Creating New Body Memories – A Somatic Key to Trauma Healing!

Have you ever flinched when someone touched your shoulder, or felt your chest tighten for no obvious reason? These reactions aren’t “all in your head”—they’re stored in your body. Known as body memories, these sensations are imprints left by unresolved trauma, encoded not in words, but in our tissues and nervous system responses.

Through somatic therapy, we can begin to rewrite traumatic memory—not by erasing the past, but by inviting the body into feeling, integrating and writing a new script for how we would like to live now.

What Are Body Memories?

Body memories are implicit, wordless experiences that live in the nervous system. You might notice them as:

  • A sudden freeze response during conflict

  • Startling easily at loud voices or unexpected touch

  • Persistent muscle tension or shallow breathing under stress

These are not flaws. They are survival strategies. Your body, doing its best to protect you, encoded trauma responses to help you avoid harm. The problem is that these protective patterns can get stuck, keeping you living a loop from the past, where the body still feels like the trauma is happening now.

Trauma Is Timeless—Until We Rewrite It

Unlike the mind, the nervous system has no sense of time. Without completing or healing thwarted fight, flight, or freeze (FFF) responses, trauma becomes “timeless.” That’s why something that happened years ago can still feel urgent, raw, and present, and we often reenact these unintegrated memories in our present in an unconscious attempt to heal them.

As trauma expert Peter Levine says:

“Conscious, explicit memory is only the tip of a deep iceberg… The submerged strata of implicit experience (or unconscious) move and motivate us in ways the conscious mind can only imagine.”

This is why talk therapy, while powerful, may not always be enough. The body remembers, even when the mind has moved on.

How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body

During a traumatic event, stress hormones flood the brain, disrupting the hippocampus (which organizes explicit memory) and ramping up the amygdala (which governs emotional memory). The result? Instead of a coherent narrative, we’re left with sensory fragments—sounds, smells, body sensations—frozen in time.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains:

“Traumatic experiences create powerful, isolated sensory fragments… fixed and static… carved into the brain, body, and psyche.”

These imprints don’t update easily. Without somatic or other related mind-body based therapies, they can continue to drive physical and emotional symptoms for years.

Rewriting Memory with Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy reconnects you with the language of your body—sensation, breath, movement, and our felt or “gut sense”. It creates a bridge between the past and the present, helping you:

  • Recognize your body’s trauma signals without judgment

  • Invite in new bodily sensations

  • Re-pattern your nervous system over time

This isn’t about reliving trauma. It’s about rediscovering what safety feels like. Feeling into the body and reimagining new possibilities of our felt sense, images or movements, and embodying them, can create small shifts that repeated over time begin to rewire your body’s sense of safety. For example, relaxing your shoulders by 1%, taking one deep breath every hour, placing your hand over your heart when feeling overwhelmed, naming one sensation that feels good and anchoring it with a breath or gesture.

These shifts additionally support vagus nerve tone, aid in nervous system regulation, and help your body to update its story.

Your Body is Ready to Heal

Your body is not broken—it’s communicating about past experiences that are looking for healing now. Somatic therapy doesn’t bypass the mind; it does however, invite the body into the conversation. Rewriting traumatic memory isn’t erasure—it’s the process and integration of reclaiming your body’s capacity for safety, joy, and connection, one sensation, breath, or completed impulse, at a time.

Why Integrating the Stuckness of Fight/Flight/Freeze Matters!

There are many ways of being stuck, e.g. Breath, gut-brain connection, in our body. When our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) gets stuck on “on”, Fight/Flight (FF) or hyperarousal, or “off”, Freeze (F) or hypoarousal, due to childhood adversity, acute or complex traumas, life can feel very overwhelming. If we’ve been stuck on “off” or “functionally frozen” for most of our lives, we miss feeling a range of emotions, participating (collapsed), having sustained close relationships, good digestion, sleep etc. If we’ve been stuck on “on” in hyperarousal, we may miss the subtlety of presence, feel irritated often, unable to rest, sleep, digest, or inhibit our emotional and behavioural responses. When we are not stuck in either of these states, we are free to hang out in our Parasympathetic Nervous System in rest and digest mode and enjoy the ease that it brings.

Our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is working 24/7 to help us to distinguish which of these 3 states is appropriate at any given time and to provide appropriate responses to safe and unsafe situations: 1) Parasympathetic – safety; 2) Sympathetic – Fight/Flight – danger; or 3) (Parasympathetic) Freeze – life-threat.

To integrate our biggest traumas in life, we need to gain the capacity to feel into and track the uncomfortable sensations from the FFF, and express the meanings and emotions of our experiences in words. This helps to discharge bound survival energy related to both stuck states, and connects us to internal resources to experience flow again. Gaining capacity to do this brings more aliveness and vitality into our bodies and we start to look, feel and behave differently, e.g. posture opens and aligns itself, facial nerves begin to relax, we become guided from our guts, and make more life-enhancing choices.

