Our bodies hold wisdom older than explanation.
Before story.
Before belief.
Before meaning-making.
Our bodies know:
how to tremble and release
how to rest
how to soften
how to grieve
how to yield
how to return.
Our bodies are fluent in cycles.
They breathe in and out.
They sleep and wake.
They digest and release.
They heal.
They move through seasons with innate intelligence.
They are born.
And they die.
Bodies live knowing impermanence.
They know how to die.
And still, inhabiting a body is not always easeful.
Sometimes our bodies feel safe to trust, steady enough to lean into, responsive and alive with wisdom. At other times, they may feel as though they are turning against our desires—our will, our plans, our ability to move through life as we once did.
We may feel betrayal, abandonment, or rejection in relationship with our own bodies.
Or we may feel this rupture through the loss of other bodies we have loved.
There are seasons when we do not feel the girth or stability to fully anchor, ground, or incarnate—especially when the land, the culture, or the conditions of our lives feel untrustworthy to hold us through descent. Our minds may pick up speed, trying to outrun trauma. Or we may feel overwhelmed by sensation—flooded with pleasure, fear, or exuberance—unsure how to metabolize what is moving through us.
Our bodies know transitions.
They know thresholds.
They know how to prepare.
How to live within the conditions of the times.
How to pivot, recharge, and collaborate with other forms of intelligence—family, ancestry, instinct, community.
Our bodies know when to call for help.
And when to rest and retreat.
They know the depths.
They also know how to deny them.
Sometimes our bodies shut down.
They become frozen, traumatized, disembodied.
Fighting or fleeing the moment.
Carrying fear shaped by culture, by time, by ancestral and intergenerational memory.
Our bodies may move into denial or avoidance—resisting change, resisting aging, resisting endings—shaped by a culture that has little room for death.
Prompt
What happens when your body meets a time of reckoning?
A time of transition?
A crossing into the unknown?
A releasing of everything you’ve known how to carry?
What happens when grief has you?
Or when praise, beauty, or love lights up a new pathway—sending your body, heart, and mind into renewed trust or a willingness to stay?
Embodied listening happens
in the ribs,
in the belly,
in the skin,
in the ground beneath your feet.
It does not rush to interpret.
It does not rush to solve.
It allows experience to be experience.
Because in descent, too much thinking can become a way of leaving.
And the body keeps calling us back.