The Lost Language We Were Born Speaking

Recovering the felt-sense intelligence of your body.

At The Body Knows, we’re trading self-improvement for self-trust and rooting personal development in collective liberation. Subscribe to receive a post in your inbox every week.

---

I’m perched on the edge of my seat, shoulders locked, breath shallow, jaw clenched like I’m bracing for impact, when it hits me. Again. That creeping tightness at the base of my skull, an old, familiar visitor signaling only one thing: a tension headache.

My body knows what my mind won’t admit: This isn’t sustainable. It's time to stop.

Sound familiar?

Here's the thing about bodies — they're talking to us constantly. Whispering, nudging, sometimes flat-out yelling. And most of us? We're plugging our ears, trying not to hear.

Leona and I got into this last week, wondering just how many of us are moving through life on autopilot, cut off from the deep wisdom and guidance we were born with. The conversation was too good to keep to ourselves, so picture me now — leaning in, eyes alight, eager to let you in on it.

Let's address that skeptical squint.

I can practically see some of you right now, one eyebrow raised, thinking: "Oh great, another post about 'listening to my body' from people who probably have a crystal collection and chant at the moon."

Which is totally fair. I've been that skeptical squinter too.

What do we even mean by "coming home to your body"? That it's somehow wise and on your side, communicating with you? Cue mild panic that you just subscribed to a Substack offering an "Unleash Your Inner Glow" manual, complete with vague "journal your way to happiness" prompts and a 5am celery juice routine.

Full disclosure: I love a glass of freshly pressed juice and a zesty new moon practice, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about something much more basic and profound.

Our two ways of knowing.

Let’s start with the science: We experience everything through two distinct channels, called "cognitive" and "felt-sense."

The cognitive experience is your mind at work — thinking, analyzing, categorizing. It lives in the neocortex of your brain, that remarkable evolutionary achievement that lets us write poetry, solve equations, and overthink our text messages at 2 AM. It's what you're using right now as you read these words.

The felt-sense experience is your body's intelligence — sensing, feeling, knowing. Connected to your limbic system and brain stem, it's the wordless wisdom that moves through you as sensation and emotion. It's the raw, direct experience of reality that we feel before the mind comes in, assigning meaning and trying to understand why we feel this way.

Think about when your hand touches a hot pan — it jerks away before your brain has even registered "OUCH!" Or when you stub your toe and suddenly your vocabulary consists entirely of expletives. That's your body's intelligence in action, making decisions faster than your thinking mind ever could.

But the body speaks in subtler ways too. The knot in your stomach during a difficult conversation. The heaviness in your chest when grieving. The flutter behind your ribs when excited.

This intelligence moves through you constantly. Before your mind forms a single thought, your body has already responded — with a sharp inhale, a leaning in, a pulling away, a shiver of excitement or unease.

This is your body's first language — sensation, movement, emotion — translating and responding to the world with an ancient wisdom that predates your ability to analyze it.

And the reality is, these days we mostly ignore it.

We live in a culture that worships the mind and treats the body like its slightly embarrassing roommate. We've created a profound split between these two intelligences, exalting thinking while trivializing feeling as unreliable, primitive, or inconvenient.

We've been taught to:

• Control our emotions ("Just calm down!")

• Override our instincts (“Don’t feel like that!")

• Disregard fatigue ("Power through!")

• Dismiss pain ("Ignore it and it’ll go away!")

The result? We're like people trying to navigate with only half our sensory equipment working. No wonder systems are starting to malfunction. We've gotten incredibly sophisticated at thinking our way through life while becoming strangers to the very bodies we live in.

Why your body’s wisdom matters.

When we tune out the body's intelligence, we lose access to an entire dimension of knowing. This shows up everywhere:

In our health: That tension headache isn't just annoying, it might be your body sounding the alarm that your "just power through" approach is heading for a cliff. I learned this one the hard way, dismissing subtle signals until they became medical emergencies. The body first whispers but eventually it shouts.

In our relationships: Remember that person everyone loved but who made your stomach clench every time they entered the room? And how later you discovered they were manipulating everyone? Your body knew. It always knows.

In our decisions: The heaviness you feel when saying yes to that "amazing opportunity" isn't discomfort to overcome, it's wisdom helping you discern what truly aligns with your deeper needs. I’ve ignored that gut knowing too many times, always eventually wishing I had listened.

The cost of this disconnect is enormous. We exhaust ourselves fighting against our own nature. We make choices that look good on paper but feel terrible in our bodies. We become alienated from ourselves, unable to distinguish between what we truly want and what we think we should want.

Relearning your body’s language.

To come home to the body is to learn its language again, a language you once knew fluently before you were taught to override it. It's about reclaiming both forms of intelligence and letting them work together.

That’s what we meant when we said in our last post that your body isn't just an all-terrain vehicle for your head, nor is it a problem to be solved, nor an image to be perfected. It's a living, breathing landscape of intelligence — speaking to you constantly through sensations both subtle and obvious.

When we start listening to the body, we don't abandon thinking, we enrich it. We create a partnership instead of the dictatorship we've been living under.

This is where transformation happens. When we stop fighting our bodies and start collaborating with them, we access a wellspring of power that runs deeper than we've been taught to believe. This power comes from millions of years of evolution, ancestral wisdom, and instincts finely tuned for survival, adaptation, and connection.

As research continues to show, our bodies hold far more than just reflexes. They carry our histories, our emotions, our traumas, and our joys in ways science is only beginning to understand.

When we relearn how to listen — to truly attune to this vast intelligence that's literally our birthright — we don't just heal. We awaken. We reclaim what was always ours, waiting beneath the should's and supposed-to's, ready to guide us home to ourselves.

Here's one of my favorite photos of Leona, relishing the feel of her body as it experiences the wonder of Tuolumne Meadows.

A simple way to begin.

If you're curious about reconnecting with your body's intelligence, try this absurdly simple daily practice to start:

Right now, take 30 seconds to pause and notice your body. That's all. Just scan from head to toe, observing whatever sensations are present. Where do you feel tension? Ease? Warmth? Heaviness? The press of gravity on your feet or sit bones? The blink of an eyelid? Your tongue on the roof of your mouth? Just notice; there is nothing here to judge, fix, or change.

No elaborate protocol. No special equipment. Just a daily moment of tuning in — to the conversation your body is having with you all along.

---

What's your relationship with your body's wisdom? Have you experienced moments when your body knew something before your mind could name it? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!