The body has a voice.
It is this voice that is an essential part of the recovery of a traumatic experience, be that the everyday part of being human, the experiences of childbirth, surgery, grief, stress, heartbreak … to the extremes of violence and abuse.
During traumatic events, our body is often a silent witness. It silences the sounds and expressions of pain, fear,distress, anger and suppresses its instincts to move and flee.
What is not appropriate, given space to or even safe, at that time to be expressed, is held in our body as tension, which overtime either becomes a buildup of muscular discomfort, or an illness where our body is at dis-ease, and can even present itself in our life as a habitual pattern.
Be that a habit that offers comfort, escape or relief.
Or a pattern that is an alignment with the feelings of the traumatic event. Unconsciously seeking what our body knows in the form of an unhealthy relationship with another, or an unhealthy relationship with our body, self limiting and self sabotaging behaviour that keeps the trauma alive in the present and a “felt happening” within our body.
We are in a wonderfully progressive era in the recovery of trauma.
In that we have opened up to the wisdom and science of the body.
Embracing the reality, that during times of traumatic life events, the mind has the visual content and retains the narrative but it is our body that feels the experience and to keep safe manipulates the natural responses to scream, rage, howl, fight or run and instead silences itself in freeze.
How to release the body from trauma.
It is an invaluable gift to ourselves and our body to meet and release the past.
To rewind and offer our body expression.
In my experience, the relief that is felt within the body is pure liberation. I have often equated it to giving birth, for childbirth is painful, challenging and raw … and yet when we come through, there is beauty, birth and love.
We are given a sense that the body can let go and move into a harmonious state.
The breath returns and reaches far and deep.
Muscles and tissues return to a place that no longer have to guard.
Spaciousness is known within.
Where old has been tenderly met and given permission to leave..
New can plant and begin.
