Why your body speaks and how to listen

In our fast-paced, thinking-focused culture, it’s easy to believe that we experience our lives only through intellectual pathways; our understanding of what happens to us. The reality, though, is that our nervous system, of which our brains are a part, runs through our entire body, providing us with a rich, sensory experience that we either don't notice, choose to ignore, or are afraid to engage with.

Understanding that we live our lives as 'whole beings' is frightening for traumatised individuals because it is often a visceral reminder of the overwhelm they felt at the time of a trauma. However, being able to safely tap into the lived experience of your body is the pathway to healing.

Why the body holds the key

Trauma is often thought of as a psychological event, but research and decades of combined clinical experience across the world show us that it is also a physiological experience.

In fact, at the time of an overwhelming experience, the part of the brain responsible for logical thought and intellectual processing is offline. This is a necessary biological reality because thinking about how to respond to a threat will only slow your responses down.

Fight, flight and freeze originate, and are controlled by a part of your brain whose language is sensation. If we want to talk to that part of the brain, to teach it that it's safe and has survived, we need to learn its language. 

Practical ways to start listening to your body

Many of us have grown up in societies that hold intellect in high regard. The unintended consequence of this is that we have disconnected from the experience of our bodies. We may know that we feel anxious, but we can't describe it. We may know that we're angry, but we don't spend any time in consultation with the body to figure out what anger actually feels like.

Learning to notice, interpret, and respond to these signals is at the heart of somatic work and the ability to regulate and restore balance in your nervous system. While working with a therapist can be productive and rewarding, you don’t need to dive straight into therapy or complex techniques to start reconnecting with your body. Here is a simple practice that can help you tune in:

Pause and notice

Take a moment to notice where you feel tension, discomfort, or energy in your body. Now name it. You may say to yourself, 'I feel annoyed.' While this may be true, it is not the language we're aiming for. Keep going until you reach sensation. For example, "I can feel a tension in my left shoulder, just at the base of my neck. It's long and thin, and it feels like it's pulling my head to one side." Now that you've located it, don't simply shake it away. Spend some time with it and see if it changes in response to your curious attention.

This may seem like a simple thing to do, but it is the foundation upon which any somatic therapy will begin. A gentle, non-judgemental curiosity about what your body is trying to draw your attention to; not because it wants to punish or scare you, but because it knows that what it's holding inside is not supposed to be there, and it needs a bit of help to release it.

Why this matters for counselling and everyday life

Whether you’re a counselling professional or someone looking to have a better relationship with your body, understanding your nervous system's role in trauma and stress can transform how you approach mental health. By tuning into the body’s messages and speaking back in a language it understands, we can prevent overwhelm, respond more effectively to stress, and cultivate true resilience.

It is not that talking about and understanding what happened to us is unimportant; it is.  It's vital to have someone sit across from us, in a therapy room, for example, and witness what we went through, and to eventually make sense of it all. However, the access point to trauma that is held in the body is the body and not the mind. Before we get to understanding, we need to help the body to feel safe; to know that the danger has passed, and it is OK to live in the present. 

Going deeper

Working with a somatic practitioner, you will likely spend some time understanding the biology of threat, including how your body responds to it and how it has impacted you. From there, a gentle introduction to reconnecting with your body through somatic awareness (what sensations are you aware of?) is followed by deeper explorations of your unique response to what happened to you.

Somatic experiencing, integrated with talking therapies, can work with the body and the mind by integrating your experience of an event with your understanding of what happened. The starting point is awareness, and this you can practice at home simply by spending a little time in your body each day and being curious about what it feels like, what it's responding to and how that response shows up as sensation in your body.