigidity, is understood as the body's natural state.
The coaching work of Karolina Rupp, playfully blending somatic and nervous-system-based methods with the idea that healing means being resilient and able to move freely among all the perspectives and sides of yourself, discovering what's there without losing yourself in any one of them.
The practice of diving beneath the surface into the living body, into what's often hidden, to feel what can't be seen from the outside, and carrying it back up to be meaningfully integrated or resolved.
Field notes on being a body
A column bringing together psychology, body work, and lived experience
Last month I signed up for an introductory workshop in freediving. What I knew before I started was that freedivers can hold their breath for a crazy amount of time and dive quite deep into waters that light struggles to reach. I got this information from a documentary I had watched a few years ago.
There was a slideshow first, then a pool that was, it turns out, not deep at all, which cleared up any fantasy I'd been secretly nursing about descending into some abyss on day one. Thick wetsuit on, calming breathing, face down in the water, floating, holding my breath, being talked through it by the coach, who holds a world record of going 130 meters deep!
My coach explained that one goes through three phases while holding one's breath. From memory, the first was the easy phase just after having taken a deep breath. The second is when things become uncomfortable, with the air hunger kicking in, and the third is a little trippy. After the third phase, you would experience a blackout. My coach said that some freedivers experience this quite a bit, but she suggested steering clear of going that far. My gut is totally with her on that.
The autonomic nervous system can interpret some sensations as threats, even though there is actually no (longer a) threat present. It has learned over time, usually through a traumatic event or chronic exposure, that a certain situation is not safe, even though it is.
So this exercise was about the strange gap that opens up between what your body is telling you and what you actually know. At some point, air hunger kicks in, a loud, urgent, very convincing signal that you need to breathe right now. But I had learned earlier that you're nowhere near out of oxygen when these sensations kick in, that there is more than enough in your body. So I found my body insisting on an emergency, even though I knew it wasn't one, as I attempted to remain relaxed. I was told to sing something in my head, or think about a visualisation that mattered to me. The urgency to breathe will still be there, but the focus will not be on it, making it somewhat smaller. What struck me was that all of this, the physical sensations, the way I want to control and will my physical struggling into relaxation, the childhood song playing in my brain, opening and closing my eyes (they meant to remain closed in this exercise), feeling the comfort of her hand on my shoulder and my focus when coming up for air, is me, different parts of me, my body, my mind — all of it.
I like Daniel Siegel's view on the brain/body/mind relationship. He states that the mind also encompasses what happens in your heart, intestines, immune system, and other bodily systems. “Energy is fully embodied, not just enskulled” (Siegel, 2021). So when talking about the mind, it is both brain and body, the whole thing.
[possibly add body-mind divide from book on eastern perspective on the body]
A few days later, I was walking with a friend whose father had passed away around two years ago. Our conversation had me thinking about grief and loss, and how these feelings never really go away, but rather become a little smaller as we somewhat reluctantly build a new life where the person we lost no longer lives in our present.
It’s not really possible to fully process a loss, to fully get over it. Instead, one moves forward with it, and this moving forward changes the intensity of the grief and how we experience it.