My Body Is a Temple

I’ve often found it incredibly successful to tell my clients that self-care is more than just drinking water and getting your nails done.

I didn’t quite understand the idea that my body was a temple. 

For the most part, I thought I had been taking care of my temple. I drink socially, which for me was once every two or three months. I never smoked. I worked out regularly and ate a mainly plant-based diet with lots of leafy greens. I did yoga to de-stress. I made sure to always take a probiotic and if my poop was not on schedule, I called my doctor immediately. I’m serious.  Wouldn’t you say that’s treating your body like a temple?

I was sure it was, until I found out that trauma is not stored in your heart or your head. Trauma is stored in the body. And while all my disciplines were moving like a well-oiled machine, my temple was crumbling at its foundations because of the trauma I was holding in it. 

Over the last six months, I have been working with mobility professionals to stretch my hips, shoulder area, neck, arch my back, and do many more exercises ONLY to find: the more I stretched my body, the more I pressed the wound. And the more I pressed the wound is when I finally understood the connection between mental health and physical health.

The best example I can give is something that happened to me years ago. I was driving on a long road trip in a rural area when a deer ran out into the middle of the highway. We unfortunately hit the deer (he survived in great shape and was not harmed). But what I noticed was incredibly peculiar. While he laid down defeated for a brief second, he stood up quickly and shook violently for about a minute, and then pranced away like nothing had happened. It was obvious to me at that moment that the trauma that had happened to him was not a physical pain, but something that would inevitably cause fear. I could not understand the shaking. After lots of research during my certification, I realized that the animal was intuitively doing what we should all be doing.

What the animal intuitively understood is that trauma was stored in the body. Should he have not violently shaken to release the trauma that was going to physically be stored in his body, he would have been afraid to cross highways or cross streets or make really any moves, and it would impact his ability to survive or get food. We are unfortunately never taught that the things we experience, both big and small, are traumas that are stored in our bodies many years over.  Which is why plenty of us are in our thirties and are stiff in our bodies.

If you are reading this and finding it helpful, but can’t seem to align with this idea, I completely understand. I would highly recommend the book The Body Keeps the Score. But, I will also say this: trauma is not what we think it is. We often think of trauma as the biggest moments in life, like car accidents, perhaps being attacked. Some people even struggle to see intense break-ups or toxic relationships as trauma. So, I wouldn’t put it past anyone to not comprehend the fact that a child who has dinner every night at 6pm could experience trauma when dinner is set at 7pm. In coaching, we call them Big T’s and little t’s. Whether it’s a big trauma or a little trauma, it’s all relative, but it’s all real. We have all experienced something that set us off in some way and we carry it with us through our lives in our bodies, even if we are not hurt or hurting from circumstances.

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