The Body Is Not Wrong
Activist- Poet June Jordan wrote it plainly: the body is not wrong.
Four words. And yet for so many of us, unlearning the opposite has taken decades.
I know this from the inside. I spent years in a high control religious environment that taught me, in ways both loud and quiet, that my body was a problem to be managed. A source of sin. A thing to be subdued. I have been doing somatic work long enough to know that the path back to yourself is real, and that it begins with one radical act: deciding your body was never the enemy.
What High Control Religion Teaches the Body
High control religions or any institution that uses shame and fear as tools of compliance, leave marks that live in the flesh, not just the memory.
They teach us that physical desire is dangerous. That emotion is weakness. That the intuitive voice inside us is not wisdom but temptation. That suffering is holy and comfort is suspect. That to trust yourself is the beginning of a fall.
Over time, the body learns to go quiet. To brace. To perform okayness while holding enormous amounts of pain underneath. Many survivors of HCR experience chronic tension, dissociation, difficulty feeling pleasure, and a deep mistrust of their own inner knowing. Not because something is wrong with them. Because they were taught, systematically, that something was.
The Body Kept the Score You Were Never Allowed to Keep
Here is what no one told you in those pews: your body was listening the whole time. It registered every moment you were shamed into silence. Every time you overrode your gut to stay in good standing. Every boundary crossed in the name of submission or devotion.
That isn't a weakness. That is a faithful body doing its job, holding what the mind was not allowed to process.
Somatics as a Compassionate Witness
Somatic work does not ask you to perform healing or arrive already fixed. It asks only that you show up and begin to notice. What do you feel? Where do you feel it? What happens when you simply stay with it instead of running?
For those of us conditioned to distrust ourselves, this is not a small thing. It is everything.
The somatic space becomes the first place, maybe in a long time, where your inner voice is not corrected, overridden, or called dangerous. Where you are invited to do the one thing you were wrongly taught never to do.
Trust yourself.
Your body was not wrong. It was waiting.
Come back to yourself. Again and again.
