Before you had a single word for what was happening around you, your body already knew.
It knew footsteps. It knew faces. It knew the difference between a room you could relax in and one you needed to pay attention to. Long before you could explain fear, anticipation, belonging or safety, you were already learning them through sensation.
This is one of the things I have become most interested in over the years: how much of what governs a human life was learned before we had any idea we were learning.
We tend to think of memory as something we can recall. A birthday. A kitchen. The smell of our grandmother’s house. The first day of school. But there are other kinds of remembering. Sometimes memory arrives as a tightening in the chest. A held breath. A stomach that drops before the mind has decided there is anything to be concerned about.
You can be forty-eight years old, sitting across the table from someone you love, and they go quiet.
Nothing has happened.
And yet, something in you changes.
Your mind may not even notice it at first. Your body does. The shoulders rise slightly. The breath becomes shallow. Perhaps you begin searching their face. Perhaps you start talking more. Perhaps you withdraw before they have the opportunity to withdraw from you.
The present moment has barely begun and something older is already answering it.
I have watched this happen countless times while sitting with people. Someone will be telling me about something fairly ordinary and their body will begin telling me another story entirely. Their words say they are fine. Their jaw says otherwise. Their shoulders move toward their ears. Their breathing changes. Sometimes a hand closes into a fist without them noticing.
When I ask them to stop talking for a moment and feel what is happening, they are often surprised.
“Oh.”
There you are.
The body is extraordinarily loyal
This is why I have never been particularly interested in treating the body as an obstacle to overcome. The body is extraordinarily loyal. It learned what it learned because, at some point, the information mattered.
Pay attention.
Be quiet.
Keep everyone happy.
Don’t need too much.
Stay useful.
Don’t let your guard down.
Leave first.
Whatever the instruction was, the body learned it beautifully.
The difficulty is that the body does not organize time the way the thinking mind does. Something learned decades ago can still arrive with the urgency of now. We may have left the house, ended the relationship, grown up, built another life and become an entirely different person, while some ancient sentry inside us remains faithfully standing at its post.
And then we become angry with it.
We tell ourselves we should know better. We have worked on this. We understand where it comes from. We remind ourselves that this person is not that person, this room is not that room, this life is not that life.
All of which may be true.
And still the chest tightens.
There is a particular tenderness required here because the body is not persuaded by our impatience with it. In my experience, impatience usually gives it one more thing to protect against.
How the body begins to change
What changes things is relationship.
Can I notice what is happening without immediately trying to make it stop?
Can I remain here while the sensation moves through me?
Can I put my feet on the floor and actually feel the floor?
Can I breathe without demanding that the breath accomplish something?
Can I become curious about the part of me that is preparing for something that may no longer be coming?
These are very small acts. They do not look impressive from the outside.
Much of the work that changes us doesn’t.
Sometimes the most important moment in an entire session is the moment a person stops explaining themselves and becomes quiet enough to notice what their body has been saying underneath the explanation.
Not to analyze it.
To listen.
There is a difference.
Healing as reunion
We have become very good at turning healing into another project of self-improvement. We monitor ourselves, diagnose ourselves, correct ourselves and become frustrated when the body refuses to follow the timeline we have assigned to it.
I am much more interested in reunion.
The next time something in your body responds more strongly than the present moment seems to warrant, you might resist the temptation to ask, What is wrong with me?
Put your hand where you feel it, if that feels natural. Stay there for a moment. Let the sensation exist without making it evidence of anything.
You don’t even have to know where it came from.
Just notice.
Something in me is responding.
Something in me remembers.
And I am here with it now.
There are things the body has carried for us because, once upon a time, we had no other way to carry them.
Perhaps healing begins when it discovers it no longer has to carry them alone.