When you feel into your body now, which one of these states do you think you primarily get stuck in when stressed or if a traumatic event happens? Hyperarousal (Fight/Flight) or hypoarousal (Freeze)?

Ultimately, any stuckness related to these states is a reflection of how safe/unsafe we feel/have felt, and forms an underlying foundation for our feelings and emotions, often from our developmental years. We can always choose to strengthen our capacity to feel into our bodies now and build more internal resources to help to meet any remaining stuckness with our attention and somatic movement, so that it can begin to shift and we can begin to thrive in all ways.

Click here for a brief video on how to know if you are a Fight/Flight or Freezer and what to do!

Strengthening the Nervous System via Interoception

If you close your eyes, and sense into your gut and how it communicates to your brain via the biggest nerve in your body, the Parasympathetic Vagus nerve, what do you notice? Subtle sensations, a gentle aliveness circulating around the body, emotions surfacing, or nothing at all?

In the early 1990s, Dr. Stephen Porges, founder of the Polyvagal Theory, coined interoception, our gut feedback, “as our sixth sense that allows us to become aware of our instinctual responses to our environment.”

Interoception is the physical, psychological, and social development in our bodies that allows us to sense stimulus from within our viscera, communicating our gut sense of safety, protection, good and bad stressors, and also elicits empathy. It is a feedback loop from our guts that calms our limbic brains, and can also get stuck on “on” or “off” due to trauma.

When we have a healthy Nervous System and good attunement with ourselves, others and the environment, we sense when something is off before it gets bad, e.g. we feel tired, drained, sluggish, hungry, or where we are in our cycle as women. This felt sense develops or struggles to develop within us based on how we were attuned to as young children. If we learn to ignore these signals at a young age, this eventually leads to disconnect, overwhelm and sickness as adults.

When we are babies we know how to rest and digest, sense fear, hunger, know if something isn’t right, or if touch by our caregivers is kind or not. It is the job of our caregivers to attune to us and meet physiological needs, which is why babies cry: they are in physiological distress. When the baby gets fed or diapers changed, they experience co-regulation, e.g. warmth with a caregiver, eye contact, down-regulation, and soothing. This attunement helps to build Nervous System regulation, secure attachment and good experiences with our guts over time.

When babies don’t get fed when hungry, for example, while sleep training, their stomachs cramp, hurt, they cry loudly, and eventually collapse into the freeze response. If they repeatedly experience intense distress without adequate co-regulation, this sets up confused or numbed out interoception, e.g. a poor, negative experience of their insides. Many parents from previous generations also didn’t receive co-regulation, were trained not to listen to their guts and to override their paternal instincts, e.g. doctor’s told them to let babies cry to self-soothe.

To restore damage done from dysregulated interoception, we need to relearn how to feel our guts and ourselves accurately again, so that we can remember how to feel safe in our bodies. This helps us to fear our internal experiences less, regain self-compassion, regulate our attention and co-regulate with others more easily. Practicing interoceptive exercises and tuning into our gut sense within our real lives, also helps us to regain accurate gut feedback, e.g. feeling, sensing, orienting in the world.

This rebuilds Nervous System capacity! It also contributes to our brains’ ability to accurately discern and signal safety or danger from our environments or other people, called Neuroception. If this function is faulty, the subconscious parts of our brain will overfire to make us feel that we are in danger when we are safe, and underfire to make us feel that we are safe when we are in danger. This capacity or lack of it, is also often influenced by a history of adversity and requires support to strengthen interoception so that we can choose healthy relationships and environments to thrive in.

Check in with yourself after reading this blog and honestly ask yourself, can you rely on the info that your gut sends to your brain when you have an important decision to make or problem to solve? If this feels like an ongoing struggle, please join us for monthly Somatic Integrations and/or the 12 month Grace & Somatics: Collective Program to receive personal and community support to reconnect!

Enjoy these 2 quick exercises to strengthen healthy interoception here.

The Breath, Inspiration & Nervous System Regulation

The Latin word, Inspiritus, means “breathe” and also contains the word for “Spirit”: to breathe in and be filled with Spirit; to be alive. It is also the root word for “inspiration” and in the creative sense, to be filled with the Muses, gods or God.

When we have experienced ongoing overwhelm, trauma, developmental or emotional dysregulation, our “inspiration” can disappear into the background, as well as the natural coordination of the breath, and our nervous system regulation. This can often look like physically controlling the breath in some way, e.g. shallow breathing due to the charge of our underlying survival physiology. When old traumatic memories surface in the body, and we just start taking deep breaths to control the experience, so that it can move through as quickly as possible, we miss the opportunity to integrate these underlying somatic responses.

