Memory Part Two: Feeling and the Body

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.

Notice where a feeling lands in the body. How it sits, how it moves. How it tightens or softens, or shifts the shoulders, making a breath shallow or soft? Our sensations are memory’s first language, the raw expression of what life has written into our bones.

The body remembers even when the mind chooses to forget. Breathwork and Somatics are not about doing something, or telling stories. It’s about meeting what’s there, giving it space, letting it move, or not, sometimes that involves talking other times it means any number of other things. Being available to our own inner life. And in doing that, the body and brain get a chance to talk to each other, to reconcile, to integrate.

A single memory can carry more than one feeling, joy and grief, security and fear, all layered within a single breath. Some memories intend to protect us, some to teach us, some keep knocking because they never had a chance to settle. They leave their mark in the body, in the way we tighten, soften, or take up space. Somatic work is about noticing those imprints, meeting them through sensation, movement, and breath, not forcing a story, not analyzing, just allowing what is to come forward in its own language. It’s making ourselves available, in service to our own life, moment by moment.