The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living

by Hillary L. McBride

The example I gave earlier about memory cookies, where all the sensory components get mixed together, applies to positive experiences as well as trauma triggers. Sensory elements can be combined to form memory cookies that help us know we are safe, cared for, and loved. So if you are alone and it is hard to access your truest self, imagine that a loving friend, your therapist, or anyone else who makes you feel safe is talking to you or sitting next to you. The memories and emotions you associate with loving people, or even by thinking of them, can help you access that feeling of love, which you can then use to help yourself feel safe.

Use a technique called 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Notice and list out loud five things you see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste (or a taste already in your mouth). You could even try picking out five things for each of the senses. Reach out and touch an item near you. Perhaps it is a wall, the floor, the chair on which you are sitting, a rock, or the grass. Feel the sensation of that item in your hand. Put your hands in water or splash cold water on your face. Count backward from a large number by 7 or 13 (such as 12,567 by 13s). Describe aloud the physical sensations you are experiencing in your body. Go for a walk, or take your shoes off and stand on the earth. Feel your feet meet the ground. Describe what you see around you. Pick an object or shape and trace it slowly with your eyes, taking in all the little details.

This invitation to choose what you want to do with your body is about bodily agency. This kind of movement is one way to begin practicing interoception. Interoception is the ability to sense what is happening inside your body and to know yourself from the inside out. Some examples of interoception include noticing hunger cues, physical changes that come with emotion, heart rate, or even if you feel hot or cold.

Learn about your own stress response staircase. Find a journal or set up a secure digital document and create your own version of a stress response staircase (based on the model from earlier in the chapter). For each of the steps (safety, social engagement, mobilization, shutting down), make a list of the behaviors, thoughts, or internal sensations that let you know when you are on that step. Try thinking about some of these questions: What does it feel like to be on this step? What sensations are in your body? What goes through your mind? What feelings do you have? Then focus on safety: What people, situations, or environments signal that you can move up the staircase to safety?

Our stress and trauma responses are constantly sending us messages. Our distress signals sound the alarm to indicate that something is wrong or that what is happening presently reminds us of something scary from the past. These signals alert us to change a pattern or to develop a skill. Instead of ignoring these signals, we can learn to listen to them as they help us move into compassionate relationship with ourselves, learn to care for others in meaningful ways, and prompt us to take steps toward healing. In this way, learning to listen to and honor our trauma and stress responses, even in how awful they feel, can serve our ability to grow and heal.

Girls and women are highly likely to be objectified, but increasingly boys and men are objectified as well. When this happens, a person can begin to self-objectify—to internalize the observer’s perspective as a primary way to view themselves. Objectification and subsequent self-objectification are central to disembodiment and are linked with a variety of health concerns, including depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, and sexual dysfunction.6

While experiences, or the bottom-up way, are the most meaningful way to create lasting internal change, our brains tend to do more of what they have had lots of practice doing already. So giving our brains new things to practice can help, as can repairing the wounds that we acquired along the way by apologizing to ourselves. Sometimes I put my hand on my chest and say to myself, “I am so sorry I used to believe those harmful things. There is so much more for me than to be stuck there again.”

For me, a wonderful way to connect with myself recently has been to get up close to the mirror and stare into my eyes. Sometimes it seems like I could get lost in what feels like a whole universe in there. And I’ve been amazed at how practicing wonder and gratitude related to my body has spilled over into how I feel, experience, and encounter other people. Everyone is a walking miracle! And I often linger a bit longer with people’s eyes just to get a glimpse of the universe inside of them.

What I want for you, and for all of us, is to have our appearance-focused worldviews disrupted. I want us to remember the experiences of ourselves as bodies that pull us out of what we think is going on in the minds of others and place us into our very selves. I want us to torch the ideals that are restrictive, damaging, and often unattainable, and learn instead to be present to and compassionate toward what is. Not at some later time—after we think we have changed our body until our appearance is acceptable—but now. And even if the stories about our appearances have been not so good, our bodies are good. All bodies are good.

