You Don't Have to Believe in Energy Medicine. Your Body Already Does.

What Somatic Healing Really Is and Why Your Body Already Knows.

Most people think healing requires belief.

They are wrong.

And I can prove it. Not with a theory. With 20 years of watching it happen in bodies that had given up on everything else.

But first, I need to tell you something that happened in a classroom in Indiana. Something I did not understand at the time. Something that turned out to be the most important thing I have ever observed about how human beings actually work.

Almost every fall, I lost my voice.

Ten years of teaching elementary school, mostly third grade, and every autumn when the neighbors burned their leaves, the smoke would take my voice for days at a time. A classroom full of children and no working voice for them to hear.

So at the start of each school year, before the leaves turned and the smoke came, I taught them the basics of sign language. Just enough to survive the voiceless weeks. Enough to ask for help. Enough to say they understood. Enough to keep learning when the usual tools were gone.

Not because I had a plan. Because I had no other option.

And then something happened that I was not expecting.

The room changed.

Children who had spent the early weeks of the year half-listening began paying attention in a way they never had before. Students who had been struggling suddenly broke through. The quality of presence in that classroom, on the voiceless days, was different from anything I had seen on the days I could speak.

I did not have a framework for what I was watching. I only knew that removing vocal language had somehow made the learning more real.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then.

When both hands move together, both hemispheres of the brain activate simultaneously. When the body is recruited into the act of communication, the nervous system reorganizes itself around the present moment. The thinking mind steps back. The body steps forward. And something moves between people that words alone cannot produce.

This is not a metaphor. This is how the body learns. And it is the foundation of every modality I have spent the last 20 years studying and teaching.

Here is what the science tells us, plainly.

The body keeps a record. Not a memory in the way we usually think of memory, something we can access with language and reflection and a good therapist. A physical record. Stored in the tissue. In the posture. In the breath that has been half-taken for so long that a full breath now feels foreign.

When something overwhelming happens and there is no safe place to process it, the body does what it was designed to do. It holds it. It braces. It routes around the unbearable and keeps moving. This is not weakness. This is one of the most sophisticated survival mechanisms in the natural world.

The problem is that the body does not always get the message when the threat has passed.

So it keeps holding. Keeps bracing. Keeps routing. Long after the crisis is over, long after the grief has been named and spoken and cried over, something in the tissue remains gripped. Even when we understand what happened, even when we have done the genuine work of naming it, something can remain held in the body that understanding alone cannot reach. That place was never encoded in language to begin with.

This is why people can spend years in therapy, genuinely understanding what happened to them, and still feel it living in their shoulders, their gut, their jaw, their chest.

Understanding is not the same as release.

There is a moment just before the body lets go.

It is very quiet. Most people miss it because they are waiting for something dramatic. But it does not announce itself. It arrives the way morning arrives. Not all at once. A gradual shift in the quality of something. A breath that goes slightly deeper than the one before. A loosening that you notice only after it has already begun.

I have watched this happen in hundreds of sessions over 20 years. And every time, without exception, it begins not when the person decides to let go, but when the body finally feels safe enough to.

That safety is not a thought. It is a condition. And creating that condition is the work.

My own body taught me this the hard way.

Both parents died within months of each other across a cross-country move to Durango, Colorado. One before we left Indiana. One two months after we arrived. Three young children. A grief I did not have time to feel because there was always something that needed holding together.

My body kept the record. They always do.

In those first raw months in Durango, still carrying ailments I could not name and a sorrow that had nowhere to go, I traveled to New Mexico for a workshop with Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, the Hawaiian teacher known for his work with Ho'oponopono.

During a break I went to speak with him directly. Others had the same idea and reached him first. Fortunately, he noticed something in me without my having to say a word, and placed his hand on my back.

Sit with that image for a moment. A hand on a back. The simplest gesture of human presence.

For more than half an hour after he removed it, I could still feel the warmth moving through me. Not a memory of warmth. The warmth itself, still present, still shifting something at a level below thought and below language. Something in me that had been braced began, almost imperceptibly, to soften.

