The Bones Remember
How Your Body Holds the Map to Your Healing (Part 5/13)
Long after the mind has forgotten, the body remembers. It holds everything you were too young, too scared, or too wise to feel.
Your Body as a Living Library
Your body is not just flesh and bone. It's a living library, storing the complete archive of your life experience. Every touch, every trauma, every moment of joy or terror is catalogued in your tissues, your nervous system, your cellular memory. The body remembers what the mind cannot or will not hold.
This isn't metaphor. It's neuroscience. Trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk explains that "the body keeps the score" of our experiences, especially those that overwhelmed our capacity to process them at the time. But the body stores more than trauma. It holds the imprint of every significant experience: the safety of being held as a baby, the terror of being yelled at, the joy of being truly seen, the confusion of mixed messages.
We live in a culture that treats the body as a machine, a vehicle for the mind, a collection of symptoms to be managed. But your body is actually your most sophisticated guidance system, your most reliable source of truth, your most ancient form of wisdom. Learning to read the body's buried map is essential for coming home to yourself.
When Safety Finally Arrives
Here's something that might surprise you: trauma often doesn't surface until you're finally safe enough to feel it. This is why people sometimes experience their deepest healing crises when their external life is going well. The successful person who suddenly can't get out of bed. The new parent overwhelmed by unexpected anxiety. The person in their first healthy relationship who starts having panic attacks.
This isn't a cruel irony. It's actually evidence of your body's profound wisdom. Your nervous system waits until it senses enough safety and resources to begin releasing what it's been holding. The breakdown that seems to come from nowhere often comes from somewhere very specific: a body that has finally determined it's safe enough to feel.
But because we don't understand this, we pathologize these experiences. We think we're regressing when we're actually progressing. We think we're falling apart when we're actually beginning to put ourselves back together.
The Language of Sensation
The body speaks in sensations, not words. It communicates through tightness and expansion, through heat and cold, through movement and stillness. Learning to interpret these signals is like learning a new language—one that's actually your first language but was forgotten in favor of the mind's constant chatter.
Your body might say:
Chest tightness: "I'm feeling unsafe or unheard"
Shoulders climbing toward ears: "I'm carrying too much responsibility"
Jaw clenching: "I'm holding back words that need to be spoken"
Stomach fluttering: "Something feels uncertain or exciting"
Throat constriction: "There's something I need to express but I'm afraid to"
Legs feeling heavy: "I'm overwhelmed and need to rest"
Heart racing: "My system is activated. I need to move or I need safety"
These aren't universal translations. Your body has its own dialect, developed through your unique history of experiences. Learning to read your body's language requires patient attention, like a naturalist learning to identify bird songs.
Trauma: The Universal Human Experience
Let's address this directly: trauma is not rare. It's not something that only happens to other people. It's not limited to obvious experiences like war, abuse, or natural disasters. Trauma is any experience that overwhelmed your capacity to cope at the time it happened.
This could be:
Being separated from a caregiver as a young child
Growing up in a household with chronic stress or conflict
Experiencing medical procedures without adequate emotional support
Being bullied or excluded by peers
Living through a divorce or family disruption
Having your emotional needs consistently dismissed or minimized
Experiencing racism, discrimination, or systemic oppression
Witnessing violence or being exposed to disturbing images
Having your boundaries violated in any way
Gabor Maté reminds us that trauma isn't what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. It's the disconnection from yourself that occurs when an experience is too much, too fast, or too overwhelming for your system to integrate.
Understanding trauma this way helps explain so many patterns that seem mysterious: why you feel anxious in crowds even though nothing bad has ever happened in crowds. Why you shut down when people raise their voices. Why intimacy feels terrifying even when you desperately want connection.
How Trauma Lives in the Body
When we can't process an experience fully, the energy of that experience gets stored in the body. Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing, explains that trauma occurs when our natural fight-or-flight responses are thwarted, leaving activation trapped in our nervous system.
Think about what happens to an animal in the wild after it escapes from a predator. It shakes, trembles, and discharges the survival energy from its system. Then it goes back to grazing as if nothing happened. Humans, with our complex brains and social conditioning, often interrupt this natural discharge process.
We're told to "calm down," "be strong," "get over it." We learn to suppress our natural responses to overwhelming experiences. That suppressed energy doesn't disappear. It gets stored in our tissues, our organs, our nervous system, creating patterns of tension, numbing, hypervigilance, or collapse that can persist for decades.
The Body's Coping Strategies
Your body developed brilliant strategies to help you survive difficult experiences. These adaptations weren't conscious choices; they were intelligent responses by a system doing its best to keep you alive and functioning.
Some bodies learned to freeze, to become very still and quiet when danger was present. If you carry this pattern, you might find yourself shutting down in conflict, feeling paralyzed when you need to take action, or struggling with depression and low energy.
