You can know, intellectually, that you are safe. You can have done years of inner work, understand your attachment style, trace the genealogy of your anxiety back to its earliest root — and still find yourself at 2am with a racing heart, or frozen in a conversation that your mind knows is not dangerous but your body is treating like a wildfire. I have been in that place more times than I can count. And what I've come to understand, both through my own experience and through the somatic and yoga work I've built my practice around, is that this isn't a failure of insight. It is simply how the nervous system works.
The body is not waiting for your mind to convince it. It has its own timeline, its own logic, its own form of knowing. To work with it, you have to meet it where it lives — not where you wish it were.
The Body Keeps the Score — But Also the Map
Bessel van der Kolk's landmark work put language to something somatic practitioners had long understood: trauma is not primarily a story. It is a physiological state. When something overwhelming happens — especially when it happens before we have words for it, or in a body that had no power to escape — the experience doesn't get processed and filed away. It gets encoded in the body itself: in the jaw that never quite unclenches, in the shoulders that live near the ears, in the breath that never quite reaches the belly, in the nervous system that never fully received the message that it's over.
This is why talking about trauma has limits. The part of the brain that produces language and narrative is not the part of the brain where trauma lives. Trauma lives downstream, in the subcortical structures that govern threat response and survival instinct. To reach it, you often have to go through the body. And the body, I've found, is remarkably willing — even eager — to participate in its own healing, once it is given a language it recognizes.
Polyvagal Theory: A Map of Three States
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges gave us polyvagal theory as a more nuanced map of the nervous system than the simple fight-or-flight model most of us learned. Rather than two states, Porges describes three — each governed by a different branch of the vagus nerve, each representing a different evolutionary answer to the question the nervous system is always asking: am I safe?
I find it helps to think of these as a ladder, and to imagine that we are always somewhere on it — moving up and down throughout the day, sometimes within a single conversation:
- Ventral vagal — safe and social. The top of the ladder. This is where connection lives, and curiosity, and creativity, and ease. When we're here, we feel genuinely present — capable of being moved by something beautiful, capable of taking in another person and letting them take us in. Pleasure lives here. Joy lives here. Real intimacy lives here. This is the state we are always, in some sense, trying to find our way back to.
- Sympathetic — mobilized for threat. Moving down the ladder: the heart rate rises, the breath shallows, the muscles prepare. This state exists because it kept our ancestors alive — and it keeps us alive now. But when we get stuck here, it shows up as chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, the restless sense of never quite landing anywhere that feels like home.
- Dorsal vagal — shutdown and freeze. The oldest branch, the deepest floor of the basement. When fight or flight isn't possible — when the threat is too big, too close, too inescapable — the system collapses inward. Numbness. Dissociation. The particular exhaustion of depression. The feeling of being behind glass, watching your own life from a slight remove. I have a story that many people who describe themselves as "fine" are actually living here, and have been for a long time.
"The goal isn't to eliminate the lower states — they exist because they once saved our lives. The goal is to expand our capacity to find our way back to the top of the ladder, and to recognize where we are when we're not there."
How Trauma Gets Stored — and Why It Stays
Peter Levine observed something that changed how he understood trauma entirely: animals in the wild face life-threatening situations regularly and do not, as a rule, develop PTSD. After a threat passes, they shake, tremble, and discharge the mobilized survival energy from their bodies — and then return to grazing, to grooming, to ordinary life. The cycle completes.
Humans often can't do this. We override the trembling because it feels undignified, or frightening, or because we learned early that showing our body's distress wasn't safe. And so the energy that was mobilized for survival doesn't discharge. It stays — as chronic tension in the psoas and the jaw and the hips, as breath that never reaches the diaphragm, as a nervous system still holding vigil for a threat that ended years ago.
Somatic healing is, in large part, about creating the conditions for those incomplete cycles to complete — slowly, safely, in doses small enough that the system doesn't overwhelm itself in the process. What I've found, both in my own body and in working with clients, is that the body knows exactly what it's trying to do. It has been trying to do it for a very long time. The work is mostly about learning to trust it, and getting out of its way.
