Body Wisdom

You, like me, may be done with doubt. My feed is full of women declaring the same thing — done with trimming their sentences into sorry and just, done with making themselves smaller so other people feel bigger. I feel part of this collective exhale, this movement of women reclaiming space.

For me, it took trauma to get here. When life cracked open, the words around me multiplied. Everyone had a version of reality, and my mind spun with them all. I tried to hold the contradictions, tried to make sense of what couldn’t be reconciled. The more I thought, the more unsteady I became.

The only compass left was my body. It refused to be talked over. It told me when I was safe and when I wasn’t. It didn’t need proof. It didn’t need permission. It knew. That’s where coherence began to return: not in what was spoken, but in what I could feel.

Psychologist Eugene Gendlin had a name for this kind of body awareness: the felt sense. He described it as “the body’s sense of a particular problem or situation.” When I first read that, it felt like recognition. I already knew what he meant. For me, the felt sense is the way I can walk into a room and feel tension before anyone has spoken. My body names the truth before my brain does.

In trauma recovery, this can be complicated. The nervous system has its own patterns. In hyperarousal, everything feels like danger. The mind narrows to survival. In dissociation, it flips the other way — numbness, floating, cut off from sensation. Both states distort reasoning.

That’s why so many of us struggle with self-doubt — not because we don’t know, but because our access to what we know gets scrambled. Sensation is often the clearest way back. Let me explain another way, because when this landed for me, it changed everything: doubt doesn’t mean you’re lost. It means you’ve been disconnected. Your body knows the way home.

Feminist artists have been naming this for decades. Barbara Kruger’s words still echo: “Your body is a battleground.”

For me, that line is not about fighting myself. It’s about recognising how my body has been treated as public space. As a younger woman, my body was sexualised. Later, it was seen only in the role of mother. At each stage, I viewed it through the lens other people handed me.

Part of my healing has been reclaiming my body as more than those projections. It is not just sexual, not just maternal. It is a divine and sovereign vessel. The battleground, for me, is learning to protect that space — to stop letting others define it, and to trust it as my own compass.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Your body is a temple.” What I’ve come to understand is that this isn’t a metaphor. The body really is a sacred place. For me, that’s been the shift: from I am my body in the shallow, external sense, to I am in my body as a place of connection. All the noise and labels — sexual, maternal, useful, attractive, failing, ageing — those are phases, not essence. The essence is that the body is holy, and it knows truth.

The roots of self-doubt often stretch back to childhood.

Some of us grew up with signals that were ignored, dismissed, or shamed. A parent too overwhelmed to notice. A teacher brushing off discomfort. A carer saying “don’t be silly” when fear was real. That’s cognitive dissonance: when what you feel clashes with what you’re told. To stay safe, children learn to override their instincts in favour of external voices. It works for survival, but as adults it leaves us with the habit of second-guessing ourselves.

Wisdom also changes as we move through life transitions. The Maiden’s curiosity, the Queen’s discernment, the Crone’s unapologetic knowing — each stage carries its own way of trusting the body. And in between these stages are the thresholds. Anthropologist Victor Turner used the word liminality for that in-between space — when the old has fallen away but the new hasn’t yet formed.

You don’t need an anthropology text to recognise it. Humans know it in our bones. Divorce, career transitions, menopause, burnout, identity shifts, grief, illness — they’re all cocoon stages. And the caterpillar doesn’t just sprout wings. It dissolves into liquid before reforming. Total breakdown before renewal. No wonder transition feels disorienting. But in that in-between, when everything else falls apart, the body can still orient you toward what’s true.

Therapists who work with trauma know this well. Entire fields of practice are built on the body as the first language of healing — somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, polyvagal-informed work. I’m not a practitioner of these modalities. I don’t claim that expertise. But I know their impact, and I know that the same principle can be practiced in everyday life.

These are the small things I return to when I need to rebuild trust in myself. I ask a yes-or-no question, imagine each answer, and notice how my body shifts. I press my feet into the ground, I check how close to my ears my shoulders have risen, or take one deep breath to remind myself I’m here. I pay attention to signals I used to brush off — a stomach that knots, a chest that softens — and I write them down. Patterns appear quickly. And each day I act on one small cue. Leaving the room when my jaw tightens. Saying yes when my body feels open. Micro-acts of body trust that compound into confidence.

Doubt has diminished us long enough. But the current is shifting. I see it in myself. I see it in other women and men reclaiming their voice, rebuilding nervous system regulation, trusting their body over their mind.

The next time your thoughts spiral, pause. Notice your breath. Feel your feet on the ground. Check the truth your body is offering.

You don’t need to think harder. You don’t need another opinion. You can trust what you know.