So hi everyone and thank you for joining me.
So in today's journey we'll explore trauma and healing from the lens of the body.
We are going on a journey through your body to find where your story has been hiding all along.
Now most people think trauma is something that happened to them in the past,
Something they remember or don't remember,
Something stored in their mind as a memory or as a feeling.
But trauma isn't primarily a mental event,
It's a psychological response that gets locked into your body when your nervous system's natural completion of a threat response is interrupted.
And right now as you sit here,
Trauma may be living in your muscles,
Your organs,
Your breath,
Your posture,
Not as a memory but as an ongoing present-tense physical reality.
So let me be specific.
When something overwhelming happens,
An accident,
Stressful event,
When you witness something,
Witness violence,
Anything that pushed your system past its capacity to cope,
Your body mobilizes to respond.
Your nervous system prepares to fight,
Flee or freeze.
Energy,
Adrenaline surges through you.
Your muscles contract,
Ready for action,
Your breath changes,
Your heart rate spikes.
But often,
Especially in childhood or in situations where you had no power,
You couldn't complete these responses.
You couldn't fight back,
You couldn't run away.
So you froze and that energy,
All that mobilized survival energy had nowhere to go.
So it stayed in your tissues,
In your nervous system,
Maybe in specific locations in your body,
Creating patterns of holding and bracing and numbing that you've been living with ever since.
Now this is possibly why you've talked about your trauma,
Maybe in therapy and you still feel anxious.
Why you can understand intellectually what happened and why,
But you still feel it in your body.
And why insight doesn't automatically create healing.
Because trauma isn't just in your mind.
It's in your jaw,
Clenched tight from years of swallowing words.
It's in your shoulders,
Raised and braced for the next hit.
It's in your belly,
Churning with fear that never got to fully discharge.
It's in your hips,
Locked from suppressed sexuality,
Frozen terror.
And it's in your chest,
Constricted from grief that couldn't breathe.
We are going to find where trauma lives in your body,
Not to traumatize you further,
Not to force anything.
But to finally give attention to the places that have been holding your story,
Waiting for you to notice,
To acknowledge and to offer them the possibility of release.
So find your way into stillness now.
All this work requires is your presence.
Not thinking about your body,
But actually inhabiting it.
Being willing to feel what you've been avoiding feeling.
No right or wrong way to do this.
Let's start with your breath.
Notice how you're breathing right now without trying to change it.
Just notice how you're breathing right now without trying to change it.
Is your breath shallow or deep?
Are you breathing into your chest or into your belly?
Is your exhale complete?
Or do you hold breath at the bottom?
Now trauma often lives in restricted breathing patterns.
The breath you held when you couldn't cry.
The breath you swallowed when you needed to stay invisible.
The breath you stopped when the feeling itself became too dangerous.
Just notice.
This is information your body is giving you.
There's no judgment.
Now bring your awareness to your jaw.
Now let's try this.
Just gently open and close your mouth.
Move your jaw side to side.
Now notice if there's tightness,
Clicking or holding.
Now the jaw is where swallowed rage lives.
Where words you couldn't speak still wait.
Where you bite down on the truth that feels too dangerous to express.
Trauma from powerlessness,
From having to stay silent,
From swallowing your no.
It all stores there.
Place your fingers now on the hinges of your jaw just in front of your ears and feel if there is hardness,
Tenderness.
This might be where your anger lives.
Frozen in time,
Waiting for permission to finally be expressed.
Now move your attention to your throat.
Just swallow gently and notice what that feels like.
Is your throat open and relaxed or does it feel constricted?
Now your throat holds everything you couldn't say.
The screams that got stuck.
The truth that felt too dangerous.
The needs you learned to silent.
Trauma from being silenced.
Trauma from not being believed.
From having your voice taken away or ignored.
It's all there.
Creating chronic throat tension,
Frequent throat clearing.
Feeling like something is stuck there that you can't quite swallow or speak.
Just be with whatever is showing up.
Now your shoulders.
Roll them back.
Roll them forward and now roll them back again and notice.
Do they move freely or is there resistance?
Are they up near your ears when you're trying to relax them?
Shoulders carry the weight of responsibility but they also carry the for impact.
The armor you built to protect yourself.
