My body was keeping score and I was not listening

I lived in my head for most of my life.

My body was just the vehicle. The thing that carried my brain from place to place. I fed it when I remembered to. I rested it when it stopped working properly. But I did not listen to it. I did not think there was anything to listen to.

Then one day a therapist asked me where I felt anxiety in my body. And I realised I had no idea. I knew I was anxious. I could describe the thoughts, the patterns, the triggers. But the body? I had never thought to look there.

She asked me to close my eyes and scan downward from my head. And I found it immediately. A tightness across my chest. A clenching in my stomach. Shoulders that were sitting somewhere around my ears. Jaw locked. Hands slightly curled.

I had been carrying all of that. Every day. For years. And I had not noticed because I was too busy living in my thoughts to inhabit my body.

This is not uncommon for neurodivergent people. When your mind is the thing that gets you through, when your intelligence and your analysis and your ability to understand and predict are your survival tools, the body gets left behind. You learn to override its signals. Hunger, exhaustion, pain, tension. You push through because the mind says to and the body rarely gets a vote.

But the body keeps score. That is what trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk found after decades of work with patients. The body stores what the mind cannot process. The tension in your shoulders is not just physical. The clenching in your stomach is not random. The body is holding something the mind has been too busy or too afraid to feel.

Somatic healing is the practice of going back. Of learning the body's language slowly and with patience. It is not dramatic. It does not look like anything from the outside. It looks like lying on a floor noticing your breath. Like pressing your feet into the ground and feeling the pressure. Like placing a hand on your chest and asking what is here right now.

It is slow. It is uncomfortable at first. You will feel things you have been avoiding for a long time.

But on the other side of that discomfort is something I did not expect. Not peace exactly. More like honesty. The body does not lie. It does not perform. It does not mask.

When you finally start listening to it you find out a great deal about what you actually need.

Start small. One breath. One scan. One hand on your chest.

Your body has been waiting for you to come home. 🌿