If I could sum up all my years of clinical training and research in one statement, it would be this: We heal when we can be with what we feel. In other words, trying to make feelings go away, and in a very authoritarian, cognitive, and seemingly disconnected manner, wouldn’t do it. It is ironic that turning toward our emotions instead of exiling them is what helps us move through them. So I tried a different approach.

Although we use many words to describe how we feel, there are seven categories of primary emotions that have their own circuitry and function within us: anger, excitement, sadness, disgust, joy, fear, and sexual excitement. Each emotion emerges depending on what is happening within and around us. Anger helps strengthen us to fight, assert or defend ourselves, and make a change or get what we need. Excitement gives us the energy to move toward something, to investigate, or to explore. It’s part of how we expand and lean into life. Sadness, which can lead us to feel heavy and pulled down, signals to us and to those around us that we might need some support. It helps us to grieve and to learn what is painful to or meaningful for us. Disgust was originally an emotion that activated our gastrointestinal tract and certain facial muscles to keep us from ingesting something dangerous, but it has evolved to include all manner of things we find harmful (including policies and behavior). It can signal to others “This is harmful,” whatever “this” is at the moment. Joy helps us expand, heal, and continue to thrive. It drives us into an openhearted state in which we can connect and share. Fear puts us on alert, helping us to anticipate and perceive threat and to move toward protection and out of or away from situations that might be damaging to us. Sexual excitement or desire originally developed to keep our species alive through procreation.

It motivates us to meet unmet needs, fulfill ourselves, and experience pleasure. Each emotion has a purpose and comes with its own physiological signature and action tendency—or the pattern of what we want to do when we feel that specific feeling. Emotions influence

Some of us might be tempted to imagine a world without emotion—nothing to complicate the workplace, the to-do list, dating, or parenting. But from people who have disturbances or deactivation in the emotion centers of their brain, we learn that they are actually unable to make decisions or connect with others. Emotions have a purpose, each of them, even in a culture that hushes this innate wisdom that is available to us all. Emotions happen inside the body and

are expressed through the body. This means that emotions can signal to others through the body what is going on within us. You might have heard it said that emotion is e-motion, or energy in motion, and the landscape for that movement is our bodies. But some of us have confused our ability to feel our feelings as they move as energy through our body with our ability to talk about what we feel. We can sit in therapy, tell sad stories, and talk about feeling sad without ever having the bodily experience of sadness.

All of them give us feedback about emotions, and our ways of being in the world adapt in response. Through repeated social experiences, we learn to internalize the responses others’ give us to our own emotions, often replicating in our internal world the spoken and unspoken messages we receive, whether internalizing loving care we receive from someone else to lovingly care for our own feelings or internalizing shame from a critical person to shame our own feelings.

Regardless of the why, when we weren’t supported to stay with our emotion, we failed to learn that emotions rise and then eventually fall, and that we will be on the other side of the feeling at some point. As a result, we need to learn, through supportive connection, that it is safe to feel and how to do

Never being shown—consistently and frequently enough, if at all—how to ride the wave of an emotion can make it terrifying to start feeling because all we know is that the sensation in our body is rising, rising, rising with no end in sight. So, when we are faced with emotion moving in us, it can be overwhelming and shame inducing. This can keep us stuck in a loop that reinforces a shutdown, fear, or avoidance response.

A defense is different from an otherwise acceptable activity because a defense is used to get away from what it feels like to be us or to avoid the emotion that is trying to get our attention. A defense isn’t necessarily a bad thing; sometimes it’s too much of a good thing, or sometimes we’re using an otherwise good thing to get away from feeling something. Having a glass of wine to get away from our feelings is different from having a glass of wine because it complements the meal. The same is true of learning, laughter, and eating.

In her book It’s Not Always Depression, psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel invites

Like defenses, inhibitory affects let us know that our bodies are trying to communicate something. Inhibitory affects rise up to push things down, thereby signaling that we are entering territory into which we have been told we should not go.

Both inhibitory affects and defenses are ways that we do our best to get away from emotions we can never actually be rid of. A large percentage of people who come to therapy do so because they have realized that their defenses are not working or are hurting them or others, they are stuck experiencing inhibitory affects (the shame, guilt, or anxiety), and it feels awful, or they are oscillating between their defenses and inhibitory affects.

