You’ve probably heard that healing isn’t linear. But what if it’s something much older and wiser than that?
What if it lies in our capacity to spiral inwards?
Ancient cultures around the world mapped the importance of spiraling journeys long before somatic trauma healing modalities described needing to spiral inwards to meet our trauma. And your body already knows this pattern.
Your Body Is Made of Spirals
Look at your nervous system, muscles and fascia trains. Their tissues wrap around themselves, your bones, and across your body. Your breath spirals outwards and inwards. Your nervous system moves between external activation and inward rest.
Spiraling into contraction and expansion is something we all know intimately.
When trauma gets stuck in the body in contraction and/or expansion, it interrupts the spiraling rhythm. Either braced and on guard, or shut down and collapsed.
Somatic trauma healing isn’t about forcing yourself out of contraction or expansion. It’s about learning to move gently inwards towards our centre.
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Ancient Wisdom Already Knew This
Long before trauma was a clinical word, cultures across the world mapped the spiral as a path of transformation.
At Newgrange in Ireland, older than the Pyramids and Stonehenge, the triple spiral, is carved in stone at the doorway to an inner chamber. On the winter solstice, light travels 19 metres through a hidden passageway above the doorway to illuminate that chamber. Expansive energy spirals towards the contraction, as darkness becomes light.
The Celtic Triple Spiral was a map of human consciousness and life, death, and rebirth. It showed the inward descent into the shadow, and then the return with wisdom. The ancient Irish knew: we need to meet the contraction before we can authentically expand.
This same pattern appears in many other ancient cultures that carry out related rituals that invite the human into the fullness of their integration. They move us inwards to find wisdom, then return outward when we feel whole, and ready to serve others.
These were the maps of how human healing happens.
What Modern Spirituality Often Misses
Much of modern spiritual culture focuses on expansion: light, growth, or rising above. We’re told to meditate away discomfort and transcend our pain.
But what happens to the contraction?
When we skip feeling our bodies in the inward descent to where the broken parts live, we don’t fully heal. We float above our wounds and mistake levity for freedom, while “the body keeps the score” staying stuck in its patterns, rhythms and matter.
Sustainable transformation honors both movements. The going in and the coming out. The tomb and the resurrection. The winter and the spring.
Celtic seasonal festivals also hold this truth. Samhain, the darkest point, is just as sacred as Beltane, the full bloom of life. One gives meaning to and feeds the other.
Your Nervous System and the Subtle World
When cortisol is high and your nervous system is stuck in survival mode, you focus on the material world. Access to the subtle realms dims, and intuition becomes less reliable when the body feels unsafe.
As regulation grows, something opens. The senses soften, perception widens, natural beauty, connection, and meaning become more available again.
This is why nervous system regulation is not just a mental health tool. It is also a spiritual one. When the body feels safe, everything shifts, and more possibilities become available for us.
A Simple Somatic Practice: Pendulation
Here is something you can try right now.
Sit comfortably. Close your eyes or soften your gaze.
Notice any area in your body that feels tight or tense. Don’t try to fix it. Just feel it. Notice its texture, weight, and temperature. Stay with this for a minute or two.
Then shift your attention to somewhere that feels more at ease. Your hands in your lap. Your feet on the floor. The gentle movement of your breath.
Slowly move your attention between these two places. The tension or numbness, and the ease. Not trying to change either. Just letting your awareness travel between them, like a pendulum.
This is called pendulation. It teaches your nervous system that contraction is not forever. That ease, or greater expansion, is always somewhere nearby. That you can move between states or polarities without getting stuck.
Five minutes of this, done with curiosity and no force, can begin to restore the spiral dance within.
You Don’t Heal by Going Around It
You don’t heal trauma by escaping or bypassing it. You heal by spiraling through it. Moving inward to meet it. Outward to integrate. Inward again to go deeper, and outward to embody its integrated wisdom.
The spiral asks for patience with the inward journey, trust that the descent has purpose, faith that contraction is also gestation.
Often following meeting it, our bodies might offer a deep exhale, letting go or down regulation.
Our ancestors knew that we need both the contraction or darkness and the expansion or light to fully integrate our human experience.Â
The Invitation
What if the dark phases of healing or life are not failures? What if they are the inner arc of the spiral, necessary for transformation, and to bring you out on the other side, more purposeful, and alive?
The ancient ones carved spirals into stone as a map for human consciousness and bodies, leading us inwards towards the centre, showing us where our spirits and feet need to go in order for us to find wholeness.
So when you find yourself spiraling towards the contraction of long-held trauma, know that it is not a setback; that your body, innate wisdom and the nature of things will take you exactly where you need to go to soon find yourself on the other side of it.Â
Want to explore the foundations of somatic trauma healing more deeply? I invite you to join my 6-week online training, Living Trauma-Informed: Foundational Somatic Training, beginning April 13th, 2026, to learn more.
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