Coming Home to Your Body: Learning to Listen to the Body God Gave You
Golden Summer Series | Week 9
“Be still, and know that I am God.”—Psalm 46:10, ESV
Health note: I am a writer sharing personal experience, reflection, and general educational information. A qualified medical or mental health professional can provide individualized guidance, diagnosis, and treatment. Please seek professional support for concerns involving trauma, dissociation, breathing, pain, or other physical and mental health symptoms.
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It is remarkably easy to live from the neck up.
Our days fill with thinking, planning, remembering, worrying, creating, solving problems, and anticipating whatever may happen next. The mind stays busy while the body quietly participates in every experience.
Eventually, the body becomes loud enough to interrupt us.
Our shoulders are nearly touching our ears. The jaw has been clenched through an entire email. We realize we have been holding our breath while reading upsetting news. Our stomach tightens when a particular person calls.
The body also recognizes moments of relief. Something inside us softens when we step outdoors, hear the birds, sit beside someone we trust, or enter a place where we feel at ease.
I have spent much of this summer thinking about presence. The Golden Summer series began as an invitation to slow down, make room for God, and become more attentive to the life He has already given us.
Lately, another question has been rising in me:
Can I become fully present in my life while remaining disconnected from my body?
Being present in my life may also mean learning to be present in my body.
Perhaps slowing down creates enough quiet to hear what the body has been saying all along.
Your Nervous System Is Always in the Room
The nervous system is the body’s communication network. The brain and spinal cord form the central nervous system, while nerves throughout the body make up the peripheral nervous system and carry information back and forth.
One part of the peripheral nervous system, called the autonomic nervous system, helps regulate processes such as heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, temperature, and physical alertness. Its sympathetic and parasympathetic branches help the body mobilize energy and support restoration.
The sympathetic branch prepares the body for activity. It contributes to alertness, movement, exertion, and our responses to demanding or threatening situations.
The parasympathetic branch supports functions associated with rest, digestion, recovery, and conservation of energy.
Both belong within a healthy human life.
We need energy to work, run, respond, create, become excited, and dance. We also need the capacity to settle afterward. Regulation gives the nervous system enough flexibility to move through different levels of energy and gradually return to a more restful state.
Regulation is the ability to rise, respond, and return.
Peace can exist within a full life containing joy, grief, excitement, anger, movement, work, and rest. The body was created to participate in all of it.
Emotions Happen in Bodies
Emotion involves the whole person.
Anger may arrive with heat in the face, tightened muscles, or a racing pulse. Fear can change our breathing and digestion. Grief may feel physically heavy. Joy can brighten our expression, open our posture, and draw us toward movement.
The body often begins expressing an emotion before the mind has found language for it.
Emotional regulation begins with recognition. We become aware that something is happening, allow ourselves enough room to experience it, and consider what the feeling may be communicating. Awareness creates space between the emotion and our response.
Anger may reveal that a boundary has been crossed. Fear may draw attention to danger or awaken the memory of an earlier experience. Grief reflects the depth of what mattered. Excitement can carry so much energy that it resembles anxiety until we understand what we are feeling.
The body offers information. Wisdom helps us interpret it.
For people who have lived through trauma, awareness of the body can feel complicated. Dissociation may involve a sense of disconnection from oneself, the body, emotions, memories, identity, or the surrounding world. It can develop as an automatic protective response during experiences that overwhelm a person’s ability to process what is happening.
There have been seasons of my life when living primarily inside my thoughts felt far easier than inhabiting my physical experience.
Thinking gave me distance. Planning gave me something I could manage. Mental activity allowed me to continue functioning while other parts of my experience remained outside my immediate awareness.
I can approach those patterns with compassion when I recognize how they once helped me survive.
Coming home to the body can happen gradually. A person may begin by noticing the support of a chair, the temperature of the room, the feeling of their feet against the floor, or the sound of a familiar voice.
Each peaceful walk, nourishing meal, safe conversation, and compassionate response offers another reminder:
I am here. This moment is happening now.
Interoception: The Inner Sense
Scientists use the word interoception to describe the sensing and interpretation of signals arising from within the body.
These signals include hunger, thirst, breathing, heartbeat, temperature, fullness, pain, fatigue, and muscle tension. The brain continuously receives and processes this information, much of it outside our conscious awareness. Interoception also plays an important role in emotional experience and mental health.
Eventually, certain signals rise into awareness.
I realize I am exhausted. My breathing has become shallow. A conversation has caused my chest to tighten. Music has helped my body relax. A walk outdoors has shifted something within me.
This inner awareness may also help explain why we occasionally sense discomfort before we can consciously name its source. The body and brain are continually gathering information and comparing the present moment with previous experience.
A bodily signal deserves curiosity. Its meaning may be connected with the present situation, an earlier memory, hunger, illness, anxiety, excitement, exhaustion, or several influences at once.
That brings me to a question I find deeply important:
Have I become so accustomed to overriding myself that I no longer recognize the difference between anxiety, intuition, exhaustion, excitement, fear, and peace?
Learning those differences takes time.
Prayer, reflection, supportive relationships, professional guidance, and repeated experiences of safety can help us recognize our patterns more clearly.
Slowing down gives subtle signals a chance to be heard.
The Breath: Where Body and Intention Meet
Breathing occupies a fascinating place in the body.
