what I trust about the body

A practitioner's working faith.

I've been thinking about what it means to trust something you can't fully explain.

Not believe in — that's a different thing, with different stakes. Belief often asks you to hold a position. Trust is quieter. Trust is what you've seen enough times that you've stopped needing to argue for it. It's the ground you keep finding under your feet, even when the theory is still unresolved.

Here is what I trust about the body.

I trust that the body is oriented toward its own repair. Not always successfully. There are diseases and injuries that overwhelm its capacity, and I hold no illusions about that. But the default posture of a living body is toward coherence. Toward function. Toward returning to something it recognizes as itself. Cut your finger and watch what happens, not because I'm telling you to, but because it's remarkable every time: the body moves immediately, without instruction, toward closing what's open. That drive toward repair doesn't stop at the skin. It runs through every level of the system.

I trust that the body holds more than it's asked to articulate. There's a whole literature now on this, Bessel van der Kolk's work, Peter Levine's, the growing field of somatic psychology, but practitioners have known it longer than the research has confirmed it. People carry losses in their shoulders. They hold old fears in their gut. Their breath shortens around memories they've stopped consciously thinking about. The body remembers in a register below language, and it keeps those records faithfully, sometimes for years, waiting for the conditions in which it's safe to set them down.

I trust that the conditions matter enormously. A body that feels safe can do things a body under threat cannot. The nervous system in parasympathetic - resting, receiving, out of vigilance - has access to processes that the nervous system in sympathetic simply doesn't. This is why the work isn't just about touch or technique. It's about creating an environment in which the body's own intelligence can operate freely. The practitioner's job is less to do something to the system than to give the system what it needs to do what it already knows how to do.

This is the piece I find myself most wanting to say to people who come to me skeptical: I'm not asking you to believe I have something your body lacks. I'm suggesting that your body might have something it hasn't had room to express - and that the session is just room.

I came to this work after years in a field that is, in many ways, its opposite. Software builds systems from explicit rules. You specify the behavior you want; the machine executes it. There's no trust involved, only instruction. The body is not like that. You cannot instruct a broken bone to mend faster by specifying the process. You can give it what it needs, rest, nutrition, stability, time, and then you have to get out of the way and let the bone do what bones do.

I find that kind of intelligence more interesting, honestly, than the other kind. The bone doesn't need to understand osteoblasts to make them. The immune system doesn't need a map of the pathogen to begin responding. The body just knows, in a way that predates consciousness, predates language, predates any framework we've built to describe it.

I think about this in sessions. The person on the table is not a problem I'm solving. They are a living system with its own organizing intelligence, and my job is to offer something useful to that intelligence and then be patient enough to let it work. The outcome isn't mine to control, and I've made my peace with that; more than that, I've come to see it as the point.

There's a word I come back to when I'm looking for a frame for this work, and the word is tending. Not fixing. Not treating. Not even healing, exactly, because healing is something the body does, not something I do to it. Tending.

A gardener tends a plant. They don't grow it. They create the conditions in which it can grow: the right soil, the right light, water when it's dry, protection when the weather turns. They pay attention. They notice what the plant is doing and respond to it. They trust that the plant has a direction - toward light, toward root, toward fruit - and they align their effort with that direction rather than substituting their own.

That's the closest I can get to describing what I'm doing when I work.

The body has a direction. Toward rest, when it's exhausted. Toward release, when it's been holding too long. Toward integration, when it's been fractured. Toward coherence, always. That's the baseline it's navigating back toward whenever conditions allow.

I trust that. I've trusted it long enough that the trust itself has become something like ground. Not certainty - the mechanism is still unresolved, and I hold that with appropriate humility. But trust in what I've seen: that when people are given genuine room, the body tends to use it. That given enough stillness and presence and time, something in the system remembers what settled feels like and begins, slowly, to move there.

That's what I'm offering. Room. Presence. An attentive accompaniment toward whatever the body is already trying to do.