Learning the Language of Your Body
Have you ever felt like your body was trying to tell you something?
Maybe it shows up as anxiety spiking around your period.
Maybe it is jaw clenching, teeth grinding, or tension you cannot fully explain.
Maybe it is the lingering discomfort after a UTI that left your whole pelvic bowl on high alert.
The body speaks in many ways. In fact, it is always communicating with us. Sometimes it whispers through subtle sensations. Other times it raises the volume through discomfort, pain, or stress responses that are asking for your attention.
But the body does not only communicate through difficult sensations. It also communicates through groundedness, calm, and connection.
Deep, nourishing breaths can be your body’s signal of safety.
A strong, steady voice is a reflection of your inner stability.
Feeling comfortable saying no can be a sign of trust in your intuition.
This language of the body is something every one of us can learn to understand. The challenge is that most of us were never taught how to listen. And the world we live in does not encourage it. Our culture prioritizes thinking over feeling, logic over intuition, and productivity over presence.
We learn to live from the neck up, trying to control our healing with thoughts alone.
But here is the truth.
You can always come back home to your body.
And this is exactly where real healing begins.
If you are new to somatics, you can read more about what it means here:
What Is Somatics and Why It Matters for Women’s Healing
Why Healing Cannot Happen Only in the Mind
You can think about healing all day long. You can read books, journal, repeat affirmations, and talk through your experiences. These can all be helpful, but they are not enough on their own.
If your nervous system is still operating in chronic activation, your body does not care how many times you say the words “I am safe.”
To your physiology, those words are meaningless without the felt experience of safety.
Healing requires sensation.
Healing requires softness and grounding.
Healing requires your body to physically experience calm.
This is not a mindset shift.
this is a physiological shift.
If you want to understand how the stress response works, this is a helpful breakdown:
Harvard Health: Understanding the Stress Response
Safety must be practiced. It must be felt and repeated so it becomes familiar in your system. This embodied safety becomes the foundation for every layer of healing that follows: trauma, patterns, relationships, intimacy, and sexual expression.
To understand why safety is the foundation of healing, you can also read this post:
Why Safety in the Body Is the Foundation of Healing
Why So Many Women Feel Disconnected From Their Bodies
The more women I work with, the clearer it becomes that many of us were taught to override or ignore the cues from our bodies.
We were not taught how to regulate our nervous systems.
We were not shown how to come back into calm.
We were not given tools for embodied living.
And none of this is your fault.
It is not about eliminating stress. Stress is necessary.
For example, if a lion is chasing you, you want your stress response fully activated. You want speed, adrenaline, and clarity. What you do not want is to stay in that state once the lion is gone.
The nervous system does not know the difference between running from a lion and being emotionally overwhelmed, navigating relational stress, or dealing with chronic pelvic tension.
Polyvagal Theory helps explain this beautifully:
Psychology Today: Polyvagal Theory Basics
Your body responds to emotional lions the same way it responds to literal ones.
Learning to Hear Your Body Again
Reconnecting to the body is a slow remembering. It begins gently and builds over time.
Here are a few ways this begins:
• Noticing sensations before your mind interprets them
• Allowing emotion instead of suppressing it
• Creating practices that support regulation
• Letting pleasure, warmth, and nourishment guide you
• Returning to grounding in moments of overwhelm
This is how safety rebuilds itself.
This is how trust is restored.
This is how healing becomes possible.
If you want to understand how the body stores trauma and why sensation matters, this is a helpful resource: The Body Keeps the Score (Book Page)
You can always come back to your body.
You can learn to speak its language again.
You do not have to live in survival mode.
This is the foundation of the somatic and psycho-sexual work I do with women. You can learn more about my approach here:
https://www.valerievictor.com/about
If you feel called to explore this work more deeply, you can learn about my 1:1 sessions here:
https://www.valerievictor.com/work-with-me
Your healing is not in your thoughts. Your healing is in your body.
