The Body Keeps Speaking

On shame, tenderness, and learning to be seen

It had been a while since I put myself in time out.

I live along the Rocky Mountains, just west of Denver, which means one of the most beautiful places on Earth is a short drive away. Occasionally I need it. When the world gets too loud — when my body gets too loud — this is what I do. I tune out. I head west. I focus inward.

These past few months have been absolutely brutal. I needed the mountains.

I drove up to Grand County. The stretch between Winter Park on Highway 40 and Grand Lake on Highway 34 is my own personal heaven. This is the terrain of my grandparents, my cousins, the summers that built me. Granby is in me the way some places get into you when you are small enough to absorb them without noticing.

It feels like home. It feels like comfort.

I found the Massage Garage tucked into this little corner of the world, run by a wonderful woman named Kate.

Before the ninety minutes of pure bliss, she paused and asked me a question I have never known how to answer.

What do you need?

I need deep, therapeutic work. I need a refuge from real life. I need to escape my body and my brain and just be. I need to stop being the person who is always holding something.

I said some version of this. I probably said less than I felt.

Kate looked at me, gentle and clear.

I can read bodies, but I can’t read minds.

Those words have stayed with me for a week.

She can read bodies.

What would my body say, if it had words?

I have been sitting with that question for years, though I haven’t always known that was the question.

Some time ago I read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. I recognized myself on every page. The hypervigilance. The exhaustion sleep could not touch. A nervous system that had been running on high alert for so long I had stopped noticing anything else as normal. Van der Kolk writes that trauma does not live only in memory or thought — it lives in the nervous system, in muscle and bone, in the body’s unrelenting effort to protect itself from what the mind has not finished processing. Grief does not stay in the mind. It moves into the body and makes a home there, and eventually the body insists on being heard.

My body has been keeping the score for a long time.

It kept it through my own childhood. It kept it through my children’s stories. It kept it through surgery after surgery, through the ordinary weight of a life spent leading through complexity while privately navigating crisis at home. I have spent a lifetime not-at-home in my body. Using food to soothe what I could not face. Using achievement to outrun what I could not name. Using competence to cver what I did not yet have language for.

The body kept it anyway.

So when Kate said I can read bodies, what I heard underneath was something more like: You don’t have to explain. Your body has already said it. I’ll meet you there.

The ninety minutes were incredible. I had what I can only describe as an out-of-body experience, one that deserves its own essay on its own day. For now I will stay here, with Kate.

At the end of the session, before I moved, she asked gently if she could give me a blessing.

Of course she could. I need all the blessings I can get.

She referenced a passage from Deuteronomy. For years, in my attempt to care for my body, I’ve had a lot of massages. I have never had anything like that happen, and it was exactly what I needed in that moment — a grown woman, a stranger, speaking ancient words of blessing over my body while it lay there, finally quiet.

When I was dressed and met her in the front area, she told me she had had a vision. She said she felt she needed to tell me something.

And then she talked about my body.

My skin. My excess skin. My arms.

My arms.

The part of my body I am most embarrassed by. The part I try hardest to hide. The place my shame lives when it needs a room.

She had no idea these were my buttons. No idea that after huge weight loss, after the years of yo-yo dieting and the closet full of a dozen different sizes, my arms are still the thing I cover first. She did not know my history. She did not know the particular shape of my shame.

She just sat there and spoke kindness and love over me.

This is what I keep coming back to.

Not that she was right about my body. Not that she identified the exact place I hurt, though she did. What stays with me is that her kindness landed in the place I armor most — and it did not feel like exposure.

It felt like being blessed.

I have spent my life learning to be seen through my competence. Through what I can do, what I can hold, what I can carry. Through the work. Through the mothering. Through the performance of having it together, even when — especially when — I do not.

And here was a woman who did not need any of that.

She read my body.

She spoke love over the parts I would not have offered her. Over the parts I have not yet learned to offer myself.

Before there was language, there was love.

I have written that sentence before here. I have thought about it in the context of my child — the way he curled into me before either of us had words, the way he knew where he belonged before anyone asked him to prove it.

I had not yet thought about it in the context of my own body.

My body, which has been keeping the score. My body, which has been asking to be loved in the same places I have been trying to hide. My body, which cannot read minds — but can, apparently, be read by someone kind enough to know how to listen.

Kate could not have known what she was doing. And she did it anyway.

Some blessings arrive that way. Through the hands of a stranger in a mountain town. Through ancient words spoken over a quiet body. Through someone who can read bodies and is willing to speak love over what she finds there.

I drove back down the mountain different than I went up.

Not fixed. Not finished. Nothing is ever finished.

But blessed. Seen. A little more willing to stay in the body I live in. A little more open to the possibility that love can arrive through the places I have been trying hardest to hide.

That is what the mountains gave me this time.

That, and Kate.