The Day I Realized the Body IS the Mind
From intellectual understanding to embodied knowing
I thought I understood mind-body connection.
By my early twenties, I’d devoured every holistic healing and human potential books. Academically, I studied the body as a Kinesiology (Integrative Physiology) with a special emphasis in Neuroscience and the mind with a specialization in psychology (read on class shy of a double major). I had the intellectual framework down. I could talk eloquently about treating the whole person, about how everything in our experience is interconnected.
But knowing something intellectually is not an embodied knowing! Those are two entirely different things.
Feldenkrais Changed Everything
When I entered my four-year Feldenkrais training, we talked about integration constantly. How movement and awareness dance together. How the nervous system learns. How transformation happens not through force, but through gentle, organic shifts in our patterns.
I was having profound experiences in those training sessions. Movements that seemed simple on the surface would unlock something deep and mysterious. Often, that meant feeling lighter, more connected. Like I'd remember something I'd forgotten about myself, but sometimes it meant not being able to find my ground.
Not sure where my pelvis was in space because some of the deep-rooted patterns that I'd relied on for years were all of a sudden disrupted, and I had to find my way back to a new norm.
But if I’m being honest?
I was still thinking of it as really sophisticated bodywork. Amazing, transformative bodywork — but bodywork nonetheless.
I had no idea how fundamentally wrong I was about the nature of that relationship.
The Retreat That Shattered My Understanding
It was my second year of training when I returned to the Zen temple where I had lived before starting my Feldenkrais training for a 10-day Zen retreat. Something about combining the stillness of sitting practice with the movement awareness I was learning felt deeper than any experience I’d had before.
Those first few days were exactly what you’d expect from a meditation retreat. Lots of sitting. Lots of noticing my restless mind. But somewhere around day five, something extraordinary started happening. I began to feel thoughts forming in my body before they entered my mind.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Literally.
I’d be sitting in meditation when I’d sense this subtle shift - maybe a tightening in my chest, a flutter in my belly, a change in the quality of my breathing. And then, moments later, the thought would arrive in my consciousness.
At first, I thought I was imagining it. But it kept happening. Over and over.
A sensation in my solar plexus would precede thoughts about my work. A clenching in my jaw would come before memories of difficult conversations. A softening around my heart would arrive just before gratitude filled my awareness.
The Moment Everything Clicked
On day seven, sitting in the Zendo (meditation space) with other silent practitioners, it hit me like lightning: There is no separation between mind and body. None.
Not “they’re connected.” Not “they influence each other.” They are literally the same thing, expressing itself in different ways.
The body doesn’t just house the mind. It is the mind, speaking in the language of sensation, movement, and breath.
Every thought has a physical signature. Every emotion lives in our tissue. Every pattern of thinking creates a pattern of holding, of moving, of being in our bodies.
And if that’s true — if mind and body are truly one seamless system - then working with the body isn’t just influencing the mind. It’s working directly with the subconscious, at the level where patterns form.
Coming Home To The Work
When I returned from that retreat, everything about my Feldenkrais training made sense in a completely new way.
Those simple movements that created such profound shifts? They weren’t just releasing physical tension. They were literally reorganizing the subconscious patterns that create our experience of being alive.
That sense of “remembering something I’d forgotten”? That was my nervous system recognizing more integrated, more authentic ways of being.
I understood why Moshe Feldenkrais called his classes “Awareness Through Movement.” We weren’t fixing broken bodies. We were offering the whole system — mind, body, spirit, whatever you want to call it — a window into deeper awareness and new options for organizing itself.
The Doorways Into Transformation
Here’s what twenty years of this work has taught me: We can bring our awareness to movement, to emotions, to thoughts — any one of these can be a doorway into transformation.
You focus on your thoughts and beliefs. You can work through emotional processing, diving deep into feelings. You can work through movement, as we do in the Feldenkrais Method. All of these approaches can create real change.
But the real potency happens when you start to see the threads of how they’re all connected.
When we start to notice the physical response in our body to our emotions or thoughts, we can begin to untangle patterns that have been running automatically for years, sometimes decades. We can start to shift things at the root level, creating a foundation for change that’s sustainable because it’s integrated.
The Early Warning System
Movement and sensing are particularly powerful doorways because they give us access to information before it becomes conscious.
When you really tune into your body—and I mean really tune in, with the kind of attention that meditation retreats teach— you start to gather those subtle cues before the emotion or thought fully forms.
You get this incredible foreshadowing of what’s about to happen in your own emotional or thinking landscape.
Maybe you notice your shoulders starting to creep up toward your ears, and you realize anxiety is building before the worried thoughts even start. Maybe you feel your chest beginning to close, and you catch yourself before you slip into that familiar pattern of shutting down.
And in that moment of awareness, you get to choose.
You can decide if that’s the path you want to move down, or if you want to gently shift your attention, adjust your posture, breathe a little deeper, and invite your system toward a different response.
But I want to be clear, this isn't about controlling your experience or never feeling difficult emotions.
It is about having choice points where there used to be only triggers and reactions. I also know this: the more we lean into this realm, the more we actually grow our capacity to be with emotions as they rise. And when we can be with our emotions as they rise, they can rise and fall, and they don't get trapped in our tissues.
The typical emotion lasts only 90 seconds. If it goes beyond 90 seconds, it's often that we're feeding it with a story. And so when we grow our capacity to be with our body, we grow that capacity to be with those emotions.
This Is Subconscious Work
This is why I call somatic movement the back door to emotions and the front door to shifting the subconscious. We’re not just releasing tension or improving posture, though those things often happen too.
We’re accessing the place where patterns form, before they become the automatic responses that run our lives.
Your subconscious mind is constantly communicating with you through your body. The way you hold your shoulders when you’re stressed. The way your breathing changes when you feel safe. The way your whole system organizes itself around different emotions, different people, different situations.
Most of the time, we’re not listening to this stream of information. But when you learn to tune in, when you develop that sensitivity to your own internal landscape, you gain access to choice points you never knew existed.
The Ripple Effect
What amazes me most about this work is how changes in one area ripple out to transform everything else.
When you shift a physical pattern - maybe you learn to let your ribs soften instead of gripping them when you’re nervous - it changes how you breathe. When you breathe differently, you feel differently. When you feel differently, you think differently. When you think differently, you respond differently to the world around you.
It’s all one seamless system, constantly reorganizing itself based on the quality of attention and awareness you bring to it.
That retreat taught me something profound that continues to inform everything I do: The body doesn’t just house the mind - it IS the mind, expressing itself in sensation, movement, and breath.
Your Body Knows
After all these years, here’s what I want you to know: Your body is constantly communicating with you about what you need, what you’re feeling, what patterns are ready to shift.
It knows things your thinking mind hasn’t figured out yet. It holds wisdom about who you are and who you’re becoming. It remembers not just trauma, but also resilience, joy, and your deepest capacity for healing.
When you learn to listen to what your body is telling you, everything changes.
Not because you’re fixing something broken, but because you’re remembering something true: You are an integrated, whole, constantly evolving system with an incredible capacity for growth, healing, and transformation.
The doorway is always available. The question is: Are you ready to step through it?
Join Me
If this resonates with you, if you’re curious about what your own body might be trying to tell you, I’d love to explore this work together. Sometimes the most profound transformations happen through the gentlest attention to what’s already present within you. Please consider joining Terra, Andrea, and me at Root & Resonance on Sunday, October 19, 2025. It’s a day of coming home to yourself - to your body, your energy, your natural way of being in the world. Find out more & register here.