My mind had no explanation. My body needed none.

Something had shifted. Not completely. Not dramatically. But enough to know that something real had happened and that I needed to follow it.

My ailments and sorrow led me next to a Native American Medicine Man living near Durango. He had spent his life weaving together Touch for Health Kinesiology, B.E.S.T., Medical Qigong, Yoga, and the deep wisdom of his own heritage into something that operated below the level of explanation.

He did not ask me what I believed.

He asked my body what it was holding.

In the session that followed, things moved that I had not been able to move on my own. Not through effort. Not through understanding. Through something quieter than either of those. A willingness to stop overriding what the body already knew.

I began studying under him. Around the same time, Reiki found me in Durango as well. For a year or two I was learning from both simultaneously, the Medicine Man's integrated body wisdom and the quiet transmission of Reiki practice weaving together into a foundation I could not yet fully name.

Then the avalanche hit.

We had rented for two years in Durango before finally purchasing a home. Before we ever spent a single night in it, an avalanche struck and blew out the back of the house.

The body keeps records that the mind does not always notice right away. In the months that followed I became aware slowly, the way you become aware of something that has been building quietly, that my back was holding all of it. Not just the avalanche. Everything. The losses. The years of holding things together. The shock of a wall of snow taking out the home we had not yet lived in. I could not move easily. I could not tie my own shoes.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. Not as a metaphor. As a literal physical fact. A body that had been carrying things for years finally ran out of room and the back gave way under the weight of all of it.

One to two years after the avalanche the Medicine Man moved away from Durango. Reiki training continued and eventually deepened in Sedona, Arizona. And then, about four years after the avalanche, I traveled to Malibu, California, for a Touch for Health Kinesiology class taught by Matthew Thie, son of Touch for Health founder John Thie.

During that class I received a balance.

Something released. Not gradually. Not partially. Something that had been gripped for four years let go in the way that only the body knows how to let go when it finally feels safe enough to do so.

By the end of that week I was tying my own shoes again.

I was not collecting credentials. I was following a thread that began the moment something moved in my body that I had not been able to move on my own. That thread led to over 1,000 hours of study and practice across a multi-year Reiki program that ultimately led me to question everything I thought I knew about how healing works and who I was becoming inside it. It led me to Traditional Japanese Usui Reiki Ryoho under Bruce Taylor, whose lineage runs directly back to Mt. Kurama in Kyoto, where monks have practiced this work for centuries. To the Spinal Flow Technique under Dr. Carli Axford. To live human medicine training with Charlie Goldsmith of TLC's The Healer, whose work has been studied at NYU and in California.

Twenty years. Multiple lineages. Hundreds of students.

And the thing every single teacher confirmed, in their own language, through their own tradition, is the same thing I watched happen in a voiceless third grade classroom in Indiana.

The body knows things the mind has not caught up to yet. 

 You do not have to believe this.

In fact, I would ask you not to believe it yet. Belief is the thinking mind's way of deciding something is safe before it has been tested. What I am asking for is something simpler and more honest than belief.

Curiosity.     

Just enough willingness to ask the question your body has probably been asking for a very long time. Not what do I think about this. But what do I feel. Right now. In this moment. In the breath I am taking as I read these words.

Is it full? Or is it held?

That answer, whatever it is, is the beginning of the conversation I have been having with students and clients for 20 years through Clear Flow Wellness, LLC. Whether we are working with Reiki, Touch for Health Kinesiology, Spinal Flow Technique, or any of the other modalities I have been trained in, we are always doing the same thing at the deepest level.

We are creating the conditions for the body to remember what it already knows.

And in my experience, it never takes long.

Because the body has been waiting for this conversation for a very long time.

Teresa teaches Reiki, Touch for Health Kinesiology, and energy medicine, and practices Spinal Flow Technique, through Clear Flow Wellness, LLC in Goshen, Indiana. Learn more at ClearFlowWellness.com.