Constant readiness for the next blow.
Trauma from unpredictable caregivers.
From violence or threat of violence.
From having to be hyper vigilant.
It creates this permanent tension.
This raising of shoulders as if you're still waiting for the danger that might never come.
Bring your hands to your chest now.
Resting them over your heart.
Feel your heartbeat if you can.
Your chest holds grief.
Old grief.
Unprocessed grief.
Grief that never got to be witnessed or held.
It also holds the constriction that happens when you learned to protect this tender place by armoring it.
Creating a wall of tension across your chest that makes it hard to breathe fully.
Hard to feel deeply.
Hard to let love in or out.
Just notice for me now if your chest feels open or closed.
Spacious or tight.
This is where relational trauma lives.
Betrayal.
Abandonment.
Abuse from people who were supposed to love you.
Feeling what you feel.
Nothing to analyze.
Nothing to change and nothing to judge.
Now move down to your belly.
Place both your hands here and feel this area.
Your belly is where fear lives.
Primal visceral fear.
It's also where shame lives.
That sense of being fundamentally wrong or bad.
When your belly is tight or churning or numb.
It's often holding trauma from early childhood.
From times when survival felt threatened.
Maybe from violations of your body or boundaries.
And this is also where the freeze response lives most strongly.
That shutdown.
That going away and that disconnection from your core.
Feeling into it and trusting what your body is showing you.
Now your hips and your pelvis.
This might feel tender.
So move gently here.
Your hips hold sexual trauma.
Yes.
But they also hold any trauma where you couldn't move.
Couldn't run or you couldn't escape.
The freeze response often locks into the hips.
Creating chronic tightness and disconnection from this area.
Sometimes pain.
If you've experienced any form of violation or if you learn to disconnect from your sexuality because it wasn't safe.
If you felt trapped or powerless.
Your hips remember.
They hold that immobilization.
That sense of being frozen.
Unable to move forward or away.
Just feel what your hips are showing you now.
Now feel your legs and your feet.
These are your capacity for escape.
For running.
For moving towards what you want.
And moving away from what threatens you.
When trauma involves being trapped.
Being unable to leave.
Or being physically or mentally restrained.
Your legs hold on to that.
Sometimes as weakness.
Sometimes as restless energy that can never quite discharge.
And sometimes as numbness.
Your feet need to feel the ground beneath them to feel safe.
But if you learn that the ground itself wasn't safe.
If home wasn't safe.
If nowhere felt like safety.
You might feel completely disconnected from your feet.
Ungrounded.
Like you're floating.
Like your legs might collapse.
Now let's work with what we have discovered.
We are not going to try to force anything to release.
We are going to offer an invitation,
Attention and presence.
Choose now one area of your body where you felt the strongest response or activation.
Where you sensed trauma might be living.
Gently place your hands there if your body allows.
Now this may be a part of you that has been holding on to so much for so long.
It's been trying to protect you.
Trying to complete a response that got interrupted.
Trying to keep you safe even through danger in the past.
Speak to this part of your body.
Silently or out loud.
I see you.
I feel you.
Thank you for holding this for me.
Thank you for trying to keep me safe.
I'm here now.
I'm ready to help you release what you've been carrying.
I see you.
I feel you.
Thank you for holding this for me.
Thank you for trying to keep me safe.
I'm here now and I'm ready to help you release what you've been carrying.
Breathe into this area now.
Imagine your breath now.
Bringing warmth,
Space and bringing the message that it's safe now.
Some of you may feel this sensation intensify at first and that's completely normal.
This is just that energy or that imprint beginning to move.
You might feel tingling,
Might feel warmth,
Even shaking or trembling.
This is your body's natural way of discharging the held trauma.
Don't stop it.
Allow it.
This is healing.
If emotions arise,
Tears,
Anger or fear,
Let it come.
Trauma releases through the body and often there have been stored emotions along the way with the physical holding.
You're not being re-traumatized.
You're finally allowing the natural completion of a response that got frozen.
This is what your body has been trying to do all along.
To complete the cycle,
To discharge the energy,
To come back to equilibrium.
You are just giving it permission to do that now.
Let's practice gentle movement now to support the release.
Starting with whatever area felt most activated.
