The Body Knows the Way

There are times when the surface of life looks polished, but something underneath is aching. You smile. You carry on. You meet your duties with grace. But in the night, your jaw clenches. The dream returns. Or a strange tiredness fills your bones.

The psyche never forgets. The soul keeps score in the tissue of the body. What is not faced, returns. Not to punish, but to be met. Again.

We live in a culture that praises control. It rewards speed and performance. The outer image becomes more important than the inner truth. In this distortion, many people learn to live from the neck up. The body becomes a vehicle for doing, not for knowing.

But the body is not decoration. It is the chalice of the soul. And the soul, when silenced, speaks through the body. Through the tight shoulders. The clumsy accident. The illness that won’t respond to logic. These are messages.

The unconscious does not shout. It moves quietly. A tug in the belly. A recurring image in a dream. A soft but steady inner protest.

Jung called this deeper center the Self. The Self is not your ego. It is not your name or your résumé. It is the source of your becoming. It is what holds you through your unraveling and through your return.

The Self is not polite. It does not care much for what the world thinks. It cares for wholeness. And wholeness often requires disintegration.

I remember a woman who held herself together with iron will. Neat hair. Steady job. No time for softness. Until one day, her hands began to shake. No doctor could explain it. But her dreams began to speak of a child hiding in the cold. And the shaking, she later said, was that child trying to come home.

The Self brings us home. But not through shortcuts. It takes us through the places we tried to forget. The memory we buried. The vulnerability we dressed in steel.

There is a dream in this teaching that speaks to this. A woman loses her inner child. A witch steals it away. To return to wholeness, she must complete three impossible tasks. Each one asks her to face what she fears. Her own body. Her mind. Her past.

This is not a fairy tale. This is how healing works. It is never only in the mind. The body carries what the mind forgets. And the soul, patient and waiting, holds it all.

James Hollis reminds us that the Self speaks in dreams, in symptoms, and in the unexpected upheavals of life.

The soul is not interested in performance. It is interested in presence.

When we begin to listen, not just with our ears, but with our whole being, something shifts. The frozen places begin to thaw. The clenched jaw softens. A dream opens like a flower in winter.

This is not about fixing yourself. It is about meeting yourself. In the silence. In the trembling. In the place where you stopped feeling long ago.

Healing begins where it hurts. And the path back is made not with steps, but with attention. With tenderness. With deep honesty.

There is a wisdom already within you. Beneath the strategies. Beneath the shame. Beneath the noise.

The body knows the way. The soul remembers. All it asks is that you listen.

Rose – Soulful Nuggets Team