Sensation, embodiment, and the language we were never taught to read.
A gentle note before we begin
Before we go further, a small bit of context. I’m not a psychologist, medical doctor, therapist, or trauma specialist. I’m a movement nerd who has done a bit of training in trauma-sensitive yoga and is endlessly curious about how bodies and nervous systems actually work (and why mine occasionally behaves like an overcaffeinated smoke detector).
I love reading the research and learning from the clinicians and scientists who study trauma, stress, and regulation for a living. And I love trying to translate what they discover into language that feels usable in everyday life and movement spaces. So what follows is not clinical advice. It’s an exploration of ideas that have helped me make sense of sensation, embodiment, and the quiet intelligence of the nervous system. None of this is gospel.
The body was here first
Before we have words, we have sensation. Before we have interpretation, we have reaction. Before we have a story, we have a body. Something startles you and your shoulders lift. A message arrives and your stomach drops. You walk into a room and your breath becomes shallow for reasons you can’t quite name. Or you suddenly feel relief before you understand what changed.
The body is not waiting for the mind to catch up. The nervous system is already doing its job.
Many of us were taught to trust the thinking mind as the authority on our experience. The mind narrates, analyzes, explains, and makes sense of things. It holds the clipboard. It writes the report. But the nervous system is often the one who attended the meeting. The mind frequently arrives later, asking for a recap.
Your nervous system hates meetings
The brain has more than one processing speed. There is the slower, thoughtful brain that interprets and tells stories. And there is the fast brain that asks only one question: Am I safe?
The fast brain does not wait around for proof, gather evidence, or form a committee. It is not a fan of meetings. It simply prepares the body. Breath shifts, heart rate changes, muscles organize, and hormones release. Attention narrows or scatters. Only afterward does the thinking mind appear and begin asking what’s going on.
That’s why we sometimes feel anxious without a clear reason, uneasy without a story, or suddenly relaxed without knowing what changed. The nervous system didn’t forget to inform us. It simply speaks a different language.
And that language is sensation.
The book that changed the conversation
When The Body Keeps the Score entered the cultural conversation, it opened a huge and necessary door.
Its author, psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk, has spent decades studying post-traumatic stress, beginning in the 1970s when trauma was still poorly understood and rarely discussed in mainstream culture. His work helped move trauma out of the realm of private suffering and into public awareness. The book became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into dozens of languages, bringing the science of trauma to an enormous audience and helping countless people feel seen and understood.
For many readers, the book offered a life-changing realization: trauma is not only a memory or a narrative. It has physiological consequences. It shapes the nervous system, the stress response, and the way the body prepares for the world.
That cultural shift was profoundly important. As often happens when a big idea spreads widely, some of the language became simplified and a little distorted (misunderstood?) in everyday conversation. You may have heard that trauma is stored in the hips, trapped in fascia, or lodged in organs and joints like emotional shrapnel embedded in tissue.
It’s a vivid image. It helped people take their bodily experience seriously. And honestly, many of us were relieved to finally have permission to stop pretending stress lived only in our calendars. Neuroscience has continued to refine the picture.
My understanding is that trauma is not “stored” in muscles, bones, or organs. Trauma is stored in neural patterns—in the brain’s learning systems, in threat-detection circuits, memory networks, and the systems that regulate the nervous system. Trauma is, at its core, a brain-based learning experience.
But the brain does not exist in isolation. The brain directs the body. So when the brain learns that the world is dangerous, the body becomes very good at acting like it. The brain writes the software. The body runs the program. The body is not the storage unit but the loudspeaker.
Since van der Kolk’s work helped bring trauma into the mainstream, a growing group of researchers and writers—including Kristin Neff, Stephen Porges, Peter Levine, Judith Herman, Deb Dana and others—has continued expanding the conversation. The focus has gradually shifted from “What is wrong with you?” to “What happened to your nervous system?” and even further toward “What helps the nervous system feel safe now?”
The conversation is still unfolding. And that’s a good thing.
