The body keeps the score. This is the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark book on trauma, but it points toward something wider: the body is keeping score on everything, all the time, and most of us are barely literate in the language it’s speaking.
We live in a culture organized around disembodiment. The highest-status activities involve sitting still and processing symbols. The premium on intellectual work is premium on something that happens from the neck up. The body, in this framework, is a delivery mechanism for the brain — something to be maintained at minimum viable standards so the important work can continue.
The Intelligence of Sensation
But the body is not stupid. It’s doing an enormous amount of sophisticated processing that never surfaces to conscious attention, and even the parts that do surface — sensation, affect, the felt quality of an experience — carry information that purely intellectual processing often misses.
Ask yourself: have you ever known something in your body before you knew it in your mind? The tightening in the chest in a situation that hasn’t yet registered as threatening. The ease in the shoulders around someone you trust before you’ve consciously noticed why. The way a decision that looks right on paper somehow doesn’t settle — there’s a restlessness, a low-grade wrongness that the body is reporting while the mind is still tallying the pros and cons.
Relearning the Language
The contemplative traditions have always known this. Meditation practices, somatic therapies, certain athletic disciplines — all of them, in different ways, are practices of becoming more fluent in the body’s language. Not to override the mind, but to bring the two into better conversation.
The body is a sacred garment. It’s your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with. — Martha Graham
What would change if you trusted the body a little more? Not uncritically — the body has its own distortions and limitations. But as a data source that’s been somewhat systematically underweighted.
Try it with small things first. Notice the felt quality of different activities — which ones leave you expanded, which ones contracted. Notice what happens in your body in different conversations, different environments, different decisions. You’re not looking for answers. You’re learning to ask better questions.
The body has been talking all along. We just haven’t been listening.
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