Becoming Alive: Healing Through the Body
Healing begins with understanding our past.
Looking inward is not a mental exercise; it is an embodied one. While insight helps us make sense of what happened, true healing occurs when we allow ourselves to feel what the body has been holding – often for many decades.
One Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in my favorite chair listening to a podcast where I was a guest. The host had read my book cover to cover and came prepared with deep, piercing questions. Then he said, “Tell me what it was like when your father yelled at you at seven years old and told you, ‘You are nothing.’”
As his words landed, a pit formed in my stomach. I immediately closed my laptop.
I thought, Here you go—this is your chance to breathe into what’s arising, just like you teach your clients every week. I placed my hand on my belly and inhaled. Tears welled up. Then the sobbing came—deep, shaking, rising from the center of my body. I let it move through me.
When my breath finally steadied, I sat back. A wave of peace washed over me. My body expanded. It felt like a hundred-pound weight had finally lifted.
To this day, I feel a lightness when I think of that moment—when something I had carried since childhood finally released.
This is how we heal. The unrest, pain, and trauma we experience early in life don’t vanish. They are stored in our bodies. Talk therapy helps bring clarity and language to what happened, but the body holds the emotional imprint. True healing requires both—naming the story and releasing its residue from the nervous system. This is neural integration: where insight and sensation finally meet.
In that afternoon of tears, I was releasing the cellular imprint I had carried since I was seven.
I see this again and again in my private practice. Clients courageously look inward at their core wound—most of us have one—and choose to feel, release, and reclaim their lives.
As Bessel van der Kolk describes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma isn’t just a memory. It embeds itself in the nervous system, muscles, reflexes, and even immune functioning. It shapes how we regulate emotions, respond to stress, remember the past, and feel safe in the present. Trauma can create hypervigilance, numbness, dissociation, and a struggle to stay connected to the moment.
Talk therapy alone can’t reach the part of the brain where these trauma responses are stored. Healing requires bottom-up approaches that touch the body’s imprint—somatic work, yoga, mindfulness, neurofeedback, EMDR, tapping. And sometimes, I believe, nothing is more powerful than a true, unrepressed sob.
Trauma lives in the body. And we can heal—when we choose to.
Feeling alive, grounded, and connected to universal consciousness is possible for every one of us. When we release the blocks that arise, we open into healing, wholeness, and a vibrant sense of aliveness.
As I look back on my father’s life, I have forgiven him for the emotional abuse. I understand its roots in his own fear and upbringing. He was doing the best he could. Deep healing came through him—and between us—before he died.
I invite you to notice when something stirs inside—when you feel triggered, unsettled, or uneasy. Instead of pushing the discomfort away, get curious. Place a hand on your body and breathe. Your body holds your answers, patiently waiting for you to listen. As you do, something begins to awaken. The tight places soften. Life flows through them again. This is how we become alive—by remembering who we are beneath what we’ve carried. It is the doorway to greater freedom, love, and joy.