He paused, and then tears began to form in the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t realize how much sadness I was carrying around and how elaborate my strategies were to get away from it.” It was as if he opened cabinet doors inside his chest to let me see inside. He had experienced many losses and much grief but also a corresponding need to make the grief go away, to “move on,” and to protect himself and his family from what it might be like to be with all the sadness.

This way of thinking about emotions comes from the work of Dr. Diana Fosha, through her development of a theoretical framework and approach to therapy called Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Therapy (AEDP).

To become healthier mentally and physically, we have to get to know our inner landscapes with more curiosity, kindness, and compassion. We do that by understanding emotions as our guides to self-understanding, identity, and fullness in life. In this way, emotions are like colors in a crayon box. Knowing them means we can use them more skillfully. It is hard to have a life of wholeness if we have only one color or if the crayons seem to chaotically spew out of the box. This process of learning to use a full box of crayons, deciding how to best use colors and when it’s the right time to do so, is called emotional regulation: it is our ability to notice, manage, and respond to emotions effectively and appropriately given our context. Emotional regulation enables us to prevent and treat mental health issues, facilitates better academic performance, helps us parent with more ease, and equips us to have more peaceful, intimate, and satisfying relationships.

awareness down through your body, looking for anything that stands out, such as temperature, tightness, openness, or movement of energy (swirling, rising, pressing, weighing, undulating, sinking, etc.). The purpose of noticing sensations is not to take us away from the emotion but to help us attend to it in a way that moves the emotion through us without blocking it. When emotions signal something in our body, turning kind attention toward that helps us regulate our emotions and also connect with ourselves—a connection that cannot be taken from us regardless of

Riding the wave of each emotion enough times gives us confidence when the next wave is building that it too will recede.

There are some good things on the other side: usually we get a mix of relief, internal space, and some insight about what matters to us or what we need to do next.

Diana Fosha has said that feelings are the experiential arc between the problem and the solution.11 When we stay with that arc, our bodies lead us to what needs to happen next. Sadness helps us ask for comfort, helps us grieve, or gives us the release of letting go. Anger helps us set a boundary and protect ourselves or someone else. And joy takes us into full expression, sharing our experiences to help them expand.

When we are more emotionally regulated, but haven’t forgotten the message the emotion gave us, we can integrate our thinking into our feelings to figure out our best next move.

Watch what your thoughts are doing. Sometimes when we are learning to stay with emotions, we confuse that body-based process with the thoughts that made us feel that way in the first place. That is the equivalent to pouring gasoline on a fire (great if we want a bigger fire, not so great if we are struggling to manage the fire as it is). For example, you might think of something sad, but as you try to stay with sadness, you continue to think about what someone said to you and what you think it means about you. Instead, try to step back and notice only the emotion, setting the story aside in order to be fully with the bodily sensation. This can take practice, especially when we aren’t used to focusing on our inner experience this way.

Emotions are wired into us because we are human, but the specific emotional response we have to a scenario is unique to each of us. These responses tell us what is important to us and what we have been through.

Even if two people are experiencing the same event in the same moment, because of what they have been through in the past, one person might feel afraid while the other person might feel excitement or not notice much of anything.

Feelings offer us insight about ourselves, if we let them. When we are frustrated, it is easy to blame another person, but doing so means we miss a chance to see where we need to heal, seek comfort, get out of a situation, or understand ourselves more deeply. Believing that a feeling is about someone else might make us think that the other person, or the situation, has to change. That can trap us in a cycle of codependency, making us think that we can never be okay until the other pers...

