The Body Keeps the Clues: What Your Body Knows Before Your Mind

(Gentle note before we begin: This episode touches on themes of trauma and stored emotional experiences. If that feels tender for you right now, please take care in choosing whether to continue.)

You’ve probably heard the phrase...

your body remembers what you mind forgets

But what if we treated our bodies not just as vessels to be managed… but as instruments of wisdom?

As life speeds up, it’s easy to rely entirely on the thinking mind...penciling in our day, planning meals, tracking progress, overworking our goals.

And in doing so, we lose contact with an essential truth: the body is a sensory organ too, one tuned to subtle shifts, alerts, and truths that the mind might miss.

Why We Discount Our Body’s Signals

Many of us have been raised on the idiom: mind over matter.
We’ve learned to battle through exhaustion, stay busy, and override the signals of fatigue, hunger, or discomfort. In that striving, we may silence the body’s gentle dysregulation; like the hypervigilance of cortisol surges, or the weight we carry emotionally between the shoulder blades.

But there's a deeper truth: trauma doesn't live in our thinking brain... it lives in the body.

As Bessel van der Kolk’s work suggests, traumatic experiences can leave traces, not in words or memories, but in sensations, physiological responses, and unconscious reactivity. Trauma becomes somatic, not semantic.

Peter Levine’s Waking The Tiger explores how animals instinctively shake off threat and discharge stress energy that humans tend to hold. When we don’t release that energy, it becomes stored... in tension, rigidity, or muscular guarding.

We joke that we carry emotions in our muscles. But if you’ve ever tried to "look strong" to feel safe, or found your shoulders clenching during hard conversations, you know the truth: the body remembers.

Trauma Isn’t Always What You Think

When we hear the word trauma, many of us assume it refers only to major, life-threatening events.

But trauma isn’t defined by what happens to us, it’s defined by how our system responds when we don’t have the resources, safety, or support to fully process an experience.

Sometimes, trauma is loud and obvious.
But often, it’s quiet. It looks like:

• The moment you weren’t heard.

• The time your emotions were dismissed.

• The pattern of holding back because you learned it wasn’t safe to speak up.
  

Small things, repeated over time, leave deep imprints.

In those moments, the nervous system does its job: it moves to protect you. And that protection has a language known as fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flop.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, Flop: Through the Eyes of a Deer

Imagine a deer in the woods. She hears a rustle. Her ears prick. Her heart rate spikes.
If the danger is real and near, she might flee, sprinting away.
If cornered, she might fight.
If neither is possible, her body might freeze, playing dead, so the predator loses interest.

But here’s the important part: once the danger has passed, the deer shakes. Her body discharges the stress energy. Then she walks away, back to grazing.

Humans rarely get that reset.
We freeze... and stay frozen.
We fight... and never stand down.
We flee... and keep running for years.

The energy meant to protect us gets trapped. Stored.
Until the body begins to whisper—or shout—for our attention.

Strength, Softness, and Missing Messages

I used my muscles to speak when I struggled to say the words.
Not to be seen as strong, but to feel strong. Wired up, controlled, “managing” everything.

I chased the adrenaline highs of high-impact workouts and achievement squeezes, until even the achievements felt hollow.

Then I noticed something else... the quiet strength of softness.
The stillness, the slowing, the subtle noticing: that a shoulder lift without breath felt empty, but with attention felt rich. That grace can be powerful. That stillness can hold information.

When we slow enough to feel the flutter in the chest after a boundary, or the ache that means our system is tired, that is data.

That is intelligence. That is potency.

What the Science Reveals

The Body Keeps the Score showed how trauma can inhabit your physiology: unresolved fear, shame, or disconnection shows up as chronic pain, hypervigilance, or autonomic chaos, even when the trauma isn't consciously remembered.

Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing model holds that healing trauma isn’t about rewriting story, it’s about releasing stored energy through body awareness, subtle cues, and reconnecting with sensation, slowly.

While this podcast isn’t therapy, I am trauma-informed, and I’ve witnessed the power of simply noticing breath, tightness, or tremor to help slow the storm.

The body doesn’t lie.
It keeps memory of what passed through, even when the mind moved on.

A Note About Catharsis

While some Breathwork experiences can lead to catharsis...like crying, shaking, or intense emotional release, it’s important to remember: this isn’t the only way healing happens.

In my own life, and with my clients, I’ve found that gentler, slower Breathwork that allows integration into daily life is often far more effective than a single, intense release.

You don’t need a breakdown to experience a breakthrough.
Sometimes the most powerful healing is a softened jaw… or a single deep breath.

Midlife: A Time to Reconnect with the Body

Midlife often brings us face to face with what we’ve ignored or overridden.

The body asks louder now.

• The tight shoulders that won’t release.

• The gut that clenches during conflict.

• The breath that catches when we don’t speak up.
  

And yet, this isn’t a crisis. It’s an invitation.

To listen.
To re-inhabit.
To respect the sensory intelligence you’ve carried all along.

When we return to the body, we don’t just feel better, we become better guides for ourselves.
We stop outsourcing our choices.
We start living from the inside out.

Gentle Tools for Reconnection

If you’re wondering where to start, try one of these:

• Pause with a body scan: Tune into your breath, then scan; feet, tailbone, throat. Notice tension without judgment.
  

• Move with attention: During walking, lifting, or stretching, feel into contact: feet on the floor, spine rising, muscles lengthening.
  

• Breathe with your body: Let your exhale lengthen. Let the inhale arrive in its own time. Breathe with your body, not at it.
  
  

Your Invitation

This blog isn’t a manual. It’s a map.
Not to fix you, but to remind you: your body has always known the way.

If you’ve been living in your head, I get it. That’s how we survived for such a long time.

But you don’t have to stay there.

Let your body speak.
Let breath make space.
Let presence become your new pathway forward.

If you’re craving clarity, not through doing more, but sensing more, I’d love to meet you there.
With trauma-informed breathwork, presence-focused coaching, and space to rediscover the wisdom you already hold.

✨ Book a free clarity call at carlykillen.com ✨

Until next time,
Wishing you strength and ease

Carly x