What Your Body Holds
Your body keeps tabs open for later 🗂️
Something happened to me in one of my own somatic sessions recently that genuinely blew my mind.. even as a practitioner.
You'll know from earlier this year that I was in a sudden accident which caused some nasty foot injuries (stitches, fracture, a lot of blood). In the immediate aftermath, every bit of my nervous system's attention flooded to that foot.
The pain, sensation, processing – all of it was concentrated there. That's what the body does, it's intelligent like that.
🗓️ Fast forward a couple of months.
I'm being facilitated for my own somatic session. Without directing anything, I start simply being with the sensations in my body and trusting it to do what it needs to.
Then naturally, my body starts resequencing the accident. Not because I willed it there, but because it was ready to.
My foot began to really hurt and pulled inward.
But because I'd already spent so much intentional time over the weeks of recovery really being with it, and the pain there, it softened. My leg lengthened and then…
Suddenly I had an intense stinging sensation in my wrist. As if it was bleeding, raw and had just been wounded. The past felt and experienced right there in the present moment. 😣
Why?
Because during the accident itself, my body simply didn't have the capacity to be with everything happening at once. 🚫
The foot demanded all the bandwidth. What was happening in the wrist, which was also heavily impacted, got paused.
Filed away, and put on hold for later.
This experience blew my mind. It seriously deepened my appreciation for somatic work and how…
Our nervous system can only be with and process so much at one time.
When something intensely painful or overwhelming is happening, and simultaneously there's something else going on, the nervous system prioritises.
It takes what it can and saves a tab for the rest, not forever just for later. 🗂️
(eg. grief alongside a period of burnout at work)
But if we never make space for later.. If we stay busy, in our heads, keep pushing through..
Then the wrist, the grief, the thing that didn't get to be felt stays. Sensations get paused, inflammation gets stuck. The body quietly holds what the mind never made time for.
This is why integration and processing time isn't a luxury. It's how the body heals.. all the way through.
I'm so grateful I could be with my wrist in that session. That it could feel seen and heard. So it can heal, not just on the surface, but all the way down.
Your body is doing this work for you constantly, but it needs you to show up for it.
Is there something in your body that's been waiting for later?
Maybe now is the time. 🙏🏽
