Your body is a truth teller, always living in the present moment and giving you honest signals about what’s happening within you. However, many of us struggle to listen to our bodies and instead prioritise the thoughts and beliefs in our minds. This disconnection between body and mind can be traced back to unresolved trauma and overwhelm.
By addressing the energetic roots of trauma, you can heal and reconnect your body and mind, allowing you to fully experience and trust the truth your body is telling you. Check out this explainer video for more insights on this topic.
Your body tells you the truth
Your body lives in the present moment, providing you with information about what is happening right now. In contrast to your mind, which can be clouded by past experiences or future worries, your body is a reliable source of information about your current state.
By listening to your body and aligning your thoughts with its messages, you can gain a deeper understanding of yourself, your emotions and what’s moving through you.
How are you feeling right now, as you read this?
Curious, tired, stressed, happy, energised, bored, worried?
Do you feel tight, supple, fluid, light, numb, cold?
What’s happening right now?
Can you be with your answer without a story about where it came from and what it means?
Can you accept what is arising without the need to change it?
The mind-body disconnect
The mind-body disconnect refers to the imbalance that can occur between our mental and physical states. Your body constantly sends you signals indicating when you need rest, nourishment, or movement, as well as when you need time to heal. However, your mind may not always be attuned to these messages.
For instance, when your body is tired and in need of rest, your mind may be preoccupied with work or other tasks, causing you to push through and ignore the need for rest. This disconnection can lead to the depletion of both your physical and mental well-being, ultimately impacting your overall health.
Disconnection can manifest as disregarding the messages your body sends you, not valuing the information it provides, or dismissing it in some way. It can also manifest as pushing yourself beyond your physical limitations and capacities.
Disconnection between body and mind also happens when you find yourself lost in thought, worrying about the past or future. These signs indicate that you body may be overwhelmed, but your mind is not fully aware of or in tune with these sensations.
Additionally, the disconnect can also be experienced as a feeling of not receiving any information. However, it is important to challenge this perception, as your body is constantly sending signals and information to the mind. Sometimes, these signals may manifest as numbness, making it difficult to recognise and interpret them, especially if you have become accustomed to this state. What patterns of disconnection do you observe in yourself?
What is the cause of mind-body disconnect?
The disconnect between your mind and body is caused by unresolved overwhelm, otherwise known as trauma. It is a disconnection of self, and the present moment.
Your minds distances yourself from your experience because overwhelm feels overwhelming! Without the support and internal resources to feel the emotions, physical discomfort or pain, and energetic tone of the overwhelm, your body will not be able to release the overwhelm.
As a result, you become accustomed to carrying the overwhelm without fully realising its impact on your well-being.
It’s common to believe that ‘it would be too overwhelming to experience a past wound’. This belief can prevent people from seeking healing. However, with the right support and inner resources, it’s totally possible for the overwhelm to safely move through you, without being retraumatising. You need your body to process the overwhelm, not re-experience the trauma in your mind. Healing through your body and energy creates space for your potential to grow and shine.
What is trauma?
Trauma is a term used to describe the wounds that result from overwhelming experiences.
While we typically think of trauma as “big T” events like accidents, abuse or natural disasters, it can also encompass “little t” trauma, which refers to the cumulative impact of insults and injuries experienced from conception to late childhood.
How you were treated as a child greatly influences the level of trauma your system is organised around, and this is known as developmental trauma. It revolves around the extent to which your physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs were met, particularly during your time in the womb and infancy. The absence of being seen, valued, loved, and supported as needed can lead to overwhelming experiences.
To what extent where your physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual needs met?
The answer to this question is not just about what happened, as Gabor Maté points out, it’s also about what didn’t happen.
How to reconnect with your body after trauma?
After experiencing trauma, there are various methods you can use to reconnect with your body and promote healing. Mindfulness, breathwork, talking therapy, yoga, Feldenkrais, and somatic experiencing are just a few examples. One approach that specifically addresses the energetic roots of trauma is Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. This trauma therapy taps into your body’s natural healing process to clear trauma energy, allowing for trauma release and the establishment of new cognitive patterns.
The Biodynamic Craniosacral approach to trauma resolution relies on the practitioner’s deep connection to your present moment experience. By creating a healing space that directly meets what is arising in you, the trauma energy can be metabolized, unlocking your full potential. This approach is highly mindful and focused on meeting trauma energetically.
A crucial aspect of trauma transformation is finding someone who can energetically hold the intensity of fear, grief, charge, terror, or abandonment that may be present within your overwhelm. This provides the necessary space and resources for these challenging energies to be released. When trauma is truly digested and cleared from your body, it is natural for your mind and body to reconnect and work in harmony. This is how you are designed to be.
10 key points about healing the mind body disconnect
- Your body tells you the truth, it lives in the present moment
- Your mind can be clouded by past experiences or future worries
- Overwhelm makes it difficult to hear and respond appropriately to your body’s messages
- Your mind distances you from your experience because overwhelm feels overwhelming!
- Overwhelm was overwhelming when the wound first happened
- Overwhelm organises your mental, emotional and physical experience of yourself
- Overwhelm is trauma
- Trauma can be ‘big T’ or ‘little t’ trauma. A lot of your trauma most likely came from your childhood, right back to the beginning of life in the womb. That’s little t trauma.
- A trauma therapy that works directly with the energetic roots of trauma is powerful.
- When trauma is truely digested and cleared out of your body, it’s natural for your mind and body to be connected and working in harmony together.
Sonia gave me a safe place to heal, and a safe place to finally bring out the better me.
She can hold space.
Space to heal.
Space for grace.
Space for issues.
Space for peace.
Explainer video: healing trauma reconnecting body and mind script
| Your body is a great truth teller.
It gives you real time information about what is happening. |
| If you are in your head a lot, it’s usual to focus on what you think should be happening, or what has happened, rather than what is here now.
You could say this type of focus is a trauma response. Your awareness is focused on your thoughts, which hen pull you away from yourself. |
| It results in disconnection between mind and body.
The root of this pattern is undigested overwhelm, and it’s very normal. Essentially you feel ill-equipped to sense into and be with the overwhelm, so your focus moves away from your felt sense into the realm of thoughts. When that happens, it’s as if there is a grey cloud covering up the feelings and sensations. It gives you a false sense of coping with your overwhelm. Whilst thoughts, can give you a sense of being able to control or work out what’s wrong and what to do… The overwhelm remains. |
| Coming into relationship with your overwhelm, your physical body and reconnecting them with your mind takes practice because your early childhood experiences most likely didn’t prepare you to live happily in your body, with all that arises through it. |
| Seriously…! |
| How you grew and developed shaped your experience of yourself deeply … it takes time to learn to reconnect, and come to a place of trust and ease with what is moving through you. |
| A body and energy centric approach to healing can provide a very efficient and effective way of supporting the reconnecting process, because it’s attuned to your body, what is moving through you in the moment, and provides the resources and support to process overwhelm at it’s energetic roots. |
| When you heal at this level, your inner world becomes rich and you can really get comfortable knowing and being yourself. That’s a place of inner freedom and opportunity. |
| To find out more about how my work can support resolving your trauma, check out my website InnerBodyFreedom.com. |
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