Healing the Past to Live Fully in the Present

There is a moment in every healing journey — and I mean every single one — where the ground seems to fall away.

We walk around in these miraculous bodies, carrying histories we don’t always understand, entire libraries of experience stored in our cells. For years, a sharp, intermittent pain would grab my right shoulder. It would come out of nowhere — while washing dishes, driving my car, or reaching for a book on a high shelf. It was a phantom, but its grip was brutally real. Doctors found nothing wrong. X-rays were clear. “It’s probably just stress,” they’d say, a tidy dismissal for a mystery that felt anything but tidy. Their words felt like a pat on the head, a well-meaning but ultimately hollow reassurance. I knew, with a certainty that resonated deeper than bone, that this pain was not just stress. It was a story my body was trying to tell me, a story I hadn’t yet learned to hear.

What if I told you that your body is a sacred messenger? That every ache, every tension, every chronic condition is not a betrayal, but a communication. A love letter from your deepest self, asking for your attention. In our culture, we are taught to see the body as a machine to be fixed, to silence its signals with medication or push through its fatigue. We declare war on our symptoms, treating them as enemies to be vanquished. But this is a profound misunderstanding of the body’s wisdom. The body doesn’t lie. It holds the unsaid, the unfelt, the unresolved. It is the living library of our experiences, and it speaks a language of sensation, not of words. A recurring bladder infection might be the body’s way of showing you a conflict around letting go, a feeling that it’s unsafe to release what you’re holding. A knot in the stomach isn’t just indigestion; it’s a sign that you’ve swallowed an experience you cannot metabolize. The body is always, always speaking its truth.

The Body Keeps the Score

Modern neuroscience is beginning to catch up with this ancient wisdom. We now understand that traumatic or intensely emotional experiences are not stored neatly in the cognitive, narrative parts of our brain. They are stored in the body — in our nervous system, our tissues, our very cells. When an experience is too overwhelming for the nervous system to process, its energy becomes frozen, trapped. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a pioneer in this field, calls this “the body keeps the score.” The unresolved energy of the past doesn’t simply vanish with time. It continues to live within us, shaping our perceptions, our reactions, and our reality in the present.

These frozen energies create neural pathways, well-worn grooves of response that get triggered by present-day events. A certain tone of voice, a particular scent, a fleeting expression on a stranger’s face can activate these old circuits, and suddenly we are reacting with a level of fear, or anger, or sadness that doesn’t match the current situation. We are, in a very real sense, living in the past. The shoulder pain I experienced for years? It was the echo of an old burden, a responsibility I had taken on as a child that was not mine to carry. My body was holding the tension of that long-ago effort, faithfully reminding me of a story that needed healing. It was the weight of the world, on one small shoulder.

The body is the subconscious mind. It is where we store the memories and beliefs that run our lives without our conscious awareness.

This is not a cause for despair. It is a doorway to profound transformation. The beautiful truth of our being is neuroplasticity — the brain’s and the nervous system’s ability to change, to unwire old patterns and create new ones. Think of your brain as a dense forest. The old, painful patterns are like deeply worn paths, easy to travel down without even thinking. Healing is the process of consciously choosing to forge new trails. At first, it takes effort. You have to push aside the branches, step over the roots. But the more you walk this new path, the clearer it becomes. The old path, unused, begins to grow over. This is not just a metaphor; it’s a biological reality. We can, and we do, change our own minds, and by extension, our own bodies.

Healing is Not Reliving

My approach to healing the past is not about endlessly reliving the pain. It is not about excavating every detail of a traumatic event to understand it intellectually. That can often re-traumatize the system. Instead, healing is about transforming the energy that the past holds within the body. It is a gentle, compassionate process of meeting these frozen places with presence, with love, with a deep and abiding sense of safety.

We don’t need to fight the past. We don’t need to banish it. We simply need to learn to be with it differently. To bring our calm, regulated, adult consciousness to the parts of us that are still frozen in time, still feeling scared, or alone, or overwhelmed. When we do this, something miraculous happens. The frozen energy begins to thaw. It begins to move. It begins to release. This is the essence of somatic healing: working with the body’s felt sense to allow for integration and resolution.

This is not about forcing or fixing. It is about creating the conditions for the body’s innate intelligence to complete its healing process. It’s about learning to listen… really listen… to the whispers of your body before they become screams. What is that tightness in your stomach really about? What is the story behind the tension in your jaw? Your body knows. It is waiting, with infinite patience, for you to ask.

I once worked with a woman, let’s call her Claire, who suffered from debilitating migraines. They had plagued her for decades, and she had tried everything. In our sessions, we didn’t focus on the migraines themselves. We focused on creating a space of deep safety. We worked with her breath, with gentle awareness of her body. Slowly, a memory surfaced. Not a dramatic, cinematic memory, but a quiet, pervasive feeling from her childhood of having to be constantly vigilant, of needing to anticipate her parents’ volatile moods. She had become an expert at “reading the room,” a skill that kept her safe but also kept her nervous system in a state of constant, low-grade hyper-arousal. Her head, as she put it, was always “on duty.”

The migraines were the physical manifestation of this relentless vigilance. They were her body’s desperate attempt to release the immense pressure of all that watching and waiting. By bringing compassionate awareness to this pattern, by acknowledging the little girl who was trying so hard to keep herself safe, Claire was able to begin to let go. She learned to signal to her own nervous system that she was no longer in that childhood home, that she was safe now. We did this through simple, gentle practices. Placing a hand on her own heart and whispering, “You are safe.” Feeling her feet firmly on the ground, a connection to the present moment. These small acts of self-compassion were the new path in the forest. The migraines didn’t disappear overnight, but they began to lessen in frequency and intensity. She was, for the first time, healing the root, not just managing the symptom.

Reclaiming the Present

Healing the past is the work of reclaiming the present. When we are no longer unconsciously run by old wounds, we are free to respond to life as it is, in this moment. We have more energy, more vitality, more access to our creativity and joy. We are no longer living in a ghost story. We are living in the vibrant, breathing reality of our own lives. We can taste our food. We can feel the warmth of the sun on our skin. We can laugh, fully and freely, without a part of us holding back, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So, I invite you to get curious. The next time you feel a physical symptom — a headache, a stomach ache, a familiar ache in your back — pause for a moment. Take a gentle breath. Instead of immediately reaching for a pill or trying to ignore it, place a hand on that part of your body and whisper, “I’m here. I’m listening. What do you have to tell me?”

You might not get an answer right away. And that’s okay. The act of listening itself is a powerful form of medicine. It is an act of love. It is the beginning of a new relationship with your body, one based on trust, respect, and reverence. You are building a new neural pathway, a pathway of inner connection and compassion.

You are not broken. You have never been broken. You are a whole and complete being, with an incredible capacity for healing and transformation. The past does not have to be a life sentence. It can be a wise teacher, a guide that leads you back to the brilliant, radiant truth of who you are.

With infinite love and support on your journey, Susan