#bodymind

Traditional psychology got a lot wrong. It told you to talk about your trauma.

To analyse it. To make sense of it with words. But your trauma doesn’t live in your thoughts. It lives in your nervous system.

Helen Frankenthaler :: Tutti Fruitti, 1966

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In painting, as in any art, we can escape the prison of our minds and connect with what transcends ordinary perceptions. And just as a body of water stays still while a wave-form moves through it, consciousness remains stable despite the constant motion and flow of our thoughts.

—Fredericka Foster, “Spotlight On: Fredericka Foster”

Women of Depth Psychology 

The aching discrepancy between what the mind understands and what the body can actually tolerate.

The gap between intellectual understanding of our internal processes and our actual bodily integration is an important one, but it is rarelt talked about.

Marion Woodman captured a universal friction here in this passage from her book 'Bone: Dying Into Life' (2001).

It is entirely possible, even common in deep analysis, for our intellectual insight to skyrocket ahead, while our somatic, physical self lags behind, anchored to the familiar architecture of old defenses.

The mind can shift in a flash of lightning. An insight arrives, a pattern becomes conscious, and we think, “Ah, I see it now. I am therefore free."

But it doesn't happen that fast for the body.

The body does not speak the language of intellect; it speaks the language of regulated tissue, nervous system pathways, and deeply grooved survival strategies that were utilized for years if not decades.

The body is inherently conservative: it holds onto old eating patterns, codependent people-pleasing, or hyper-vigilance because those patterns kept us alive in the past.

Woodman’s final admission- "I know this is true, but I have to keep saying it to myself" feels incredibly validating.

It reminds us that honoring the slow, sometimes frustrating pace of the body is a daily, conscious discipline.

It is an act of deep compassion toward the "Volkswagen chassis" that is doing its absolute best to carry the immense energy of transformation.

Integrating intellectual insights into our lived, bodily reality requires a fundamental shift in how we relate to knowledge.

An insight is merely a map; integration is walking the actual path and terrain.

If the intellect has run far ahead of the body, the path down into the cells cannot be forced through more thinking.

It happens through slow, deliberate somatic choices.

Marion continues:

"I am trying to be as faithful as possible to my own evolving process. Sometimes my process is radically out of balance—my spiritual knowing is far beyond my body’s capacity to incarnate it.

Body is much slower to give up the past—old fears of not pleasing others, old eating patterns, old patterns of relationship.

I have a Jaguar engine in a Volkswagen chassis.

The images that come from my spiritual womb hold the energy that can destroy or heal.

They hold the transformative power that connects body, soul, and spirit. Internalizing the images, breathing, dancing, writing them into my body, giving them time to radiate my cells with new energy—that is healing.

I know this is true, but I have to keep saying it to myself."

Anthony Goldsmith

Fear, trauma, stress, grief, anger, worry, the body often carries emotional load through different systems and patterns of tension.

• Kidneys + nervous system → fear and survival responses.

• Heart + nervous system → emotional stress and trauma patterns.

• Adrenals → chronic stress, hypervigilance, overwhelm.

• Brain + heart connection → stress regulation and nervous system load.

• Lungs + breathing patterns → sadness, grief, emotional holding.

• Liver + body tension → anger, frustration, irritability.

• Gallbladder → resentment, stored emotional tension.

• Stomach, pancreas + spleen → worry, overthinking, digestive stress.

Anthony Goldsmith

The nervous system was never designed for constant masking.

What we hold to be a self-evident truth was not always so. There was a time when the self was not understood and experienced as though it were ensconced within the blood-brain barrier. For instance, the Hebrew word sarefet means both “diaphragm” and “thought”; similarly, the ancient Greek word phren means both “diaphragm” and “mind.” Those examples indicate that the mind and its thinking were experienced in the diaphragm. - Philip Shepherd, New Self, New World

Anthony Goldsmith

When life feels heavy, we reach for more. More information… more structure… more solutions.

But the body doesn’t need more input. It only needs… less noise.

Water has a way of quieting us. Its rhythm slows down something inside.

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Relatable? : Reblog = 🤍