Why it feels like it lives in the body
When something overwhelming happens, the nervous system learns quickly and deeply. Then it begins predicting danger before danger is present. Shoulders tighten before you notice the stress and breath pauses before you notice the worry. The stomach clenches before you notice the fear and fatigue arrives before you notice the overwhelm.
When people say they carry stress in their neck or anxiety in their chest, they are describing the output of the nervous system—the protective patterns the brain has learned to run automatically.
And the body runs them beautifully.
Seen this way, sensation starts to look less like a problem and more like information. Not pathology or weakness. Not something to override or silence. Information that tells us when we feel safe and when we don’t, when we are bracing and when we are softening, when we are overwhelmed and when we are settling, often long before the thinking mind understands why.
Learning to feel is not indulgent woo-woo. It is basic nervous-system literacy.
A quick note on “grief in the lungs” and body–emotion language
If you’ve spent time in yoga, somatic, or bodywork spaces, you may have heard phrases like grief lives in the lungs, anger lives in the hips, or fear sits in the gut.
It can be confusing, especially if you also enjoy neuroscience and anatomy and are trying to hold multiple frameworks at once.
It’s worth saying up front that many of these ideas echo very old healing traditions. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, for example, emotional patterns have long been associated with organ systems and energetic pathways. These traditions were built from centuries of careful observation of how emotional life and physical experience intertwine. They are not random ideas, and they have helped many people make sense of their inner experience.
Here’s how I think about the overlap: these phrases are experiential language rather than anatomical language.
They are attempts to describe reliable patterns in human physiology using metaphor instead of medical language. For example, grief is strongly linked to changes in breathing. When we cry, sigh, sob, hold our breath, or feel that unmistakable “lump in the throat,” we are experiencing very real shifts in the respiratory and nervous systems. Over time, many people who are grieving notice tightness in the chest, shallow breathing, or a sense of heaviness around the heart and lungs.
So when someone says grief lives in the lungs, they are not describing a literal storage unit inside the ribcage. They are describing a pattern that shows up again and again in human experience. In the same way, anxiety often shows up in the gut. Anger often shows up as heat, pressure, or readiness in the arms and jaw. Fear often shows up as tightening in the belly or a sudden drop in the stomach.
These are not storage locations. They are common expression patterns.
It can be helpful to think of this as two different languages describing the same reality. One is the language of lived experience and observation. The other is the language of neuroscience and physiology. Both are trying to point to the same thing: the nervous system is always expressing itself through the body.
Are the body and brain even separate things?
At this point you may be wondering why I keep talking about the brain and the body as if they are two different characters in a play.
Technically, they are not separate. The brain is part of the body. The nervous system runs through the entire organism like an electrical and chemical network. Information is constantly traveling in both directions: brain to body, body to brain, back and forth all day long.
In fact, a large portion of the nerves that make up the vagus nerve carry signals from the body to the brain, not the other way around. The brain is continuously receiving updates about heart rate, breath, muscle tension, gut activity, and internal chemistry. You could think of the brain less as a commander issuing orders and more as a central processor receiving a constant stream of status reports.
So why do we talk about the brain and body as if they’re separate?
Mostly because it helps us describe different functions. When we say “the brain,” we’re usually talking about neural processing and prediction. When we say “the body,” we’re talking about the lived, sensory experience of those processes.
And then there’s the word mind, which makes things even more interesting.
One way to think about it is like this: The brain is the organ. The body is the organism. The mind is the experience that emerges from both.
You don’t need to keep these categories perfectly straight. It’s enough to remember that they are constantly in conversation. Sensation is one of the primary ways that conversation becomes noticeable.
The surprisingly simple idea of embodiment
Somewhere along the way, the word embodiment became both popular and confusing. It can sound abstract or mystical, like a personality trait some people naturally possess and others don’t.
But maybe embodiment is much simpler than that. It is the experience of being aware of your body while you are living your life. Not thinking about the body. Experiencing the body from the inside.