Where Yoga Comes In
I came to yoga as a practitioner long before I became a certified teacher, and what kept drawing me back was not the strength or the flexibility — it was the felt sense of my own nervous system changing in real time. The way a long exhale in a forward fold could soften something that no amount of thinking had been able to touch. The way two minutes in a hip opener sometimes produced an unexpected wave of emotion that had nothing to do with my hips.
This is not mystical. It has clear physiological pathways — and I want to name them, because I think people deserve to understand what is actually happening in their bodies:
- The breath as a vagal lever. The vagus nerve runs from the brainstem through the heart and lungs to the gut, and breathing is one of the only autonomic functions we can voluntarily influence. Extended exhales activate the parasympathetic branch directly. Practiced consistently, breathwork builds what researchers call "vagal tone" — improving the nervous system's overall flexibility and resilience, its capacity to move fluidly between states rather than getting stuck.
- Completing the incomplete. Certain postures — particularly those working with the psoas, the hips, the jaw — access areas of the body where survival energy is commonly held. The psoas, sometimes called the fight-or-flight muscle, runs from the lumbar spine through the pelvis and is directly connected to the threat response. Slow, supported opening in these places can allow stored tension to release. Sometimes this happens quietly. Sometimes it arrives as trembling, or tears, or a deep settling that seems to come from somewhere very old. I've learned to receive all of it as completion, not breakdown.
- Interoception — learning to listen inward again. Yoga builds the capacity to sense what is actually happening inside the body. For many people who have experienced trauma, this interior listening has been switched off — the body became a place of pain, and the safest option was to stop tuning in. But you cannot regulate a nervous system you cannot feel. Slow, attentive practice begins to rebuild this capacity — gently, at a pace the system can tolerate.
- Pendulation between activation and ease. Trauma-informed yoga moves between effort and rest, between challenge and settling — mirroring the clinical technique of pendulation, which helps expand the window of tolerance without flooding it. A sequence that asks something of you and then genuinely lets you rest is, physiologically, a practice in resilience.
- Co-regulation in community. Polyvagal theory tells us that human nervous systems regulate each other — that being in proximity to a calm, attuned presence literally shifts our own state. A well-held group practice is not just physical exercise. It is a co-regulatory experience, held inside a container of shared intention.
Three Practices to Begin With
None of these require a mat or a studio or a quiet room. They are available anywhere — in parking lots, in the moment before a difficult conversation, in the middle of the night when the mind won't stop.
- Physiological sigh. Inhale fully through your nose, then take a second, shorter inhale at the top to fully inflate the lungs. Release in one long, slow exhale through the mouth. Research from Stanford shows this is the fastest single-breath technique for reducing physiological arousal. One breath is enough to feel a shift. I use this more than I can count.
- Orienting. Let your gaze move slowly around the space you're in — noticing colors, shapes, textures, the quality of light. This mimics what animals do instinctively after a threat has passed: they lift their heads and look around, signaling to the nervous system that the danger is over. Let your eyes rest on something neutral or pleasant. Notice whether your jaw softens. Notice if the breath deepens on its own.
- Grounded exhale. Press your feet into the floor and feel the ground receive your weight. On the inhale, breathe in slowly. On the exhale, let the breath travel all the way down through the body and out through the soles of the feet. This pairs grounding — a return of attention to the lower body, which activation and dissociation both tend to disconnect us from — with the parasympathetic activation of a long exhale. Three to five rounds. Notice what shifts.
A Note on Pacing
Everything here works best slowly. The nervous system heals in small, tolerable doses — not floods. This is something I hold carefully with clients: the impulse to go all the way in, to do all the work at once, often comes from the same part of us that has been pushing through discomfort for years. The body needs to be coaxed, not forced. Titrated back into itself, not thrown.
If body-based practices produce overwhelm, dissociation, or a sense that things are getting worse — that is important information. It means the system needs more support and a slower pace, ideally with someone who can help you find the edge without going over it. That is precisely the kind of work I do in coaching, often integrating somatic and yoga-informed practices directly into sessions for clients who are drawn to it.
Your nervous system has been trying to find its way back to safety for a long time. It knows the direction home. The work is mostly learning to trust that — and giving it the conditions to complete the journey.