Trauma Is Stored in the Body
As a reiki practitioner and one who has navigated a variety of life experiences, I’m intimately familiar with the ways in which trauma is stored in the body.
The debilitating jaw pain that makes it difficult to open your mouth and sip through a straw, just one day after having an opportunity to speak your truth and allowing it to pass by.
Sore ankles dangling from an office chair, begging to walk away and never see the inside of said office again, with physical discomfort meeting the refusal to step out on faith and know stability is assured.
The sinking feeling that dives down to the deepest pits of the stomach as a name flashes across the phone screen that threatens your sense of self-worth, confidence and discernment.
Intense heart pain and feeling of cold numbness across the body while crying like never before.
Feeling disconnected from all that is in the midst of known unalignment.
The anxious feelings that rise within you when you don’t trust your own word, path, purpose, and live within a freeze state, immobile toward alignment. Because what demands will life make of you next when you’re everything you say you are?
The indignant anger that billows out similar to smoke from a chimney when all you desire is for the weight of your memories to lessen.
I know from experience that a quality workout will bring those weighted memories to the surface, and weight loss is more than just physical. It’s mental, emotional, and spiritual.
I embarked on a fitness journey years ago with a talented personal trainer who brought humor, upliftment, and discipline to each training session. I thought I was grounded until his quips would incense me mid-session, to be met with eye rolls, huffs, and snippiness.
Years later, God gifted me with numerous prophetic dreams. In one of them that I can recall as clear as day, I had a bird’s eye view of a fitness class led by said trainer in a small yoga studio. He sat before the class on the floor in front of a row of glass mirrors behind him, with about ten attendees sitting cross-legged in front of him. I could sense that he loved his career. I watched as clients would get angry with him in the midst of the session for seemingly no reason. He did his best to cope with this fact, and humorously made light of the fact that he had to fire some clients. By the end of the scene, I could sense his inner frustration.
When I awoke from this dream, while still in the hypnopompic state, I heard God’s voice express to me that I was being prepared to receive clients whose trauma would be illuminated during reiki sessions. I also felt a strong pull to apologize to my former personal trainer for my past behavior. We hadn’t spoke in years, and I texted him before sunrise “I owe you an apology.” He told me to call him, and revealed that he had prayed for an apology for his client’s behavior just days prior to our talk. God answers prayers, and the prophetic dream rang true for him: he had numerous experiences of easily angered and grieved clients.
I shared my perspective that trauma is stored in the body, a reality for many that was popularized by Bessel van der Kolk’s book “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” This trainer (who chose to remain anonymous for this blog and will hereby be referred to as “Trainer”) recommends the read, and based on his own experiences with clients, agrees with the perspective I shared.
Trainer stated “It all boils down to trauma being stored in your muscles and in your fascia. I preach myofascia release through foam rolling to all of my clients.” I can attest to this - he would never let us start or end a session without foam rolling.
He went on to say “I also control the frequency of sessions through music to uplift clients and release stress, to start the day right. I don’t play music that would induce anger.” Trainer typically listens to gospel and afrobeats on his way to training sessions early in the morning to set the tone for his own day and better navigate experiences he has with clients expressing anger and grief. As someone who released listening to secular music frequently in favor of listening to predominantly gospel music this year, I can attest to his practice as well.
Trainer’s experiences confirmed pre-existing psychological studies and God’s hand-delivered wisdom, yet I couldn’t receive confirmation from just one professional. With a hunger for additional experiential research, I contacted renowned trainer Jon Q., based in Santa Monica, CA. He agreed that trauma is stored in the body.
In his many years of training, he’s witnessed clients cry during exercises in which they’re unable to be in full control of their body due to painful experiences in which their autonomy and control over oneself had been threatened. Exercises that caused one’s body to shake as they attempted to hold their workout position were sure to induce crying in those who needed that therapeutic release.
Jon creates additional opportunities for therapeutic release through his wellness nights. In an avant garde approach to personal training, he hosts wellness nights inclusive of sound healing, massage, and access to a sauna and cold plunge tub. He provides pillows, eye masks, and blankets for attendees and they have a moment to lay down in silence, which he’s found can induce crying for those who are used to moving all the time. He’s certainly gained the trust of his clients to host such events, given they’re in a space with strangers with their eyes closed.
Jon also noted “You can cater the workout to [a client’s] expressed pent up feelings - ball slams and snatches, which are a violent or explosive exercise in a sense, to relieve their stress.”
Over the years, clients have shared stories of sexual abuse, coping with infidelity, and more in the small, private-style gyms he’s built. He’s hosted larger classes of 30-32 people per session, 6-12 of them in a day, with a majority of clients being young adults in a transitional period of life - early 20s to early 30s. I give him a multitude of credit for introducing this generation and the generations before them to different healing modalities beyond training their physical bodies.
In my own reiki practice, I had a client who was in the early stages of emotional healing from a trauma they hadn’t recognized prior to conversations with me. A reiki session gave them an immediate feeling of relaxation, and in the weeks that followed, they expressed they’d felt they regained their spark. In the months that followed, however, they expressed a deepening of the troubling feelings that led them to the reiki session initially. I must note here that one reiki session, nor a series of personal training sessions, will permanently relieve an individual from deep-seated trauma. One should seek a variety of healing modalities in combination with self-work to achieve lasting impact on lessening past trauma felt within the physical body and trauma responses.
One such healing modality I’d recommend is massage therapy. I spoke with two massage therapists, Allison and Neria, to further explore their experience with how they’ve perceived trauma to be stored in their clients bodies and how to work with it.
Allison is also a certified reiki master. She explained that trauma in the body can show up in many ways. She’d had one client in her second year of massage who shot up face up on the table when Allison touched her shoulders, approaching her neck. After the jolt, this client revealed she had been in an abusive relationship in which she was strangled. While Allison can feel subtleties in the body and adjust pressure accordingly, there were no signs that this would happen until it occurred.
Her client was in tears, and Allison thoughtfully talked her through the moment. Once she calmed down and felt at ease, the massage session continued.
Allison further explained “Someone who has been sexually abused [will have] trauma primarily held in the root chakra. The root deals with your stability in life and how you move through the world. That area is prone to illness.”
Allison wisely noted that the body’s meridians relate to the chakras, which relate to lived experiences of trauma.
If Allison feels certain areas of the body are tight, she knows what they’re going through without them saying a word, because of the different areas trauma is stored in the body. She also noted that trauma can be stored in places, and places hold memories. If you’ve made every effort to release trauma and find it persistent, you’ll also want to look to your environment and spiritually cleanse it in the way you see fit.
Neria, gifted massage therapist, also has an understanding of how trauma is stored in the body. In her years of practice, she has commonly seen stiff bodies and people who may be guarded and unable to open up. Neria said “I look at that as a personality trait, but it can also be that some people aren’t as open when they meet new people. It’s very important to be slow in those environments so they have time to finally take that deep breath, trust, and also enable them to feel calm enough to open up. Root chakra questions come to mind to ask them, like are you feeling safe? I’ll explore asking questions if they are open enough to take the opportunity to go deeper.”
There are a number of ways you can move trauma through the body. In practicing some of the methods I’ll be recommending, you may spontaneously cry. I encourage allowing yourself to cry as a form of release. Methods to move trauma through the body include:
Hip opening exercises
Somatic shaking
Journaling
Therapy
Running
Nature walks
Workout sessions
Massage therapy
Reiki sessions (distance or in-person)
Quality rest
Sound healing
Breathwork
Whichever form(s) of trauma release you choose, I pray you find comfort in the knowledge that you hold each key to your healing journey.
