What It Means to “Return to the Body” After Trauma, Birth, Grief, or Spiritual Awakening

When the Body No Longer Feels Like Home

There are moments in life when the body stops feeling like a place we live inside.

We may still be functioning, caring for others, thinking clearly — and yet something essential feels distant.

Sensation is muted or overwhelming to our system.

Breath stays shallow, shoulders and neck tense.

The body feels braced, numb, or strangely foreign, like we are just going through the motions.

For some people, this happens little by little over time. For others it happens after something big, something that changes us massively.

Why Major Life Events Can Pull Us Out of the Body

Trauma, birth, grief, divorce, and spiritual awakening all have something in common: they overwhelm the nervous system’s familiar reference points.

When the intensity of an experience exceeds our capacity to stay present, the body does something intelligent — it protects us by creating distance from our ability to feel everything so much. Awareness lifts upward. Sensation narrows. We’re left with just enough embodiment to survive.

This is a beautifully well-designed strategy.

Trauma, Initiation, and the Protective Intelligence of “Leaving”

Leaving the body is not a mistake — it’s often the body’s most loving response. In trauma, it prevents overwhelm. In birth, it allows us to go and fetch our baby’s soul and then open passage for them through our body. In grief or divorce, it softens the impact of loss. In spiritual awakening, it can occur when the system opens faster than it can integrate.

This only becomes a pain or a problem when we don’t know how to return.

“Coming Back” Does Not Occur Through Forcing — It’s About Inviting

Returning to the body isn’t something you make happen through daily specific effort or discipline, contrary to what so many public figures say these days. You can’t think your way back in. You can’t force your way back in through intense experiences like ice baths or plant medicine ceremonies (no disrespect to these modalities, they have a lot of value in other ways!).

The body returns through invitation — through creating foundational safety, slowness, permission, and presence, first. Through this foundation and these repeated safe moments, we begin to realize we no longer have to brace.

True embodiment happens when the nervous system feels met, not managed.

Returning to the Body After Birth or Womb-Opening Experiences

Birth is both ecstatic and disorienting.

Even when it is beautiful, it can profoundly reorganize identity, sensation, and relationship to the body.

The womb opens — physically, emotionally, energetically — and support for integration of all of these aspects is often minimal.

Returning to the body after birth can mean slowly reclaiming sensation, reconnecting with the pelvic space, and allowing softness and aliveness to flow again without the urgency or expectation that often comes from intimate relating with our partner.

When Grief Lives in the Tissues

Grief doesn’t just live in the heart. It lives in the jaw, the chest, the belly, the pelvic floor. It alters posture, breath, and the way we inhabit space.

Somatic work allows grief to move in its own timing — not necessarily through reliving or talking about the story (though there may be some aspects of that), but through giving the body room to feel, release, and reorganize (on its own without our brains being involved) around what has been lost.

Spiritual Awakening Without Grounding the Body

Spiritual openings can expand awareness dramatically — sometimes faster than the body can keep up. When embodiment is missing, people may feel ungrounded, uncontained, or dissociated, even while having profound insights.

Returning to the body after awakening is how realization becomes lived rather than conceptual. The body becomes a place where consciousness can land, integrate, and express itself through ordinary life. Which is honestly what we need moreso than so many folks who can talk about spiritual concepts but don’t know how to live in a spiritually aligned and grounded way.

What Returning to the Body Actually Feels Like

Returning is subtle. Although it can happen over the course of one amazing and well-attuned session, it’s often micro-adjustments happening over time.

You may notice your breath dropping lower into your belly instead of your chest or shoulders. Or pleasurable sensation spreading to take up space where you once felt numbness or pain. Or just a realized sense of being “here” again — in the hips, the low belly, your arms and legs and feet. It can feel like time slowing down, especially in special moments, or like your body is softening the frequency with which it tries to grip and control.

Often, it feels like relief and spaciousness before it can feel like pleasure.

Why Slowness, Touch, and Presence Matter

The body learns through experience, the brain learns through explanation. We try to focus on both but give much more space to the experiences that support the body and nervous system best.

Slowness allows the nervous system to orient to safety, over and over again. Attuned touch provides feedback that it is safe to receive. Presence — steady, regulated, non-intrusive — offers a template the body can entrain to.

This is how trust is rebuilt from the inside out.

Returning to the Body as a Pathway to Aliveness

Embodiment can be about healing pain, yes. But it’s alap about restoring aliveness. Creativity, libido, intuition, and a sense of inner direction often return naturally as the body becomes a place we can inhabit again.

Aliveness is not something we create — it’s something we uncover when the body is no longer armored against life.

Who This Work Supports

This work tends to resonate with people who have been through something that changed them — trauma, birth, loss, divorce, initiation, or awakening — and who sense that their next step isn’t more insight or learning or workshops or retreats, but deeper inhabitation.

It’s for those longing for paced, titrated depth and integration.

An Invitation Back Into the Body

I offer this work through in-person, one-on-one sessions in Nosara, Costa Rica, with limited availability.

Sessions are slow, attuned, and grounded in nervous system awareness, embodiment, and spiritual integration.

If something in this speaks to you, you’re welcome to book a 15-minute clarity call or reach out via WhatsApp to explore whether this work is a fit. There is no rush. The body returns in its own time. :)