Instead, we can choose to stay connected to our body and let ourselves feel what the breath wants to do, the emotion, pain, sensations, and maybe even complete some thwarted fight/flight/freeze responses through movements in our arms or legs.

When we let ourselves stay with and move through the discomfort, there will often be a spontaneous release of breath, possibly a more chaotic one, as well as emotion, and/or impulses, which invite the body into a deeper reset post-release.

If we allow and invite it, the breath can help us to sync with our own internal rhythms and help others to sync with theirs. Each breath brings modulation of the heart rate, vascular rhythm, respiratory rate and muscle tone. When the body is at rest, there is unison between these, except when severe trauma continues to disrupt these systems and remains unintegrated. When coherence comes to the forefront, we feel whole and the physiology does what it’s supposed to do by self-organizing and self-regulating.

Sense into your breathing rhythm now and how it is carried throughout the body. How each area of the body can offer a subtle sensation of being “breathed”.

Notice how it can convey both our presence and vulnerability, and how they can lead us into embodying greater strength and power. Ask yourself if the way that you breathe inspires you to take in life around you? How does the quality of your breath reflect your relationship to Spirit, and how much you invite yourself to be filled with the muses, gods or God?

Breathing in something greater than ourselves helps us to recognize that we are constantly being “inspired”, and from this we can create something beautiful and true in life.

3 Principles for Happiness from Ayurveda & Somatics!

I am in the midst of a 3 week Panchakarma cleanse, including diet, Ayurvedic medicines, rituals (Pujas) and body treatments in South India. The Centre is gorgeous, enveloped by mountains, covered in palm trees, with an incredibly auspicious energy that is healing us all in all ways.

The other night, the Ayurvedic Doctor gave a talk on the 3 principles for life’s happiness. Ayurveda teaches that to have a good life, we need to be in right relationship with 3 things: 1) our Soul; 2) the 5 elements; and 3) Divinity.

I mused on and greatly appreciated the wisdom of this 5,000 year old Indian health and life science.

I was also very inspired by the cross-over with Somatic Therapies, which encourage much of the same!

1) We help people to reunite the fragments of the psyche and/or Soul through body-based techniques that have fragmented during trauma so that they can reconnect to their Souls; 2) We help people to return their stress physiology and nervous system regulation back to how nature intended, pre-trauma; and 3) We often help people to reconnect to the Self or Spirituality that lies beyond trauma, to invite greater meaning beyond what has happened to us, as well as a relationship to the Divine.

These fundamental principles of human health and happiness are quite Universal, whether we are drawing on ancient or more modern wisdom. It is up to us to continue to reconnect to them so that we can find ourselves where we want to be.

If you could use some help with reconnecting to yourSelf through body-based techniques and somatic trauma integration, feel free to reach out to book a Somatic session online and/or join one of my upcoming Somatic Trainings. Your life can only become more vital, and your body your greatest home.

Nervous System Health & Relationships Interview!

Enjoy this helpful interview by Natalie Eskenazy @theheartsway.ca about how nervous system health and our capacity to read and understand it in relationships can help us and them thrive. Full of wonderful tips and insights about how to orient to your partner, children and/or close friends in order to enjoy deeper sustainable connection, and more ease for all.

Ps. My video picture quality was not great in Bali but the interview was!

Awakening Through Grace & Somatics Podcast

Check out this amazing new podcast called, “Our Awakening Journey” with Light worker, Therapist and founder of École d’éveil multidimensionnel, Mylene Piche! Such a beautiful opportunity to share about Somatic work and the opening into Grace that so many of us experience on our healing journeys.
Please do enjoy our uplifting and heartwarming conversation:
You can also find it on Apple Podcasts & iHeartRadio 
Many blessings!

Are You Stuck in Fight, Flight or Freeze?

The Autonomic nervous system (ANS) includes the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, which are responsible for communicating with our organs and endocrines, including digestive (the Enteric Nervous System), heart rate, other speeding and slowing body processes, function of involuntary smooth muscles, etc.

Here is a brief breakdown of it’s parts and how we can sense when our body is experiencing different aspects of FFF or the more relaxed aspect of the parasympathetic system.

1) Ventral Vagal (VV) branch of the Parasympathetic Nervous system, which is active when we are most relaxed, and influences our heart, lungs, facial expression, intonation and vocalization, even the middle ear. It acts as the first line of defense for humans, through social engagement and befriending the other; it will tell us if we are safe or not safe. Our facial expression conveys our state, e.g. when we feel safe, our face is open and relaxed with healthy colour tone, voice is melodic using a range of tones and speech is paced (not fast or breathless).

2) Sympathetic Nervous System engages when the social engagement system does not work, which can enable huge levels of mobilization, fight/flight. We will then try to fight with arms, or flee with legs to find safety.

