Movement That Remembers What Your Body Already Knows

When a horse rolls in the sand, it isn’t performing. It’s not thinking about how it looks. It rolls to feel. To release. To reset. This is instinct — somatic wisdom in action.

Horse rolling in sand at Bucco Reef, Tobago

Your body has always spoken. But over time, you may have stopped listening. In hypnotherapy, we speak with the subconscious — the deep inner mind where old patterns and protections live. But the body is not separate from the subconscious. In fact, it often holds the first word.

“Horses do it. Babies do it. You’ve done it, too — without even realising.”

You throw your head back when you laugh. You stretch first thing in the morning. You shake your hands when you're nervous. You clench your jaw when you’re holding something in.

Tension is a Message

Tension isn’t random — it’s a signal. As Bessel van der Kolk explores in The Body Keeps the Score, the body often feels what the mind hasn’t yet named. Long before we can speak it, the body holds it: a clenched jaw, a shallow breath, a sudden freeze. This is the subconscious speaking somatically. Somatically simply means: through the body — felt, sensed, and experienced rather than thought or spoken. Over time, this unspoken distress can surface as chronic pain, inflammation, or fatigue — a physical echo of unresolved experience.

“We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.” - van der Kolk

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In other words, trauma lingers — not just as memory, but as a physiological state. Without gently addressing it at the level of the body, it may continue to express itself as dis-EASE.

Stillness and Movement are Messages Too

When I work with clients looking to free themselves of pain, we begin with the feelings Together, we explore what an experience ‘felt’ like and where emotion lives in the body — a tight chest, a hollow belly, a pulsing in the hands. And as we guide the mind into a relaxed state, the body begins to reveal more:

• The moment it learned to brace.

• The feeling it never got to finish.

• The movement it still longs to make.

This is the somatic subconscious — a place where memory lives as sensation. And it wants to move. In session, we might work with breath, imagery, even a felt sense of shaking, swaying, releasing. It’s not dramatic or performative. It’s what your body would do on its own… if you let it.

Just like the horse rolling at sunset —
You, too, were built to move through things.

Not over them.
Not around them.
Through.

An Exercise in Observation for You

If you’ve been feeling stuck, tense, shut down, or overwhelmed — begin here. Not with analysis, but with awareness.

• Take a quiet moment in a quiet place:
  - Close your eyes.
  - Breathe gently.
  

• Ask yourself:
  - Where in my body am I holding tension?
  - Notice without judgement - jaw, belly, shoulders, chest…
  
  

• Then ask:
  - What would it feel like to soften here?
  - You don’t have to force it. Just imagine the possibility of ease.
  - A small shift. A loosening. A breath that reaches further than before.

  
  

• Let your body speak first.
  - Your mind will follow.

If you’d like to explore this deeper, my hypnotherapy sessions include gentle somatic awareness to support lasting change. You can begin with a voice-led ritual or book a 1:1 session.