The Body Keeps the Score: What Bessel Van Der Kolk Taught Me About My Nervous System

In this episode of Words & Contemplations, Fai shares a reading of “The Body Keeps the Score: What Bessel van der Kolk Taught Me About My Nervous System.” For a long time, I thought I could understand what I was feeling by thinking about it. The Body Keeps the Score helped me understand something different: that our experiences don't simply live in our memories and minds. They can also be carried through the body. This reflection explores some of the ideas that stood out to Fai while reading Bessel van der Kolk's work, and how they changed the way she understood stress, trauma, the nervous system and the relationship between mind and body. It’s also a personal contemplation on what happens when we begin paying attention to the physical sensations beneath our thoughts and how practices like movement, breath, meditation and awareness can become ways of reconnecting with a body we may have spent years overriding. A reflection on The Body Keeps the Score, embodiment, nervous system awareness, trauma and the process of learning to listen to what the body has been saying all along. Sometimes healing begins with understanding. Sometimes it begins with finally feeling.