Why We Can’t Think Our Way to Healing
- Samantha Leonard
- May 29
- 3 min read
Updated: May 30
"The body holds onto what the mind can't metabolize."
If you’ve lived with chronic pain, anxiety, autoimmune symptoms, or lingering depression despite years of therapy, journaling, reading, or spiritual work, you might wonder what’s missing.
You aren't lazy. You’re not broken. You’re not doing it wrong.
You’re just trying to think your way through something the mind was never built to carry alone.
Emotions aren’t cognitive experiences.
You can know why you’re sad. You can understand your anger. You can even explain your grief.
But explanation doesn’t equal integration.
That’s because emotions aren’t thoughts. They’re not logical. They’re not “figured out.”They are felt. In your gut. In your chest. In your muscles and bones.
Emotions are physiological events—waves of energy that rise in the body and need to move through the body.
When we experience trauma (especially early trauma), our emotional responses often get shut down before they can fully complete. We disconnect—not because we’re weak, but because it was too much to feel. Too dangerous. Too fast.
And when emotions get stuck, the body keeps them alive. Not as stories, but as chronic tension, illness, numbness, anxiety, or pain.
The loop stays open until it’s felt.
We often seek to heal by “figuring it out.” We talk, analyze, journal, get the diagnosis, learn the terms. And for many, that’s a powerful beginning. Insight is a gift.
But insight alone doesn’t complete the circuit.
Healing comes when we can sense ourselves in real time. When we can notice the tightness in our throat, the drop in our stomach, the invisible wall we put up without realizing.
When we track a sensation and follow it inward, we’re not revisiting the past—we’re reclaiming the part of ourselves that got trapped there.
Integration happens through felt sense. Not catharsis, not rehashing. But presence.
The body remembers what the mind forgets.
You don’t need to relive the worst thing that ever happened to you in order to heal. But you do need to connect with the part of you that still thinks it’s happening.
That’s where somatic work enters—particularly in yoga therapy, where breath,
movement, and attention give you a way to be with your body in its own language.
This is why “just feel your feelings” doesn’t work if you’ve never had a safe container for them.Why traditional talk therapy sometimes falls short for those with deep trauma or chronic pain.Because you can’t talk your way into feeling something your body was trained to shut down.
This isn’t about fixing. It’s about witnessing.
When we treat the body not as a broken thing to be managed, but as an intelligent system that did what it had to do to survive, everything shifts.
Suddenly, your emotional overwhelm makes sense.Your shutdown, your panic, your flatness all make sense.
They’re not dysfunctions. They’re messages.
And when we can be with those messages—in breath, in movement, in stillness—we offer the one thing we couldn’t give ourselves back then: presence.
Try This Now
Don’t try to feel something profound. Try to feel something small.
Notice the soles of your feet.
Feel where your spine touches the chair or floor.
Is your jaw relaxed or tight?
Without fixing it—can you just feel it?
That’s the beginning.
When You’re Ready
If you want to work at the level where transformation actually happens—not just in your thoughts, but in your whole being—this is the kind of work I offer.
Gentle, trauma-informed yoga therapy.Breath, movement, and nervous system repair.A way back to your emotional body, one sense at a time.
You're not too late. You're not too much. You’re not beyond healing.
You’re just ready to stop thinking your way around it—and start feeling your way through.
When you’re ready, I’m here to walk with you.
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!
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