For as long as I can remember, I have been in awe of the body, how it carries us, lifts us up each day, and walks with us through every joy and every sorrow. It holds us, even as the weight of our experiences settles into our tissues. And yet, we so often forget to listen to it, to acknowledge what it’s been through.
I have long been a believer in the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, and Gabor Maté, all pioneers in understanding how trauma lives within us. The body keeps the score, a truth I have seen firsthand in my work. Every knot, every ache, every holding pattern tells a story of a life lived, of emotions unprocessed, of pain stored away for another day.
I first experienced this within myself when I studied Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) a practice designed to activate the body’s natural tremor mechanism, shaking loose the echoes of past experiences. As my own body began to tremble, I felt trauma shift and release. It was a profound reminder that healing isn’t just about what we think it’s about what we feel, about what our nervous system has held onto without our conscious awareness.
And then, this week, I started reading Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal. I was prepared to be challenged, but I was not prepared for the deep emotional reckoning it triggered in me.
Maté speaks about how chronic stress and trauma manifest as physical illness, how the burden of oppression, racism, and societal pressure shape not just our minds, but our very biology. One section struck me like a lightning bolt how racism has been directly linked to asthma in young Black teens.
And suddenly, I was back in a moment I thought I had left behind.
I remembered advocating for a young Black teenager who had suddenly developed asthma. I remember telling the doctor that this was not random, that this was the body responding to stress, that this was a nervous system in overdrive, drowning in cortisol, inflammation rising like a silent alarm. I knew, instinctively, that no child just wakes up one day with a chronic condition. But I wasn’t heard. I wasn’t seen.
And now, reading the studies, reading the proof, I felt the weight of that moment all over again.
Maté writes: “When we shut down emotion, we also shut down immunity.”
Levine tells us: “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
Van der Kolk reminds us that “The body keeps the score: it absorbs our history and reflects it back to us in symptoms, sensations, and pain.”
Imagine that. A lived experience causing a physical condition. Imagine how many times this has happened, unseen, unacknowledged. Imagine the toll this takes, not just on individuals, but on entire communities.
And then imagine what we could do differently.
What if we truly listened to the body? What if we honoured its signals instead of silencing them? What if we acknowledged that healing is not just about medicine, but about environment, about connection, about feeling safe enough to release what we’ve carried for too long?
I refuse to look away.
I refuse to be silent.
We can do better. We must do better.
And for those of us who hold space for healing, for those of us who witness, who work with the nervous system, who see what is stored and unspoken, our responsibility is clear: to learn, to listen, and to help others find their way back home to themselves.