Article: Somatic Wisdom: Listening to the Keys the Body Holds
By Joanna Foote Adler, Psy.D., CHT
Editors’ Note: Joanna Adler, Psy.D., CHT is a Depth Hypnosis Practitioner, a licensed Clinical Psychologist and an instructor at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream. She holds a doctorate degree in Clinical Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she specialized in the study of Transpersonal Psychology and Family Psychology. Joanna has been working with individuals, couples, and families as a psychotherapist and spiritual counselor since 1993. She has trained extensively in the fields of Buddhist Psychology, Applied Shamanism, Energy Medicine, and Depth Hypnosis, and teaches nationally and internationally in these fields.
Joanna completed an efficacy study of the spiritual counseling model of Depth Hypnosis, which offers clear evidence of the efficacy of Depth Hypnosis in treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and raising well-being.
Since our arrival, the body has been in continuous relationship with us and our experience, responding to every environment, interaction, and event with exquisite sensitivity. It exists in service to us in every way: doing its best to orient us toward safety, offer vitality, regulate our inner rhythms, and support our capacity to connect, create, and love.
In addition, the body bears the imprint of our full lived experience. Joy, tenderness, belonging, and moments of deep regulation are woven into our tissues just as surely as shock, neglect, fear, and loss. Nothing is excluded. If experiences are supportive, the nervous system strengthens and settles. When life is overwhelming, the body adapts and copes in the best way it knows how. These adaptations are intelligent survival responses, even though they sometimes have downsides.
When experiences are too much to feel or process at the time, our emotional and mental experiences can take root physically – the body will hold them on our behalf. Emotions and memories can even be moved outside of conscious awareness if they feel too threatening or overwhelming. We can understand this as a form of self-protection. The body “locks away” what is too much, but the original imprint is stored in our tissues, our nervous system, and even our very cells. The attempt to disconnect from difficult experience so that we can continue living and participating in the world is well meant, but it leaves a trail of crumbs behind it: hallmark sensations in the body. This can look like dullness, tightness, sharpness, shortened breath, pain, or worse, as these patterns of sensations and reactions can harden into more serious problems.
Traumatic experiences can solidify in the body in myriad ways including freezing, fighting, or flight responses. For example, freezing can become a slowed motility in the gut or the shutdown of chronic fatigue. Fighting can become an immune system that attacks indiscriminately causing auto-immune disorders. Flight can become a nervous system that is constantly running creating insomnia or autonomic regulation problems.
When we allow our bodily experiences to reveal themselves to us once again, we realize what the body had been communicating, often beneath words. Symptoms, habitual tension, and even chronic illness are the heralds that point to the places that the body/mind/spirit is asking to be understood, and pointing the way to eventual resolution. These experiences can be brought forward regularly by the body, as it knows that the seeds of healing lie within the unwinding of the presenting symptoms. The body shows us the doorway to resolution. What was once protected or encased can be brought gently back into awareness when there is enough safety and presence to unravel the original well-intended knot. The body has not been resisting healing—it was waiting for the conditions that allow release, integration, and completion.
Through somatic awareness, we can practice listening to the body in a direct and respectful way. We learn to notice posture, sensations, temperature, images, words, and to recognize how past experiences live in these expressions. By slowing down and honoring the body’s communication, we build the trust that allows deeper layers of experience to re-emerge and unwind.
When we listen deeply, especially with the support of guidance, something profound unfolds. The body begins to reorganize itself, and held energy softens. Bound life force can return to circulation and power is retrieved. What was once fragmented can be integrated and find coherence, and patterns that are no longer needed can be released. Through having the courage to know the truth of our experience, we access healing.
Listening to our experience allows us to remember that the body has always been working for us, despite its dysregulation, pain, or illness. When we meet all of this with reverence, curiosity, and compassion, the imprints of our history become sources of insight rather than limitations. The body becomes not only a record of where we have been, but a living pathway into greater freedom and wholeness.