At the next break, I overheard one of the men approach another man and say, “Will you walk with me while I cry?” The second man simply nodded, unphased, and the two of them walked together out toward a crop of walnut trees. When we came back together after the break, the first man shared that the walk was the only time in his life he had cried with another man present. He described feeling that for the first time, almost unbelievably, he knew he did not have to be alone in his sadness. Because he was not crying alone, his sadness was bearable and began to dissipate. I was in awe. His courage and authenticity were so moving that most of us sat with mouths agape. It was a stunning, real-time demonstration that change is possible and that when we are not alone, we can take risks to feel the pain that was otherwise unbearable. Each of us was reminded that emotion itself is never the problem; the problem is the stories that keep us apart from each other, create conditional belonging, or require us to shove things down in order to stay connected. I think of this memory often because I never want it to leave me. It gives me hope. In fact, I can’t imagine a better picture of hope than those two men walking close to each other on a path into a grove of trees. One man cried, and the other man helped him write a new story—a story in which being a body, with all its feelings, did not have to exclude him from connection but could draw him more deeply into it.

With years of practice, it has become natural to think that my body is good, that all bodies are good. But it requires something different to say that now—it carries a different weight for a person to say it when there is pain. Or illness. Or injury. Or disability. I was becoming aware of how much others might have to negotiate to know and believe that their bodies are good, especially when prevailing cultural values are against them. Still on the floor, condensation from

What is true of me, underneath the stories we tell about our body, is true of you too. Your body is good simply because it is your home. Your body is good, no questions asked—though it may be the fight of our lives to remember and reclaim this essential truth for ourselves and each other.

My body isn’t bad. What happened to me was scary and painful. My body did what has kept so many bodies safe for millennia—it tightened. Realizing that the pain, the tightening, was a natural response to something scary and unpredictable gave me instant compassion for myself, for my physicality, and even for the tightening. I could notice myself in pain and say to my body, as if speaking directly to the wise force entwined with my DNA, “Thank you for how you tried to keep me safe. You are doing the only thing you know how to do when something very scary happens. And although we are safe now, you do not know that yet. Instead of being angry with you, I promise I will show you that we are safe by treating you in such a way that reminds you that we really are safe.” My body softened. I took a deep breath.

As I described in chapter 3, when we remember or think about something scary, our body activates to protect us as if the scary thing from the past were happening again in the present.

it. But guess what happens when we are frustrated or afraid? Our bodies tighten. The organ systems and biochemistry that make our muscles tense are activated, even if we don’t know it is happening. That is our nervous system trying to protect us. If the triggering event is indeed something from which we need to be protected, great. Otherwise, the activation is not so helpful. When our body tightens, the muscles compress around our nerves and cause a lot of pain. It is real pain, not imagined pain. Think of a charley horse or a leg cramp. While it is happening, we know that no major injury has occurred, but it can hurt like hell. No matter how the pain happened, how we choose to respond to it can ramp up, or lessen, the pain. This pattern is a cycle we can get stuck in when we have chronic pain; we will call it the pain cycle. The research on chronic pain5 and stress-related disorders6 (irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia, TMJ, and even some forms of headaches or autoimmune diseases) and the psychophysiology and behavioral aspects of how we respond to our own pain show us a pattern: we get stuck in a cycle of tightness → pain → second arrow (repeat). Figure 3 illustrates this. Something happens (the first arrow), it hurts because our nervous system gets amped up (tightens), and we are in psychological distress. What we do in response contributes to the cycle. we might stop doing things we enjoy, which increases our stress, and then our capacity to move with ease decreases. A...

When we are able to choose kindness or curiosity to at least interrupt the second arrow, it looks like the progression in figure 4. This new way of responding builds confidence in our ability to respond to our pain, helps us begin to heal our relationship with ourselves in a more global sense, and starts to reverse the pain cycle by undoing the tightness, fear, and avoidance we experience in the presence of pain. And when pain comes up again, we know we have agency in the process: we can choose how we respond to it. That makes pain less scary and hopeless, and it makes it easier for us to refrain from picking up the second arrow. You might remember from chapter 3 that having agency over our bodies is one way to heal from trauma. By not adding more distress to our bodies, we can make space to heal what is already there without heaping more pain on top of it. Although pain may still be there, we can learn to respond in ways that don’t cause more pain.

