What’s stuck in your body?

In the words of the Buddha moments after his awakening, it is said that he uttered the First Noble Truth: “It ain’t easy being a human.”

OK, so that’s a loose translation, but I believe it captures the gist of it.

There are lots of factors that make the human experience universally difficult, but one of them is this: we don’t fully process, in the moment, the traumas of our lives.

Think about it this way: you’re driving down the road and suddenly a deer leaps out in front of your car. You barely miss the deer, and both of you are frightened out of your wits.

How you two mammals deal with that scare tells part of the story I want to tell. You keep driving down the road, seat belt holding you in place, doing your best to convince yourself and your passengers that all is well.

In the meantime, that deer is off to the side of the road trembling, even shaking her entire body. She’ll do that until the fear is, in a sense, out of her body.

Meanwhile, back in the driver’s seat, you’ve tucked that fear away somewhere in your body in the form of stuck energy; the deer has moved the terror along and is back to grazing in the field.

We humans do this trauma-stuffing all the time, and have done it our entire lives. All of us. There is something about the full and complete expression of our strong emotions that we simply don’t allow ourselves, or that we aren’t allowed by our caregivers, teachers, or society at large.

“Big boys don’t cry.”

“Good girls don’t get angry.”

“If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.”

“Stop screaming — there’s nothing to be scared of here.”

“CEOs don’t let their employees know how dire the situation is and how scared they are. They just suck it up and handle it.”

So, what happens to this stuffed energy? It gets lodged in our bodies, which is also to say it gets lodged in our unconscious. Once safely tucked away, these blocked energies of unprocessed emotions then hide outside of our awareness, influencing the choices we make, our moods, our relationships, our careers — everything, in other words — without our permission or conscious awareness.

Modern psychological modalities such as Core Energetics, Somatic Experiencing, and Bioenergetics, as well as the work we do at the Shalom Mountain retreat center, know this phenomenon well. What is less widely known is that this has been understood in certain lineages for hundreds, even thousands, of years. For example, the 1,000-year-old Kashmir Shaivist text, The Recognition Sutra, describes in detail the phenomenon known in that tradition as samskaras:

When, despite being dissolved [into oneself], the experience of the object deposits internally various impressions (samskara) such as anxiety and so on, then it is established in the state of concealment, becoming a seed of experience that will arise again.

The Recognition Sutra, translated by Christopher Wallis

And, this “seed of experience” will arise when we least expect it, in forms that, because it is in our unconscious, we have little capacity to influence. A trauma experienced when we were six years old might come out decades later as a reluctance to risk relationship; a trauma experienced when we were two might induce us to snap at a loved one in a moment of stress.

What do we do about these concealed and stored emotions? If they are outside of our conscious awareness, how can we address them so that we are not controlled by them?

The answer to these questions is in the body.

Now, of course, humans are way too complex for this process to be understood fully, much less explained fully in a few hundred words. Furthermore, each of us is unique, so how and where I store and conceal my unprocessed emotions as samskaras will be different than how and you store yours. To make matters more complicated, how I stored and concealed my emotions when I was six months old is different than how I stored and concealed my emotions when I was seven years old, 30 years old, and last week at 66 years old.

This vast evolutionary complexity, however, doesn’t mean we are helpless in unlocking the energy and wisdom of these concealed energies. On the contrary, centuries and even millennia of experience have given us a pretty good idea of how to access and move this stored and concealed energy. Particularly through the use of breath and movement, we can find these hidden treasures of stored energy, reveal them to ourselves, and move that energy so that we can access their power and move with greater and flow to create the lives for which we yearn.

This is not a one-time process. No single weekend retreat or consultation with a practitioner will free up your energy blocks. On the contrary, this is a process for those of us who are committed to lifelong learning. However, with commitment, support from skilled teachers and practitioners and in many cases from a loving community, we can access dimensions of our potential we have forgotten we ever had.

What’s stuck in your body? Nothing less than the possibility that you can become who you’ve always wanted to become, do what you’ve always wanted to do, and have what you’ve always wanted to have.

What’s stuck in your body is, quite simply, access to your deepest heart’s desire.

Perhaps it’s time to set your body, and perhaps your dreams, free.