Fight – hold breath or rapid shallow breathing, tension in muscles, hands, feet and jaw, anger/rage, impulse to bite, kick, claw, narrow eyes, cortisol, etc.

Flight – urgency, fear, anxiety, restlessness, hold breath or rapid, shallow breathing, arousal in limbs – tremble shaking, urge to flee, cortisol, etc.

3) Dorsal Vagal (DV) branch of the Parasympathetic Nervous System conserves energy and stimulates automatic at rest activities. In defense mode, this system shuts down and we experience the freeze response (immobility), if FF was unsuccessful because FF eventually exhausts us. It results in paralysis, hiding, disappearing, numbing, low oxygen, dissociation, shock, panic, overwhelm. Face becomes pallid, breath is shallow, pupils become small, and muscles flaccid lacking tone.

Vagal communication is coming 80% from the gut (Enteric Nervous System), to the brain so when the gut shuts down, the brain knows something is wrong. The heart, lungs and all organs slow down and the person often dissociates. (Note that the DV has rest and digest at one end of it, and freeze at the other.)

All of our organism’s health focus relates to survival. If our body is stuck in FFF, the immune, digestive, cardio systems, etc. can’t repair themselves, e.g. Neurodegenerative health issues often correlate with early developmental stressors. (Much research on this by Dr. Gabor Mate.)

When we carry these high levels of stress inside for long periods of time, our health eventually breaks down. (The higher our Adverse Childhood Experiences Score ~ ACE score, the higher chances that this may happen).

Notice what’s happening in your body as you read this. If there is constriction (hyperarousal ) or emptiness/numbness (dissociating/freezing) surfacing in the muscles, see if you can start to feel into some open, warm, fluid resources that are also within your body and/or something that is easy to look at in your environment. If you notice that you are freezing, you can also move your eyes and body using subtle or medium movements to bring yourself back into a relaxed VV Parasympathetic State.

Welcome to your Autonomic Nervous System!

Is Somatic Experiencing Evidence Based?

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body–mind therapy focused on healing trauma by helping clients draw their attention to their bodies and befriend them again.

The sensations and experiences explored are:

  • Interoceptive (i.e., internal awareness of the body)
  • Proprioceptive (i.e., spatial orientation of the body)
  • Kinesthetic (i.e., movements of the body; Payne, Levine, & Crane-Godreau, 2015).

Unlike other trauma therapies, SE intentionally avoids directly evoking traumatic memories and, instead approaches these memories by using the body as a gateway, exploring them gradually and indirectly by promoting more adequate, safer, and comfortable bodily experiences (Payne et al., 2015).

Within SE, stress is defined as “the inability of the complex and dynamical autonomous nervous system to recover to normal functionality” (Payne et al., 2015, p. 3), and trauma, as the constant dysregulation of the nervous system and bodily experiences (Levine & Frederick, 1997).

This means that trauma resides within the body and not in the nature of the event, and that people vary greatly in their ways of perceiving and responding to the event, depending on various biological and psychosocial variables, as well as the foundations of their own nervous systems, e.g. developmental traumas, etc.

The autonomic nervous system is dynamic and can respond paradoxically when facing stress, simultaneously activating the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems (Payne et al., 2015).

Levine states throughout his numerous books and papers, that the body can get stuck in an overwhelmed and dysfunctional response, which is reversible, though not modifiable by an external event. Instead, SE helps to renegotiate the trauma through the body so that it can discharge the trauma~related bound survival energy, and return the nervous system to regulation, assisting the body and mind’s healing.

Empirical research has shown that SE is an effective therapy for treating trauma. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are largely considered the gold standard of research and are used to test the effectiveness of therapies before applying them to wider populations.

An RCT conducted by Brom and colleagues in 2017 indicated that after participating in 15 weekly sessions of SE, participants reported a significant decrease in the severity of their PTSD symptoms and depression.

Another RCT developed by Andersen and collaborators, also in 2017, compared treatment as usual with SE in addition to traditional treatment for PTSD and chronic pain. They found that participants in the SE group reported a significant reduction in the amount of PTSD symptoms and fear of movement. Additionally, both treatment groups reported a significant decrease in pain and disability.

There are additional studies with treatment groups of natural disaster survivors that also showed significant increases in resiliency measures and a reduction in PTSD symptoms. Several follow-up measurements showed that participants reported decreased arousal, intrusion, and avoidance symptoms, with 90% reporting a significant improvement or being symptom free after eight months.

(https://positivepsychology.com/somatic-experiencing/)

This blog was summarized from the above website article. I shared it here as I thought that it would be helpful for people to understand more about the direct impacts of SE work on people with PTSD symptoms and how incredibly helpful it is in the reversing and integration of those symptoms!