Trauma isn’t stored in the body — not in the muscles, the fascia, or the nervous system. That might sound pedantic, but it matters, because how we think about trauma shapes how we meet it.

Trauma can be understood as an experience that overwhelms our capacity to respond — when what happens feels too much for the resources we have at the time. The causes vary widely: the death of someone close, a physical assault, or the loss of a home. Whatever the event, it brings a wave of distress, fear, or helplessness. Later, situations that echo the original experience can re-awaken similar feelings. Because these sensations seem to rise up from the body itself, it can feel as though the trauma has been “stored” there, waiting to be released. But something subtler is taking place.

As Antonio Damasio describes, feelings of any kind arise from the brain’s ongoing mapping of the body. Interoceptive nerves sense shifts in our internal chemistry and visceral state, while proprioceptive feedback from muscles and joints lets us know how we are physically positioned in the world. Together they create the backdrop of feeling that colours every moment. Some states are obvious — hunger, thirst, fullness — while others are more diffuse, such as calmness or unease. Different internal conditions generate different tones of feeling: some more activated, others more peaceful.

As life unfolds, we are always responding — sometimes consciously through our movements, and sometimes automatically through the rhythms of the autonomic system, which changes our heartbeat, breathing, circulation, and the release of hormones and neurotransmitters. External cues such as light, sound, or smell mingle with internal ones to give us a moment-by-moment sense of how we are: safe or unsafe, at ease or on edge. The brain interprets these shifting signals in the light of past experience, shaping an emotion that fits our history and the present moment.

Feelings and emotions are continually being created from the shifting sensations that arise within us and around us. Difficulties arise when the feelings we generate are often disturbing or uncomfortable — why might this happen?
One of the quirks of a mind that learns so well is that it also habituates. Anything we do repeatedly becomes automated. This is generally useful — it lets us move through the world efficiently — but we also automate responses we never consciously chose.

A child who is regularly bullied at school may, without realising it, develop a subtle pattern of muscular bracing to help them cope. Alongside this, the brain’s stress circuits activate the familiar cascade of autonomic and hormonal changes: quickened heartbeat, shallow breathing, dilated pupils, a surge of adrenaline — the state we often call fight or flight. Years later, when something in the present echoes that earlier situation, the same network of bodily responses can be re-activated through association and prediction. The body recreates the old internal state, and with it the same familiar feeling. What seems like a memory stored in the body is, in fact, a fresh reconstruction — the nervous system predicting danger and preparing us to survive it once again.

If our feelings are continually being constructed from the body’s signals, then the way we inhabit the body will inevitably shape what we feel. Each posture we hold, each pattern of breath or tension, becomes part of the language through which the nervous system predicts the next moment. When we learn to move, breathe, and attend differently, we begin to offer the brain new information — evidence that the present is not the past. Over time, these quieter, more regulated bodily states can become the new normal, gradually loosening the grip of old predictions.

This is where practice becomes deeply helpful. Whether through attentive movement, stillness, or the untrammelled breath, we are not “releasing” stored trauma but retraining perception — helping the body and brain to recalibrate what safety feels like. The aim is to help loosen ourselves from the grip of the past and to widen the range of what feels tolerable, so that life can be met with less defence and more openness.