started moving at half-speed and gently placed my warm hands on every part of my body, pausing and lingering at the places with pain or injury that I was there to investigate. Feet first, then ankles, shins, knees, hips, belly, and chest, then my neck, scalp, and finally my hands came to rest on my cheeks as I met my own gaze in the mirror. I was standing there, hands tenderly on my face, like a mother would place her hands on the face of her beloved child. To the parts that were hurting, that had worked hard, had endured, survived, were afraid, I said aloud to all of me, “Well done. You have worked so hard. You have been in so much pain, so vocal about where it hurts. Thank you for speaking up. I am listening. And the doctors are listening too. Thank you for working so hard to protect me after such an awful and scary thing happened to you. You are safe now.” It just tumbled out of me; perhaps it was all the practice I’d had doing this in the mirror before and after physiotherapy, late at night in bed, on the floor of my office, or every time I got in a car after the accidents. There was an older man in the stall next to me struggling to put on his seafoam suit, and he chuckled at my profession of compassion. I had forgotten for a moment that anyone else was there. But I smiled, wondering what it was like for him to hear all that. Perhaps this was a kind of dialogue he knew well. Perhaps I was simply the mysterious lady with a soft voice one stall over having a very strang...

It can be hard to see with clarity the systems within which we live, especially when these systems seem abstract and ideological, or when we benefit from them directly. But they shape the social landscapes within which we live, and they have observable and experiential consequences on our bodies, individually and collectively. In the words of somatic psychology expert Christine Caldwell, “The marginalization of the body has such a long and cross-cultural history that we barely notice or care that the oppression of our bodily selves is constant, insidious, and potentially devastating.”

Sometimes I would mimic or parody or outright make fun of myself as an Asian. I was saying to white people, ‘I’m not like those people who are sensitive about race. You don’t have to worry about me; I won’t cause trouble here.’ I was basically putting myself and my community down to make someone else feel comfortable and not have to change something. But I’m in my mid-thirties now, and I’m asking myself the question, ‘What does it look like for me to be proud of who I am, with my race and ethnicity and sexuality?’ I don’t want to shift myself anymore just to make it comfortable for other people. That is for their sake, for my sake, and for the sake of people groups who experience far more oppression than I do.”

The more representation, the stronger those voices are. But when there is a group of people who are really different, like this church I was at, when nobody belongs, we all belong to each other, and it just works. You can feel more ease about being yourself, because there isn’t this caricature of who you’re supposed to be.”

Even when we think we are protecting people and respecting the rights of people with disabilities, sometimes our goodwill can be harmful. Heather said, “I blame the international symbol of accessibility for this because the sign for the washrooms, the sign for parking—it’s a figure in a wheelchair. That is what people think of when they think about disability. But in reality, 93 percent of disabilities are invisible. There is a lot of variability to disability, and I don’t think that’s talked about enough.” Heather told me that some disabilities are seen as more legitimate or real, while others aren’t. They also identified how different systems work together to create more barriers for people to access care.

Heather highlighted two ways of thinking about disability: the social model and the medical model. The medical model views people with disabilities as needing to be fixed by the medical system. In this case, disability is the problem. But the social model views harmful perspectives on disability, or ableism, as the problem. Ableism creates an inaccessible world, and we all have a role in either creating it or dismantling it. The social model shifts the problem from the person and bodies to systems and ways of thinking about people and bodies.

Sexuality may be invited to the surface of your attention by certain contexts, people, sensations, and more, but it is yours—in you, through you, and for you.

Having only the handed-down set of inflexible sexual scripts meant neglected opportunities to learn to ask questions outside of the pure/impure sexual dichotomy. What many of these adults learned post–purity culture is that for all the effort of trying to do what was “right,” they lacked the space to nurture a nuanced, developmentally appropriate, real-world sexual ethic with a sense of personal responsibility or agency.

Instead, I would rather educate a person about the options, how to think critically, and how to make choices that feel right, safe, and honoring of themselves and whomever they are with.

believe it is unhelpful when we create systems in which certain people in power tell other people that their sexual activity can make them morally superior or somehow exclude them from Divine love. This creates communities in which people are disconnected from their bodies, suggests that worth and love are conditional, and undermines a sense of responsibility for their own behavior. Moving the locus of control for sexuality outside of a person creates the conditions under which a person could use another person’s body sexually and blame someone else instead of taking personal responsibility.