Your Body Hasn’t Read the Book — Why Real Change Goes Beyond the Mind
Why Insight Isn’t Always Enough
There’s a phrase I often come back to:
Your body hasn’t read the book.
It’s one of those truths that lands again and again — in myself, and in the people I walk alongside. You can understand everything in your mind. You might know the origins of an inner pattern. You may have done years of therapy, read all the books, understood the science, sat through retreats, and meditated with devotion. And still… something hasn’t completely shifted, you’re still feeling stuck and entangled on some level.
That’s because real change doesn’t just happen through insight. It happens through felt experience.
The Body Carries What the Mind Can’t Name
Your body needs to feel something different — to register safety, choice, movement, connection.
And it often hasn’t had that yet.
We live in a culture that prizes mental understanding and pushes away feelings. One that teaches us to over-effort, achieve, perform, analyse, and fix. But your body is not a machine. Your nervous system is not a switchboard. You are not a project to be completed.
Listen to the Body’s Truth
Nervous system work isn’t about fixing or overriding. It’s about slowing down enough to attune to what your body is really communicating — with radical compassion. It’s about noticing what your system is doing to protect you, and gently introducing experiences of safety through breath, movement, and sensing.
The nervous system is the place where safety is felt — before the rational mind or meaning-making even gets involved. This is where the alarm first goes off. It’s where protective patterns begin. So when we engage at this root level, we’re working with a deeper intelligence — one that later informs the rational mind, which is capable of insight, but not always connected to felt safety.
This is like stepping into a conversation the mind has no language for, and opening space for the body’s deeper wisdom to guide the way. It’s about bringing cues of safety to the system — not through reasoning, but through sensations, breath, and embodied presence. These are the things that speak to the nervous system and the body in their own language: you’re safe now.
Weaving Body, Soul, and the Greater Field
You are a multi-dimensional being. Your body holds not only your personal history, but imprints from your upbringing, your lineage, your culture, and the collective field. A whole cosmos of knowing, energy, ancestry, and aliveness dwells in you — that you can tap into. Even the most subtle, unnamed, or energetic experiences leave traces.
When I say “energetic experiences,” I’m also referring to the unspoken tension in a room, an inherited family pattern, subtle energy, or a deep sense that something isn’t quite safe — even if you can’t explain why. And when the nervous system is running survival strategies — even quiet, hidden ones — it’s hard to access the multidimensional clarity, freedom, or peace you know is possible.
This is why the body can’t be left behind in transformational work.
And it’s why I always return to somatic, nervous system, and energetic work as a core part of the process — not as separate techniques, but as something deeply woven with soul, spirit, and the wider field of intelligence that moves through us.
Trusting the Mystery of Your Becoming
Because the truth is: your healing — your becoming — is not linear.
It doesn't unfold on a neat timeline. It doesn't always make sense to the rational mind. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
We are part of a universe that is so vast, so mysterious, that our minds can’t even grasp its full shape. So who are we to decide that what we can’t explain isn’t real?
There are deeper threads of transformation at work. Sometimes they whisper. Sometimes they shake the ground. But they always ask us to slow down… listen… and let something older and wiser — ancient — rise to the surface.
If you’re feeling stuck: it may not be because you’re doing it wrong. It may be because something inside you is longing to be heard and waiting to feel safe and free enough to change.
Let Your Whole Being Guide the Way
What I see, again and again, is this:
When we begin to include the body — not just as a vehicle, but as a wise and essential part of our unfolding — something shifts.
When we make space for what the nervous system is holding, what the field is whispering, what the deeper knowing is inviting — new rhythms emerge. Ones that don’t come from pushing or trying to “figure it out,” but from meeting life from the inside out.
This is where real change lives. Not in doing more. But in becoming more fully yourself.
Let your whole being guide the way.
Try this now:
Take 60 seconds. Notice how your body feels as you read this. Is there tension? Softness? Restlessness? Just observe, without needing to fix or analyse.
So make it a mantra.
Ask yourself throughout the day: How is my body feeling right now?
Check in with your skin, your breath, your muscles, your eyes — anything. Let it be simple. Let it be enough. This small act of attention is how we begin to come home to ourselves.
Mindfulness-based Embodiment Coach and Intuitive Transformational Guide
Your energy and presence are gifts to share with the world — even if they are deeply quiet. They are the very fuel that helps you transform your life and truly flourish.
You can tap into this when you ground in the essence of being you.
That’s what this blog is here to hold: reflections from my own long journey home to myself, interwoven with the insights I’ve gained through years of lived experience and training.
Warmly, Julia
Author’s note:
This writing is grounded in my own lived experience, training in somatic and nervous system work, and informed by foundational frameworks such as Polyvagal Theory developed by Dr. Stephen Porges. I also draw insight from the applied teachings of Deb Dana, who has translated this work into relational and therapeutic contexts. While I work as a coach and not a clinician, my approach is deeply shaped by this understanding of the nervous system, safety, and embodied healing.