Some bodies learned to stay hypervigilant, constantly scanning for threats. If this is your pattern, you might experience chronic anxiety, have trouble relaxing, feel exhausted from being "on" all the time, or struggle with insomnia.
Some bodies learned to flee, to always be moving, doing, achieving. If this is familiar, you might struggle with sitting still, feel uncomfortable with stillness or boredom, use busyness to avoid difficult feelings, or have trouble being present.
Some bodies learned to fight, to protect through aggression or control. This might show up as difficulty trusting others, a tendency to take charge in every situation, chronic anger, or problems with authority.
Some bodies learned to fawn, to survive by pleasing and accommodating others. This pattern might manifest as chronic people-pleasing, difficulty saying no, losing yourself in relationships, or struggling to know what you actually want.
None of these are character flaws. They're evidence of your body's intelligence and resilience. The goal isn't to shame these patterns but to understand them and gently help your body learn that it has more options now.
Befriending Your Body
If you've been living primarily in your head, reconnecting with your body can feel foreign or even frightening. This is especially true if your body holds difficult memories or if you learned early that your body wasn't safe or trustworthy.
Be patient with this process. Your body has been waiting for you to return, but it might need time to trust that you're genuinely interested in listening rather than just trying to fix or control.
Start with simple presence. Place your hand on your heart or your belly and just breathe. Notice what you feel without trying to change anything. Is there tension? Softness? Warmth? Numbness? All of these are valid responses.
Practice the art of friendly curiosity toward your body's signals. Instead of judging physical sensations as good or bad, practice asking: "What might this sensation be trying to tell me? What does this part of my body need right now?"
The Language of Movement
Your body has its own ways of processing and releasing stored energy. Sometimes this happens through tears, sometimes through shaking or trembling, sometimes through the need to move or be still. These aren't signs that something's wrong; they're signs that something's working.
You might notice that certain movements feel particularly good or necessary. Maybe you need to stretch in specific ways, or shake your hands, or move your hips. Trust these impulses. Your body knows how to heal itself if you give it permission and space.
Dancing, walking, swimming, yoga, martial arts, or simply moving however feels good can all be forms of somatic therapy. The key is to move with awareness, paying attention to what feels alive and what feels stuck, what wants to expand and what wants to contract.
Boundaries as Body Wisdom
Your body is constantly giving you information about boundaries. The person who makes your skin crawl is giving you important data. The environment that makes you feel tense is communicating something significant. The activity that makes you feel expanded and alive is pointing you toward what's aligned for you.
But many of us learned to override these signals, to politeness ourselves out of our own body wisdom. We learned to hug people who made us uncomfortable, to stay in environments that felt draining, to ignore the subtle no's that our body was communicating.
Reclaiming your body's boundary wisdom doesn't mean becoming rigid or antisocial. It means honoring the intelligence of your nervous system's threat detection capabilities. It means trusting that your body's response to people and situations carries valuable information.
The Body's Memory of Safety
While your body holds the imprint of difficult experiences, it also holds the memory of every moment you felt truly safe, loved, and alive. These positive imprints are just as important as the traumatic ones, and they can be powerful resources for healing.
Maybe it's the memory of being held by a grandparent, the feeling of sunshine on your skin, the joy of running freely as a child, the peace of being in nature. These cellular memories of goodness are always available to you, even in difficult moments.
The Return to Embodiment
Coming home to your body is coming home to yourself. It's remembering that you're not just a thinking being having a physical experience, but an embodied being with the capacity for both thought and feeling, both analysis and intuition, both doing and being.
This return to embodiment changes everything. You become more present, more grounded, more authentic. You can trust your gut feelings because you can actually feel your gut. You can set better boundaries because you can sense when something doesn't feel right. You can take better care of yourself because you're listening to what your body actually needs.
You also become more connected to others in healthy ways. When you're at home in your own body, you're less likely to lose yourself in relationships or to project your unresolved experiences onto others. You can offer genuine intimacy because you're intimate with yourself.
The Ongoing Conversation
Learning to read your body's buried map is not a one-time achievement. It's an ongoing conversation, a daily practice of tuning in and listening. Your body's needs change. Its messages evolve. New layers of stored experience may surface as you become capable of holding more.
This is not a problem to be solved but a relationship to be cultivated. Your body has been your faithful companion through every experience of your life. It has protected you, carried you, and held your deepest truths even when your mind couldn't bear them.
The least you can do is listen.
The body remembers, yes. But it also heals. It also grows. It also knows the way forward, even when the mind is lost. Trust the bones. Trust the breath. Trust the buried map that lives within you.
It has been leading you home all along.
Next week in "The Rivers Beneath Your Skin," we'll explore the invisible geography of energy that flows through your body. You'll learn to sense and work with your body's energetic intelligence, discovering a whole new language of inner guidance that most of us were never taught to speak.
This post is an excerpt from my book, Inner Cartography: Mapping the Territory of Your Soul.
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