Begin to move it very slowly and very gently.
If it was your jaw,
Open and close your mouth.
Move it side to side and if you're guided to make any sounds,
Do that as well.
If it was your shoulders,
Roll them,
Shrug them,
Let them drop.
If it was your belly,
Breathe deeply into it and let it expand and soften.
If it was your hips,
Rock your pelvis gently,
Circle your hips.
Let your body move in whatever way feels natural.
Movement helps complete interrupted fight-or-flight responses.
Your body knows exactly what it needs to do.
Trust it.
Now let's practice something called pendulation.
Moving your awareness between where you hold trauma and where you feel okay.
To wherever you are right now in your journey,
Find a part of your body that feels relatively neutral or even good right now.
Easiest to do it in the hands,
Maybe your feet or maybe somewhere else for you.
Notice how this part feels.
The temperature,
The sensation and the aliveness there.
Rest your attention there for a moment.
As I tune into my hands,
That can be something else for you.
This is a resource for me now.
This is a place of safety in my body.
Now very slowly,
Very gently,
I can just go back to where that activation,
Where that trauma was.
Notice what's there.
And now slowly,
Gently go back to the neutral place.
Go back to the hands.
Now back and forth,
Teaching your nervous system that it can feel the difficult sensations without getting overwhelmed.
That there are places of safety even when you're processing difficulty.
You may choose to do another round or two.
Moving between a place of safety to where I was feeling the tightness or the sensation.
Teaching my nervous system difficult sensations can be felt safely.
Now here is what you need to understand.
That healing trauma from the body doesn't happen all at once.
It happens in small amounts.
What's called titration.
Working with just a little bit at a time.
So you don't get overwhelmed.
And what we've done today is a beginning.
You have located where trauma lives in your body.
You've offered it attention and presence.
And you've begun the process of integration.
This work continues.
Every time you check in with these places,
Every time you breathe into them,
Every time you allow sensation and emotion to move through you,
Instead of shutting them down,
You're healing.
Breath by breath,
Layer by layer,
The trauma that's been locked in your tissues begins to release.
I feel you cannot think your way out of trauma that's stored in the body.
You have to feel your way through it.
You have to be willing to inhabit your body even when it's uncomfortable.
To listen to what it's been trying to tell you and to offer it the movement,
The breath,
The attention,
The release that it's been seeking.
Now this is a somatic journey.
Not understanding trauma differently,
But actually changing the physiological patterns that trauma created.
When trauma releases from your body,
Your whole experience of yourself and the world shifts.
The chronic anxiety lessens because your body isn't locked in a permanent threat response.
The depression lifts because the energy that was being used to hold everything in place is now available for living.
The disconnection resolves because you can finally inhabit your body instead of escaping it.
Your relationships change because you're not reacting from old subconscious wounds,
You're responding from present awareness.
And this journey starts with acknowledgement,
Which we have done today.
I could see,
Sense,
Feel trauma imprints emotional energy in my body.
I know it's there and I'm doing my best to navigate and work with it.
The more I learn to feel safe,
I can work with this deeper.
I see that now.
Now place both your hands on your heart.
Feel yourself here now,
In your body.
Having done this brave work of locating and beginning to release what's been locked in your tissues.
This is the work that actually changes things.
Not new thoughts about old trauma,
But new experiences in your body.
Teaching your nervous system that the threat is over.
That it's safe enough now to complete what was interrupted and then gently release what was held.
Come back to the flexibility and ease which is your birthright.
You might feel tired or dehydrated after this practice.
You may or may not have old memories come up over the next few days.
Perfectly normal.
Your body has been working,
Releasing,
Recalibrating.
Rest if you need to.
Drink water,
Move gently.
Be kind to yourself.
And know that you can return to this practice whenever you need to.
Whenever you notice your body is expressing and bringing something up.
Whenever you feel ready to offer another layer of held energy,
The possibility of release.
You can go back to this.
Your body is not your enemy.
You are not broken.
It's been doing exactly what it needed to do to help you survive.
And now with your conscious participation,
It's finally getting to complete its healing.
Trust this process.
Trust your body.
And trust that healing happens,
Not despite the body,
But through it.
Thank you very much for joining me.
And Namaste.
