Body
Working with the body’s innate wisdom
“Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than fear, everything shifts.”
Bessel van der Kolk
Our body remembers everything, as Besel Van der Kolk says, “the Body keeps the score”. It remembers all our experience and our body is our emotional cupboard. We hold our unprocessed emotions that felt too much to feel at the time. Holding it down and as far away from our conscious awareness, holding it tight in our hips, diaphragms, lower stomach, thighs, jaw, throat and shoulders. We try to ‘hold ourselves together’, literally bracing ourselves, holding ourselves in, contracted. And quite frankly, it’s exhausting.
It takes immense energy to hold and push down these emotions and can feel like trying to hold a beachball underwater. And every now and then, our grip loosens, and the intensity of those emotions can bounce up to the surface, where we quickly try to swallow them back down.
But there is another way
The body has an innate wisdom, a quiet intelligence that is trying to get itself back into balance. Medics and scientists refer this as homeostasis. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica “Homeostasis is any self-regulating process by which an organism tends to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are best for its survival.”
Our body is able to do this for us, if only we would allow it. That’s right, we get in our own way by trying to use our conscious minds to feel safe. But our felt sense of safety is not in the conscious mind, it is in the body.
We have disconnected from our body in favour of thinking and analysing. We have forgotten and disconnected from the innate wisdom of the body through numbing out.
The world we [as humans] have created for ourselves is overwhelming, over stimulating with not much space to slow down, recharge or connect with how we are actually feeling. So it’s no wonder that we are led to desensitise ourselves in whatever way we can through food, over analysing, being too busy, scrolling social media, binge watching TV, consuming drugs and alcohol. We have disconnected from the thing that can help us feel safe, the felt sense, the actual physical experience of feeling safe, at ease and relaxed.
We feel safe, we don’t think safe
When we start to come into the body and experience the sensations and emotions that are there, we can start to recognise where we are at. We can start to feel our state. Feeling and learning how to come into feeling in a safe way, is the first step in your healing journey. The body never lies. And as a Chinese proverb says “if you don’t listen to your body when it whispers you’ll hear it when it screams”.
The body craves sensory information of safety, it physically responds to these cues of safety by relaxing our muscles. It receives millions of pieces of sensory information through our sight, sound, hearing, taste and touch. And when we start to connect in with how our body responds to these different things – such as the ‘ahhhhh’ when we climb into a comfortable bed with fresh sheets, or the warmth of hands around a mug of tea or the felt sense of support from another trusted person’s touch on our arm or shoulder, our body responds with a quiet ‘ahhhhhh’.
When we start to flood the body with sensory cues of safety, it allows us to feel into the more uncomfortable feelings which over time helps to build our strong internal container.
Our body also has an ability to shake and release our muscles to loosen tension and old repressed memories that still have an emotional charge. These are called neurogenic tremors and is our body’s natural tremor reflex. This is an involuntary tremor, which is different from consciously shaking.
We are fully able to self-regulate and to stop these tremors at any time. It’s similar to breathing; we can control our breath when we bring our attention to it, but when we ‘forget’ to breathe our body takes over for us. TRE® (tension and trauma release exercises) is a way of accessing this tremor reflex.
Experience tells me that the body’s wisdom has a deeper intelligence than the conscious mind. Just think about how it keeps all our bodily functions happening without any interference from us, if we had to do all that consciously, pushing the right buttons at the right time, I’m sure we’d struggle to keep ourselves alive! However, when we start to follow the body’s wisdom, learning to trust it to bring us back into balance, it gently releases what it needs to at the right time.
All we need to do is learn how to come back into connection, feel that experience of being in our bodies to ground ourselves to the here and now, instead of the virtual reality of our conscious mind, we can start to allow our body to guide us to the deep healing state the body is wanting to return back to.