Most of us spend a surprising amount of time slightly disembodied, living primarily in thoughts, plans, memories, and to-do lists. The body becomes transportation for the brain—a helpful vehicle, occasionally a nuisance, something to manage. Like a very loyal car we mostly remember to appreciate when the check-engine light comes on.
Embodiment happens when attention drops back into lived experience: the feeling of your feet in your shoes, the movement of breath in your ribs, the subtle lift of your shoulders when something stresses you, the warmth that spreads when you feel safe.
Nothing mystical. Just contact with the ongoing sensory experience of being alive. And this is where sensation becomes such a powerful teacher.
A ringing phone and a very honest belly
A friend once told me a story that perfectly captures how sensation speaks before the mind has formed a polite sentence.
She described someone in her life who had many good qualities and had, at times, been genuinely supportive. This person also possessed a remarkable talent for offering unsolicited commentary on how other people live their lives, usually wrapped in concern or enthusiasm, and somehow always including a subtle demonstration of how they had optimized this particular corner of existence.
The conversations were polite. Friendly, even. No raised voices or dramatic conflict. Just a gentle stream of passive-aggressive self-improvement. Over time, my friend developed a system. She would steel herself, listen kindly, agree where convenient, and wrap things up efficiently. A perfectly civilized social interaction, at least on paper.
And then one day she noticed something fascinating. Every time this person’s name appeared on her phone, a sudden unmistakable hot flare appeared in her belly. Instant and reliable, as if her abdomen had installed a smoke alarm specifically for this caller.
Her thinking mind, meanwhile, was busy being gracious. “Oh, it’s fine.” “They mean well.” “This will only take a few minutes.”
But her nervous system had already RSVP’d and was not planning to stay long.
The body does not react instead of the brain. The body reacts because of the brain, just not the thoughtful, storytelling part we identify with most. Older, faster systems are constantly scanning for patterns and predicting what comes next. They speak in sensation, not sentences.
That hot flare in the belly wasn’t drama. It was an efficient nervous system saying, Ah yes. This pattern again.
Why this matters in yoga and movement spaces
This is where the conversation becomes very practical.
When we talk about trauma-sensitive or trauma-informed movement, people sometimes imagine this applies only to students we know have experienced trauma. But the nervous system does not come with a visible label. Every person who walks into a class arrives with a history, a nervous system, and a lifetime of learning about safety.
Predictability and choice matter. A sense of control and feeling safe in one’s own body matter. This is not a specialized add-on for a particular population. This is simply intelligent teaching for human nervous systems, which are wonderfully adaptive and occasionally dramatic.
When students feel they have agency, when they are invited rather than directed, when there is room to notice sensation without pressure or performance, the nervous system learns something new: This is safe. You can stay.
From that place, embodiment becomes possible. Not forced. Not performed. Allowed.
So… we noticed the sensation. Now what?
At some point a reasonable reader might ask: Okay. I noticed the sensation. Now what?
The goal is not to become a professional sensation-noticer who walks around cataloging shoulder tension like a museum curator. The goal is to learn how to respond to what the nervous system is telling us.
When we notice a sensation, we do not immediately analyze it, fix it, or turn it into a life story. We begin by doing something far more radical: we acknowledge it.
“Oh. Tight shoulders.”
“Oh. Shallow breath.”
“Oh. Heat in the belly.”
From there, we experiment with small acts of support. A slower exhale. Unclenching the jaw. Letting the shoulders drop one inch. Pressing the feet into the floor. Looking around the room. Taking a walk. Getting a drink of water. Ending a conversation sooner than you normally would.
These actions are deceptively simple. They are also how the nervous system learns.
We are not solving the nervous system. We are building a relationship with it. And like most relationships, it improves when we actually listen.
Where the real work happens
We often imagine healing as something that happens through insight or understanding the past. But regulation happens in the present. In the moment the breath returns, the shoulders drop half an inch, the jaw unclenches, the feet feel the ground again.
The goal is not to hunt for trauma hidden in the body. The goal is to learn the language of sensation, because the body is not a problem to solve. It is a translator and a teacher that has been speaking patiently in the background of our lives.
The moment we begin listening, the conversation changes.
