Living Through Trying Times
There are moments in life when grief arrives unannounced. When it does, it has a way of dropping us into parts of ourselves we don’t visit very often. That happened to me last month.
In moments like these, I become especially aware of how I live inside my body, and how much that relationship matters when things feel rickety. This is where the work I do in somatic movement becomes less theoretical and more tangible.
Somatic movement is, at its core, a practice of intimacy with your body. It’s not about fixing anything. It’s about learning how to listen closely enough that you can recognize what your body is asking for in the moment.
When we build that kind of familiarity, something important happens: we stop relying solely on our minds or our patterns to get us through difficult moments, and we gain access to another kind of intelligence.
For example, when I notice my hands wanting to cradle my face, I let them. I lean into it, imagining a loving mother's hands. When my body feels heavy, I ground instead of pushing forward. Sometimes the most regulating choice is curling up, going “underground,” or letting myself be held by the furniture beneath me. Other times, it’s continuing to show up to the job, in service, without judgment, without self-criticism—because that, too, can be supportive.
None of these responses are strategies I planned in advance. They emerge because I know my body well enough to recognize its cues and trust what they’re offering.
This is why somatic movement goes beyond relieving pain or tension or stress, and instead invites us to deeply experience life itself. When you are intimately familiar with your body and its cues, you’re better equipped to navigate grief, uncertainty, conflict, fear, decision-making, and change. You’re able to give yourself what you actually need, rather than what you think you should need.
Death, loss, and hardship are real, and our experiences of them are deeply personal. But our capacity to meet those experiences with trust often depends on whether we’ve practiced listening before the hard moments arrive.
To know your body profoundly is a kind of superpower. The use of that superpower is infinite: fitness and performance, injury and recovery, pain and stress relief, AND ALSO parenting, work, relationships, boundaries, and, yes, sadness, anger, and even joy and pleasure—when tuning in becomes the most useful skills we have.
That’s the work. And that’s why we practice.