Years ago, I attended a week-long dance intensive.
At the time, I had already completed graduate school.
I could have explained my personal history in great detail.
I knew my family story.
I understood trauma.
I could describe the patterns that shaped my protective responses.
Then the movement teacher said something that made me pause and lean in.
"Numbness is a feeling too."
I remember feeling something inside me shift.
Until then, I hadn't even noticed my numbness.
I imagined it as the absence of feeling.
Instead, I turned inward and discovered something so close that it had become almost invisible.
Numbness wasn't the absence of experience.
It was an experience in itself.
A doorway.
It wasn't that I had no feelings about what I had lived through.
It was that I had learned not to feel them.
I had learned how to use my mind to explain my way around them instead.
That realization changed the course of my life.
It led me inward, toward my immediate experience.
Toward learning how to stay with sensations and emotions instead of immediately turning them into explanations.
It was the beginning of stepping through a doorway to healing.
I discovered that numbness asks for slowness.
For gentleness.
For nurturing.
And, whenever possible, for the accompaniment of a steady and compassionate guide.
Numbness is often misunderstood.
We imagine it means nothing is happening.
But in my experience, numbness is often a form of protection. A wise adaptation that once helped us survive experiences that felt too overwhelming, too frightening, or too painful to fully feel.
Rather than trying to force ourselves to feel more, healing begins by creating enough safety that feeling can return in its own time.
Looking back now, I realize that so much of the work I do in my practice follows this same path.
People often arrive carrying beautiful insight.
They know their diagnoses.
They understand their attachment style.
They've analyzed family dynamics.
They know why they do what they do.
Yet many have rarely been invited to ask a different question.
What is happening inside me right now?
That question changes everything.
Attention slowly moves away from the story...
and toward sensation.
Toward emotion.
Toward the nervous system.
Toward the body.
Toward the present moment.
Not because our stories aren't important.
They are.
But healing often begins when we gently lay down that persistent question of why.
When we become willing to experience ourselves instead of trying to understand ourselves.
My own journey continues.
These days, I find myself less interested in solving myself than in accompanying myself.
More curious than certain.
More willing to stay with my experience until understanding arises naturally from within it.
I've come to trust that insight has its place.
But some forms of wisdom cannot be thought into existence.
They emerge only after we've spent enough time inhabiting our own experience.
Perhaps the next time you notice yourself saying,
I'm fine.
or
I don't really feel anything.
pause for a moment.
Instead of asking yourself why, simply become curious.
What sensations are here?
What emotions might be waiting beneath the surface?
Can you meet whatever you find with gentleness rather than urgency?
Sometimes healing begins not by feeling more...
but by becoming willing to stay with whatever is already here.
With Love,
Kristen
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