Body Time: What Happens When You Learn to Wait

I've been waiting and waiting (and waiting) to write something. This waiting has been a deliberate choice. Recently, I made a commitment to myself: I would only write when the words were coming from my body, not my head.

And the body, as it turns out, has its own timeline.

What I Found in North Carolina

I recently completed an in-person training in somatic tone and primitive reflexes in North Carolina. I arrived wanting to learn new clinical tools. What I found, yet again, was myself.

The training kept returning to one idea: Change isn't necessarily a sweeping process. More often, it's specific. One small shift, when met with presence, can ripple through the entire mind-body system and reorganize how a person moves through the world.

Primitive reflexes are the ABCs of that reorganization. They're the foundational movement patterns we develop before language, personality, protective patterning, or social conditioning.

When we work at that level, we're not fixing symptoms. We're returning to something essential within that, at its core, is innately oriented toward growth, authenticity, and aliveness.

The Pull Back Into My Head

Since returning to formal psychology training, I have received some wonderful gifts. Think rigour, precision, depth of understanding. And... it's also pulled me back into my head in ways I've had to consciously work against.

The mind is quick, articulate, and impressively predictive. For me, it has historically also been a way of not quite arriving in my body. I learned I could understand something clearly and speak to it fluently, yet its lived experience remained slightly out of reach.

This was my key defence mechanism when I was in the thick of anorexia: stay up in the head, stay safe, hover just above the ground, keep an eye on things, but don't get involved (or get messy!). I used intellectual competence to distance myself from the body and from life.

I'm not in that place now. But I still notice the pull. This part of me isn't bad or something to fix or get rid of; I just overused this inherent strength until it became a liability to my well-being.

Coaxing Myself Back

So I've been doing something that doesn't come naturally to me: I've been tenderly coaxing myself back into myself, into my body. "It's safe to be here," I tell myself. It's safe to land. I have the capacity to meet what's real and in front of me. Breathe. Soften towards the Earth.

The practices that help are simple, if not always easy. Eating enough helps. Dance helps. Time in nature helps. Earth medicines help. These are re-entries—ways of dropping the altitude and coming home to ground and back into body time.

The Ocean, Not the Clock

Through this process, I'm remembering that the body doesn't run on linear time.

It moves more like an ocean: currents flowing at different speeds simultaneously, feeding into small tributaries, sometimes gushing, sometimes barely a trickle, sometimes evaporating altogether before it reaches anywhere. Things can integrate twenty years later like a cloud finally bursting after a long drought, or land immediately, like stepping into a puddle you didn't see coming.

I've been learning to respect that rhythm rather than override it. To wait when waiting is what's asked for.

To not perform readiness I don't yet feel. That's just dissociation dressed up all fancy.

Sitting Inside the Fear

Waiting isn't easy for me. It brings up two of my fears: being left behind and looking like I have nothing to say in a world where everyone seems to have something articulate and timely to offer. I can feel those fears in my chest, heat rising, stomach dropping.

But I've been learning to sit inside that experience rather than rush past it. To let body time do what it does. To choose to stay, to wait, to be in the gap, to sit in the dark, rather than perform or intellectualize my way out of it.

Eventually, something loosens, and the waiting becomes generative. This piece is what emerged from that loosening. Rather than effort or urgency, it came from allowing conditions to coalesce. And that feels like progress to me: small, specific, and rippling through the whole system the way one shift does.

What I am Offering

This is what I want to keep offering the people I work with, too. Not just frameworks for understanding the body, but to accompany people in the actual practice of re-turning to it—in the micro moments that close the gap between what we can say about ourselves and what we actually feel.

If you recognize that gap and are longing to feel more at home in yourself, I would love to be in the room with you.

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Read: Develop somatic skills during times of change

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