I want to share this because it's a great example of multiple aspects in embodiment work:
how releasing trauma has direct physical effects
the importance of holding yourself in the face of intense sensation
preventing the mind from creating a story about those sensations
how certain parts inside us feed on our low frequency states
This piece ties directly into the previous “Ancestral Grief” posts, so it’s crucial to have read those to understand this one.
A few weeks back, my resistance to learning about my homeland reached a peak. I didn’t want to open those books. I was already in so much grief and pain, my mind didn’t want me to hold more.
That’s how I knew it was time to go back in.
I grounded myself with dance and deep breaths, then chose the book which opens the most grief in me: Christopher Clarke’s “Iron Kingdom”, of which I own the German version.
After two pages, my body was full. The edge of what she can hold had been reached. I hit my limit of grief, rage, heartbreak, yearning.
It needed to purge.
I’m familiar with that experience, so my mind was calm.
I put on my favourite Prussian marches because adding that joyful frequency felt right. As I began dancing, the tears came. Once again, these specific tears didn't emerge from my face by scrunching or grimacing. My facial muscles weren’t pushing for them. They traveled upwards from my arms, chest and gut to spill in a gentle, breathy way.
My movements were wide and expanded, my arms and hands engaging the most.
And then my throat opened. I’d rarely released trauma with actual sentences coming through, partly because it felt artificial, partly because my throat was still quite blocked. But here, the entire area tingled, the muscles twitching.
It wanted to speak, so I let it.
And what it said made me sob.
We didn’t deserve this. We didn’t deserve to lose our entire country and culture and dialects and homes and families and history. We didn’t deserve to be erased like 900 years of living, laughing, growing and dying in that land were worthless. Like we’re worthless. Like we don’t exist anymore just because the borders changed less than a human life ago. Like naming our nationality is a swear word or a joke or worse. I deserve to be home. All of us deserve to be home. And I’m ready to take on our pain. I will integrate it in myself. I will feel all of our grief and anger. I will release them. From now on, I only have space inside my body for love and connection. Everything that’s not my soul or higher self, get the fuck out!
Many of these phrases repeated multiple times. I let my body speak without judgment. I felt the density of what was happening. The weight. The “Finally!” of a release I’d had no idea brewed inside me all this time.
At this point, I have to give a preface for what happened next because it might sound scary when you’ve never experienced it—and it’s not.
When we have trauma, personal or generational, a part of our essence splits off. There’s now a gap in our nervous system makeup, and that gap gets filled with something which feeds on that void. That space acts as fodder for self-sabotaging, self-rejecting beliefs and negative internal dialogue.
And when you poke those spots, the mind has its own visual interpretation of those low frequencies leaving the body.
What happened for me was my throat convulsing with the urge to bark. Yes, bark. Sometimes the body does weird stuff when it purges. I let it do what it had to—yowling, biting a pillow and shaking it back and forth. The sounds came from my gut. I felt something was stuck, so I kept yelling, “Get the fuck out!”
For a moment, my mind visualised the purge as an ox-like creature. And then the image left.
Does this mean I exorcised myself? No. My mind habitually reacts to intense releases of trauma by showing me a scary monster. Might be an inbuilt safety mechanism, who knows.
Soon afterwards, my muscles relaxed and I felt complete. I’d freed my body of something, that was for sure. I slept like a log.
The next morning, I immediately noticed spaciousness in my mid left abdomen. I yawned and actually felt the sound reverberate into my stomach. I hummed and felt literal pleasure from my voice’s vibrations.
That was an entirely new physical sensation.
I experimented with this, going “Woohoo!”, singing, screaming.
It all translates to physical pleasure now.
My throat has been my main body part of accumulated tension. I’ve been silenced so often, so bitterly, again and again and again, that speaking up is a focal point of my personal process. I’ve gone from being unable to yell into a pillow to feeling physical pleasure merely humming.
I had no idea this was a possibility!
This is huge! And that electric highway becomes freer and more open daily, too.
This was the biggest leap yet of rewiring my freeze/fawn trauma response. And I’m excited for what else is to come.
So which lessons can you apply to your own practice?
Releasing trauma/stuck energy is largely involuntary. You can encourage its emergence, but you can't force the physical processes.
Your mind wants to attach meaning, stories and judments onto what's going on in your body. Keep focusing on the sensations instead of letting your thoughts create a narrative.
There can be immediate physical effects after a release, but there's no guarantees where, if and when. This is long-term work and everything you learn becomes part of your personal, internal toolbox to engage with life.
You're not in control over how energy moves through your body, hence this work requires surrender and total self-responsibility.
Let these lessons sink in below your neck.
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