The Body Doesn't Live in the Past — But It Remembers It

The mind can revisit the past through story, memory, or analysis. But the body relives the past through sensation and impulse. It remembers through sense-feel — the

contraction in the gut when someone raises their voice, the urge to freeze when asked to speak up, the exhaustion that follows even a minor disappointment. These aren't rational responses. They are echoes of unresolved experiences, still active in the nervous system.

In this way, the past lives not in time, but in the immediacy of the present-moment body.

Integration Is Not Intellectual

You can have years of insight — "I know where this comes from. I know why I react this way."But if your body still recoils, braces, dissociates, or floods in response to present-moment stimuli, then the past remains unintegrated.

Insight alone doesn’t rewire the nervous system.

Integration only happens when you bring your body into the now — with enough support, curiosity, and capacity to stay with what arises, rather than avoid or override it.

The Present is the Portal

Somatic shadow work isn’t about “going back” and reliving your childhood. It’s about staying with what’s happening now:

• That lump in your throat when you try to say no.

• That shame-flush when someone misunderstands you.

• That tight jaw when someone touches a nerve.

  
  

These are modern-day doorways to old survival strategies — strategies that once

served you, but are now keeping you trapped. You don’t need to dig up every memory. You need to honor the language of sensation and offer the body a new experience, in real time.

Sense-Feel is the Language of the Shadow

Jung called the shadow “the thing a person has no wish to be.” But how do we recognize that thing, if it lives below the level of conscious thought?

Through sense-feel.

• It’s the part of you that flinches, clutches, or goes numb when touched.

• The weight in your chest when you're expected to be happy.

• The hollow in your gut when you silence yourself again.

  
  

These are the breadcrumbs that lead us inward — not to “fix” the shadow, but to sit beside it. To witness it. To offer it breath, presence, and choice. That’s integration.

Why This Requires Preparation

To do this kind of work, we must build inner structure:

• Nervous system capacity (to stay present with what’s hard)

• Somatic literacy (to track sensation without narrative)

• Relational safety (to know we are not alone)

• Practices of containment and resourcing (to hold what rises without collapsing)

Without these, shadow work can retraumatize. With them, it becomes a path to strength, self-trust, and soulful transformation.

Integration Is a Return

We are not trying to delete the past. We are trying to make peace with the parts of ourselves that had to split off to survive it.

And the only way back is through the body. Through this breath.This gesture.This trembling moment.

This is the work of integration — not by thinking, but by feeling. Not by analyzing, but by embodying what we once had to push away.

And in Practice?

Somatic shadow work in yoga therapy might include:

• Grounding and containment practices for working with intense emotions

• Orienting to inner resources—safety, strength, connection—before descending into difficult terrain

• Sequences that reveal habitual holding patterns and help build new neural-motor pathways

• Breathwork to regulate the nervous system and open to deeper truths

• Guided somatic inquiry to help clients sense, feel, and speak what has been buried

Schedule a free 30-minute Discovery Call today.

Schedule your free Discovery Call

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Samantha is a member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, a Noom Certified Health Coach, and founder of Davidson Yoga Therapy and Health Coaching.

She has held complimentary healthcare positions at The Blanchard Institute, Atrium

Hospital, Levine Cancer Institute, Sanger Heart Clinic, and Davidson College. She has presented for Fortune 500 companies and major Universities, both public and professional audiences, on this thing called yoga therapy and what it can do when it is unpeeled, revealed, and adapted to meet the needs and the abilities of the person doing it. 

She leverages her three decades of yoga therapy, and health coaching experience with the following therapeutic models:

• Breathing Technology

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

• Jungian Psychology

• Jungian Dream Interpretation

• Somatic Cognition

• Internal Family Systems

• Interfaith Perspectives

• Spiritual Technologies

• Trauma Healing

• Polyvagal Somatics

• Ayurvedic Lifestyle Coaching

• Compassionate Inquiry

• Pain Reprocessing Therapy

• The Neurosequential Model

All this is to say, there are many doorways to use on the path to healing and self-discovery, and Samantha’s breadth of experience allows for vast creativity on which approach is right for you!