There is a phrase that comes up again and again in the world of trauma research. The body keeps the score.
It is the title of one of the most important books written on trauma in the last thirty years, by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. And it captures something that I think most of us instinctively know but rarely have language for. That the difficult things we experience in life do not just pass through us and disappear. They leave something behind. And that something lives in the body.
This is not a metaphor. It is physiology.
Why the Body Holds On
When we experience something threatening or overwhelming, our nervous system responds immediately and automatically. It does not wait for our rational mind to catch up. It moves us into survival mode: fight, flight or freeze. Stress hormones flood the system. Heart rate rises. Muscles tighten. Breath becomes shallow and rapid. The body prepares to either fight off the threat, run from it or play dead until it passes.
This response is brilliant. It has kept human beings alive for hundreds of thousands of years.
The problem arises when the threat passes but the body does not fully discharge the survival response it has been holding. When we do not get to fight, or run, or shake out the activated energy that has built up in the system. When life moves on but the body does not get the signal that it is safe to come down.
In those situations, the stress response stays partially activated. The nervous system remains on alert. And over time, if this pattern repeats, the body begins to function as though danger is a baseline rather than an exception.
This is what trauma does in the body. It is not just a memory of something difficult. It is an ongoing physiological state that affects how we sleep, how we relate to others, how we experience emotions, how we make decisions, how we breathe. It affects everything.
What This Feels Like From the Inside
You might recognise some of these experiences without necessarily having labelled them as trauma responses.
Feeling constantly on edge without being able to explain why. Startling easily at small sounds or sudden movements. Struggling to feel safe even in objectively safe situations. Feeling disconnected from your body, as though you are watching your life from slightly outside it. A persistent sense of heaviness or flatness that does not shift no matter what you do. Physical tension that lives in particular places: the jaw, the shoulders, the chest, the gut.
These are not character flaws. They are the body doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping you safe based on everything it has learned about the world so far.
Why Talking Is Sometimes Not Enough
Traditional talking therapy is enormously valuable, and I would never discourage anyone from it. But there is a reason that many people can spend years in therapy, develop profound intellectual understanding of what happened to them and why, and still feel something stuck in the body that the talking has not quite reached.
This is because trauma is stored somatically. In the body’s tissues, its fascia, its nervous system, its automatic physiological responses. And the cognitive, linguistic parts of the brain that talking therapy primarily engages are not always directly connected to where the trauma actually lives.
To reach the body, you need to work with the body.
This might mean movement, somatic experiencing, EMDR, or breathwork. Often a combination of approaches over time. What they share is a willingness to meet the body where it is, rather than trying to think the body into a different state.
How Breathwork Helps
Breath is one of the most direct access points we have to the nervous system.
It is the only autonomic function we can also control consciously. When you breathe slowly and fully, particularly when you lengthen the exhale, you directly stimulate the vagus nerve, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system, your body’s rest and restore mode. You are literally signalling to the body through its own language that it is safe to come down.
In a Ninth Dimension breathwork session, we use conscious connected breathing to take the body into a state where stored survival responses can finally complete themselves. Where the energy that never got to discharge can move. Where the held places can soften.
This often looks like shaking, or crying, or feeling intense heat or tingling move through the body. These are not concerning signs. They are the body doing exactly what it has been trying to do for a long time. Finishing what it started. Coming back to balance.
I have sat with people in sessions who have understood intellectually for years what they were carrying and finally, through breath, felt it leave their body. Not as a concept. As a physical sensation of release that is unlike anything a conversation can produce.
That does not mean breathwork replaces therapy or that one session fixes everything. Trauma that has lived in the body for years does not dissolve in an afternoon. But it does mean that for many people, breathwork becomes the piece that makes everything else make sense. The thing that creates the felt sense of safety that allows the deeper healing to happen.
Where to Begin
If any of this resonates, I want to say something gently but directly: you do not have to keep carrying this.
You do not have to have it figured out before you come. You do not have to know what you are looking for or have a clear sense of what happened or be able to articulate your experience in any particular way. You just need a willingness to show up and breathe.
Your body already knows what it needs to release. It has been waiting, with extraordinary patience, for the right conditions to do it.
That is what I try to create in every session. A space safe enough for the body to finally let go.
With warmth,
Jenni 🌀
