The body keeps score, but I long left the game.

Muriel C. Paul
Apr 8
3 min read

You’re doing your best. You’ve been steady—rebuilding, regulating, focusing on your healing. You’ve been showing up for yourself in ways you never thought possible. And then, bam—out of nowhere, a message. A voice-note. A familiar energetic disruption. Something or someone that once held power in your life suddenly appears again.

It could be a text in the middle of the night. A comment from a person who hasn’t earned access to your peace. A situation that reactivates old pain—not because the present moment is dangerous, but because the body remembers what it was like the last time.

The body keeps the score.

The body doesn’t wait for logic. It reacts instantly.

Your heart races. Your hands tremble. Your voice catches in your throat.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve healed. It doesn’t matter that you know you’re safe now.

The same stress hormones that used to flood your system back then, are leaking through you in that present moment. Your breath shortens. Your jaw tightens. Your whole nervous system kicks into that deeply familiar survival mode. And yet—

This is where everything changes.

Because this time, you notice it. Not just emotionally. Sensationally. You know the map of this reaction so well, it’s like watching an old movie play on your skin. But instead of letting it pull you under, in that split second that is always the answer to " I don't know what happened" or " Next thing I know"- You actually do something different.

You breathe. You stay. You saw the scores as they were been pulled, without catching them. You just feel—without dissociating.

And it’s not perfect, it's especially not perfect. Your body still shakes, you can barely hold the phone to type. Your chest still tightens, you kind of still want to throw hands, if that's what it would take, you can feel your throat closing off. But your presence doesn’t disappear. The only blinking that happened was the natural blinking process of your eye lids. You stayed present.

That’s the miracle. That’s the upgrade. Not the absence of reaction—but the awareness within it.

You stayed. you didn't disappear.

There’s something sacred in recognizing that healing doesn’t mean we never react again—it means we no longer abandon ourselves when we do. We stay in the room with our bodies. In our sacred seat of consciousness. We speak to ourselves with compassion. We let the response complete without collapse. All the teachings we’ve practiced—the breath, the posture, the rewiring tools—they begin to show up and deliver.

Healing isn’t clean or poetic in the moment. It’s shaky. Sweaty. Breath-heavy. Real. And that’s enough. That’s the work.

This is also where many of us forget to measure our own progress. Many of us abandon the work there because deep down, we still reach for external validation. And like every other human being, we long for a loving, compassionate witness—even when there’s no immediate danger, and the body is only reacting as if there were.

If you’ve ever felt ashamed that your body still reacts—don’t be.

If you’ve ever caught yourself mid-trigger and chose to stay—you’ve already shifted timelines.

This is what healing looks like on the inside.

This is what it means to return to yourself.

Let this be your reminder:

Your body might remember, but now—you respond.

🌿 A 15-minute restorative class to support you through this process is on its way.

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