When the Body Speaks and We Don’t Listen

On the Gap Between Managing Experience and Trusting the Body

Many people come to body-based work carrying ideas, images, and beliefs about what healing should look like.

These ideas are rarely random.
They come from culture, from past experiences, from spiritual teachings, and from survival strategies that once helped us cope. Often, they arrive with good intentions: protection, reassurance, hope.

But body-based work asks something radically different of us.

It asks us to listen before we interpret.
To experience before we manage.
To trust that what arises from the body is not a mistake, an obstacle, or something that needs to be corrected.

Recently, during a class, I was reminded of how easily we step away from the body at the very moment it is asking to be heard: when a body brings forward a sensation or inner event that feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar.

From a cognitive or symbolic perspective, this is understandable.
From a bodily perspective, something essential can be missed.

The essential question is never how to change the experience, but how to listen to it.

Why did the body bring this sensation, memory, color, or sound forward at this moment?
What is it asking for?
What does it need?

In body-based work, when a discomfort, unpleasant memory, or difficult emotion arises, it does not appear against us.
It appears for us.

The body does not present material to block progress or to test our ability to manage ourselves. It presents exactly what is most relevant in that moment: the most direct doorway toward balance and healing.

When we allow what arises to exist without managing it, improving it, or steering it toward something “better,” something shifts. The body responds. New information appears. Movement happens, sometimes subtle, sometimes profound.

But when we intervene too quickly, when we work hard to control the experience, to transform it, or to overlay it with ideas of protection or healing, we step out of collaboration with the body.

Instead of listening, we take over.

When this happens, the opportunity to follow the body’s precise and intelligent proposal for healing can be missed. The body offered a way to work together, and that invitation was not accepted.

Not out of failure or resistance, but out of lack of trust.

And this is the part that saddens me most as a teacher.

So many people have been taught, over and over again, that they should not trust themselves.
That they must control their inner world.
That they must manage, correct, improve, and override what arises naturally.

This distancing from oneself is deeply ingrained. It is social, cultural, and often praised as discipline or strength.

And yet, when the same person allows the body to lead, even briefly, the sensitivity is remarkable. The responses are intelligent. The outcomes are usually profound and impressive.

This is why body-based work is not about doing the “right” exercise.
It is not about concentration, effort, or control.
And it is certainly not about forcing change.

It is about listening.

Listening without judgment.
Listening without a plan.
Listening long enough for the body to finish its sentence.

When we trust the body to lead, it almost always chooses the most efficient and precise path toward healing.
When we don’t, we often find ourselves working very hard yet going nowhere.

As a teacher, my role is not to impose meaning, but to help create the conditions in which the body feels safe enough to speak and to be heard.

That, to me, is where real change begins.