It continues automatically while we sleep, work, speak, and move through the day. We can also bring it under conscious influence by noticing its rhythm and allowing it to become slower or more comfortable.
Research on slow, voluntary breathing has found measurable effects involving heart rate and patterns of heart-rate variability associated with autonomic activity. Individual responses vary, and gentleness matters, especially for people with trauma histories.
A simple practice begins by noticing the breath as it is.
Allow the next exhale to soften. Feel the chair supporting you or your feet resting on the floor. Let one comfortable breath follow another.
Intense breathwork can feel activating for some people. A few ordinary, unforced breaths may provide all the awareness the moment needs. Returning attention to the room, opening the eyes, or resuming a natural breathing rhythm remains available at any time.
A supportive floor cushion may also make seated stillness more comfortable by reducing pressure and helping the body find a sustainable position.
A resource to consider: Extra-Large Meditation Floor Cushion for Sitting, Reading, Yoga, or Quiet Reflection
The Body Was Made to Move
Movement reaches far beyond formal exercise.
It can happen while walking through the woods, stretching in the morning, gardening, swaying to music, painting a wall, or dancing badly in the kitchen with someone you love.
Lately, I have become curious about walking more, learning salsa with Josh, and perhaps eventually stepping into a boxing gym to discover what my body can do.
Movement offers another way to experience ourselves.
Through it, we may encounter strength, rhythm, coordination, balance, pleasure, agency, and the satisfying rest that follows meaningful effort. The body becomes the place where we participate in life, embrace the people we love, create, worship, explore, and enjoy God’s world.
A thick mat can create a comfortable space for stretching, gentle movement, or a few quiet minutes on the floor.
A movement resource to consider: Fitvids Extra-Thick High-Density Exercise and Yoga Mat
A Faith-Based Resource to Explore
Because this subject intersects with the work of my friend Julie Rebboah, I also want to point readers toward her From Bud to Bloom Ministry and the Room to Bloom podcast.
Julie describes her work as Christian nervous-system coaching that brings together biblical faith, breathwork, somatic practices, and trauma recovery. My knowledge of her work comes through our friendship and her public resources, so this mention is an invitation to explore her teaching and decide whether it may serve you.
God Ministers to the Whole Person
The story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19 has taken on new meaning for me as I have explored embodiment.
Elijah had lived through an intense spiritual confrontation. He became afraid, fled into the wilderness, sat beneath a tree, and reached the end of his strength.
God met him with care.
Elijah slept. An angel touched him and provided food and water. He rested again and ate before continuing his journey. The still, small voice came later.
I find it beautiful that God ministered to Elijah as a whole person, caring for his exhausted body before inviting him into deeper listening.
God understood that Elijah’s physical condition belonged within what he was experiencing.
This pattern of embodiment runs throughout Scripture. Creation is physical. Human beings were formed from the earth and animated by the breath of God. Jesus entered the world in human flesh. He ate, slept, walked, touched people, wept, experienced weariness, and shared meals with His friends.
Resurrection itself is bodily.
Our bodies are part of the lives God gave us to inhabit. Through them, we serve, relate, create, worship, rest, and experience His world.
Caring for the body can become an expression of gratitude. We listen to its limits, offer it nourishment and rest, allow it to move, and seek appropriate medical or mental health care when support is needed.
We can also extend compassion toward bodies that have carried years of stress, grief, trauma, work, love, and survival.
A Golden Summer Practice: Notice, Breathe, Move
I want to keep this practice simple enough to remember.
Notice
Pause and become curious about what is happening inside you.
You may recognize tiredness, hunger, tension, peacefulness, excitement, sadness, or the need for a few quiet minutes. Awareness begins by acknowledging the signal.
Breathe
Give yourself thirty quiet seconds before responding.
Allow one comfortable breath to follow another. Feel your feet against the floor or the chair supporting your weight. Let the breath bring your attention back to the present.
Move
Ask what kind of movement would serve your body today.
The answer may be a walk, a stretch, a dance, or a few minutes tending plants outdoors. Movement can be vigorous or quiet. Each choice becomes another way of participating in the day.
Notice. Breathe. Move.
Then return to your life with a little more awareness of the person who is living it.
Being Present Means Being Here
Earlier in this series, I asked, How do I stop missing my own life?
I am beginning to realize that presence includes learning how life feels while I am living it.
The warmth of the sun belongs to this life. So does the coolness of water, the loosening of tight shoulders, the rhythm of walking, the comfort of rest, and the breath that returns after laughter.
These ordinary experiences bring us back into the day God has given us.
This Golden Summer began as an invitation to slow down and notice the life God has already given me. Perhaps part of that practice is learning to notice the body He gave me to live that life through.
I am still learning.
I am curious about breathing, movement, and the messages my body has been sending. Slowing down has become an act of listening, and listening has become one way of coming home.
My body has carried me through every season of my life. It has survived, worked, created, grieved, celebrated, loved, and continued showing up.
I want to become still enough to notice it.
And when I notice, I want to respond with wisdom, care, compassion, and gratitude for the physical life God has given me to inhabit.
Join the Conversation
What helps you return to the present—walking, music, prayer, time outdoors, movement, or a few quiet breaths?
Share your experience in the comments, and consider sending this article to someone who may need a gentle invitation to slow down and listen.
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