The story does not appear out of nowhere. It rises from systems in the brain designed to protect us. The prefrontal cortex seeks order and solutions. The default mode network runs scenarios, repeats patterns, and keeps us prepared. Neuroception scans beneath it all, seven times per second, asking: safe or not safe.

These systems in us are displays of evolutionary intelligence at work. They evolved to keep us alive. Now it is our turn to evolve our relationship with them.

When we do not meet these parts with awareness, we become old scripts, rehearsed and rigid, layered with cultural and familial instructions.

Hide this.

Control that.

Stay “good.”

Over time, the story overrides the raw sensation, teaching the body how to armor itself, and eventually training the mind that this armor is our identity.

We feel something. A flicker, a surge. Almost instantly, a story forms. Two realities coexisting: raw sensation and narrative overlay.

The raw sensation wants one thing. The narrative wants another.

One wants to move, express, and be felt, to change as it changes.

The other wants to contain, analyze, rationalize, and avoid danger.

Our system strains under the pull in both directions. Rage flickers, tension rises, freeze tightens, collapse creeps in.

The body and brain try to find their way, and we get caught in the conflict.

As time does its work, we begin to notice what is alive in us. Aliveness is not something we can think into existence. It comes when our system integrates experience, when the pull of replay softens and the present begins to feel like its own place.

In the realm of breath, some traditions note that the amount of life force we receive from each inhale depends on our ability to quiet involuntary thought, an example of how presence shapes the energy we carry.

This isn’t about fixing or even changing something. It’s about showing up. Showing up to our body, our breath, our impulses, our sensations. Paying attention. Meeting what’s there.

We learn through experience. By slowing down, noticing tension or ease, letting sensation be, practicing small acts of gratitude for what we’ve created, we begin to rewrite not just how the body responds, but how our body experiences.

When we talk about repatterning how we process experience, we’re talking about loosening the grip of the past in our biology.

The nervous system carries memory, shapes emotion, holds tension, transfers, and absorbs force through our tissues, taking in every signal from inside and out.

This forms reflexes and habits that live in procedural memory. Unless examined we stay locked in survival mode.

If Part Two is where we notice how sensations are memory’s first language, Part Three is about what memory actually is and how it shows up in our nervous system.

Memory isn’t just the stories we tell ourselves. Some of it we can recall, put into words, hold in our minds. Some never reaches language at all. It lives in how we move, hold tension, tighten our jaw, shrink or cannot feel our shoulders, or take a breath that never reaches the bottom of our lungs. Some memories are tied to sights, sounds, smells. Others are only ever felt, never explained. All of this shapes not just our posture and breath, but also our personality and beliefs.

Every feeling comes from a memory, in some way. And every feeling is the way it is… shaped by what we’ve lived through, by what our body has carried, by how our brain has learned to process experience.

When a feeling shows up, it’s both here and not here, layered. Here because it’s happening now. Layered because it carries history and patterns, sensations time-stamped into our tissues… the history of what happened in, outside, and around us, also keeping a record of how we responded and/or didn’t respond, the lingering imprint of a word not spoken, or a shrinking in of something, a contraction that didn’t find its completion.

Memory is an interesting and beautiful thing. For me, the most meaningful parts of life are the memories of both fondness and struggle, and the way they come together to create something else entirely. This third thing. A feeling of meaning and significance. Not to mention how this is amplified when memories are made and shared with others.

I have the good fortune of knowing a Diné medicine man named Darryl. He talks about a kind of ceremony we do as a process of healing our memories. He says the pain-body comes from the disconnection that can happen when we forget. When we forget to tend to the relationship with ourselves… our body, our brain, all the different parts.

In this blog series so far, through the lens of Somatic Alignment, we’ve explored de-armoring and organ resets, how armor shapes not just our physiology but also our culture and the collective nervous system. We’ve looked at how shifting awareness from life-depleting thoughts to life-affirming ones leads to presence and how this shift changes everything. We’ve seen how the breath becomes a portal to coherence when infused with conscious attention. And we’ve embraced ourselves as electromagnetic beings, wired for flow, resonance, and renewal.

Every heartbeat, impulse of thought, and breath we take is accompanied by waves, oscillations of charge, frequency, and tone. The human body is not just a biomechanical system but an electromagnetic instrument, attuned moment by moment to our internal and external environments. Like any instrument, its capacity to harmonize or fragment into dissonance depends on a multitude of factors including tension, tempo, and touch.

In Somatic Alignment, we listen for that signal beneath the static, the subtle communication of electrical impulses, and oscillations within the tissue and nervous system, the shifting rhythms of breath and fascia, and the deeper pulses of the brain. We learn that healing is not just about locating and fixing problems, it’s about restoring coherence to a field that’s forgotten how to resonate.

Every breath offers a choice:

to embrace more aliveness, or to pull away from it.

How we think about what we’re feeling shapes how breath is received, and how life moves through us.

Each moment becomes a seed for the next, because our brains are ditch diggers (a concept explored in Neuroacrobatics™): they groove the same patterns deeper unless we intentionally shift attention.

Or, in the words of Binnie Dansby:

Wilhelm Reich revealed how the body armors itself against trauma, chronic muscle tensions that stifle emotional flow, distort posture, and shape our behaviors. But what if entire cultures do the same?

Just as repressed emotions crystallize into rigid musculature, unprocessed collective trauma calcifies into social structures. Institutions, media, and tribal identities become the “connective tissue” of cultural armoring, defensive, reactive, and increasingly brittle. The more a belief system is threatened, the more it contracts into dogma.

Our organs don’t just function mechanically, they exist within a complex network of nervous system signaling, fascia, and energetic flow. When this internal communication is disrupted, whether by stress, trauma, or habitual tension patterns, it can create a sense of disconnection that affects both physical health and emotional well-being.

Organ resets are a way to help restore our internal communication process. By using breathwork, localized and directional touch, and awareness, we engage the vagus nerve and fascial system to support the natural motility and function of the organs. This helps release stored tension, improve interoception, and reestablish a sense of safety and connection in the body.

The concept of de-armoring originates from the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), a psychoanalyst, body therapist, and student of Freud who recognized the intimate connection between the body, emotions, and psychological defense mechanisms. Reich theorized that emotional and traumatic experiences become stored in the body as muscular tension, what he called “armor.” This armor restricts the natural flow of energy in the body, leading to physical symptoms like chronic pain, tightness, or reduced mobility, as well as emotional and energetic struggles such as numbness or emotional stagnation and even leading to the eventual manifesting of more extreme levels of mental issues such as neurosis and psychosis.

In my one-on-one Somatic Alignment sessions, I guide you through a process of tuning into your body’s natural intelligence, not by forcing anything but by creating the conditions for realignment to happen naturally.

This isn’t about “fixing” or chasing a breakthrough. It’s about cultivating presence and working with what’s happening in the body, breath, and brain right now.