The Body Keeps
The Score. Or Does It?

My somatic sessions are never routine. Every one of them does something. Fascia. Lymph. Trigger points. Whatever the week has tightened. Some of them are pure energy work. I go in knowing something will be found and usually knowing roughly what.

This one was not like any of the others.

That day we chose the abdomen. I had held a few heavy conversations that week. Other people’s grief, shame, guilt. I wanted to check whether I had taken any of it on.

He found a knot. Right side, below the navel, just above the hip bone.

The moment he started working on it, I lost the anatomy of my own body. That does not happen to me. I can usually see where the liver sits, what is pulling, what is under his hands. It went. What replaced it was a column. A cylinder running from the point he was pressing straight through to my lower back.

I could not feel the knot at all. I could only feel the back.

He said the point was throbbing. He said it felt like a heartbeat. A very small animal.

I told him I was feeling fear.

I want to be exact about the scream, because it turned out to be the whole point. It was not an adult scream. It was a squeal combined with a scream of pure terror. It was the sound a small child makes when a monster comes into the room. That sound came out of my throat and I did not choose it.

Then I sobbed.

I had no idea what I was crying about. None. No memory arrived. No image beyond the doe. No explanation. Just terror with nothing attached to it, and twenty five minutes of crying that felt like two.

The one thing that stayed with me through all of it was my breath.

I have worked with breath for years. It is the reason I did not leave my body when the terror came. There is a point in a release like that where you either go out, dissociate, float above it and lose the whole thing, or you stay. The breath is what decides which. It is the only instrument I know that reaches into the body without the mind having to understand anything first.

So I was screaming and shaking and sobbing, and underneath it the breath was still running, holding me in there while it happened.

I slept very deeply that night. Monday was a good day. I showed up at work, did mad things, rigged a basket off the balcony so we could take quick commerce deliveries without walking down. Nothing in me was signalling that anything was underway.

My weight training day. One of the exercises was shoulder press. I was progressively overloading. 7.5, then 10, then 12.5 kgs in both arms. That is 25 kgs over my head.

To hold that above your head the torso has to open completely and the core has to carry everything underneath it.

Early childhood. My father giving me a bath. Soap bubbles everywhere. My mother coming into the bathroom. Her energy as she came in. Her telling him to finish it and get out.

To me, at the time, it had been a game.

The memory came and everything in my core went. Gone, not weakened. I brought the weight down fast.

Sucker punched is the closest phrase and it is still not accurate. I was not tired. I was not hurt. Something had been removed. A vacuum formed and there was no strength left.

I took a break. I breathed. My mind went straight at the memory and the body would not let it through. I could feel the refusal.

I tried another set. There was nothing to press with. The centre of me was a vacuum.

We moved to leg extensions, lat pull down. I was completely dissociated with my body, with movement itself. My trainer’s cues were arriving from very far away. He noticed. He asked what was wrong. I broke down and cried in the middle of a gym.

I told him I think a memory of childhood sexual abuse is surfacing, I cannot see it, and I do not know if it is real.

I want to stay on the vacuum for a moment. Written down, it looks like the moment I broke.

Something had been sitting in my core since the day it first happened and I never knew it was there. That morning it was taken out, and what I felt was the empty space where it used to be. That is why the strength went. You cannot press a weight over your head with a hole in the middle of you.

Later that day I stopped trying to diagnose it and simply poured Light into the space. That was the right instinct. It was not an injury. It was a surgery, done without asking me, on something that had been dragging at me from before I could speak.

I showed up at work.

That is something I have learnt. No matter how big the shadow, I show up. For iThrive. For the team. For the clients and the students and every single life this work touches.

All this while, the body continued to process the experience.

And the breath stayed with me. On the gym floor when the strength went. In meetings. Between conversations. Not as practice, not as a session I sat down to do. Just there, running underneath the day, keeping me in the body while the body did whatever it was doing.

That is what made the partition possible. The mind could go and work because something else was holding the ground floor. Breath was what held it.

What it gave me instead was not personal at all.

There is a plane just below the physical. Sri Aurobindo calls it the sub-conscient. It is where the vital rises into form, where energy is on its way to becoming living matter. We live in a holographic universe. All of it is in one thing and one thing is in all of it.

And there, at that layer, is a mutation of sexual energy.

That is what has been desecrated.

Not damaged. Not misused. Desecrated. There is a difference between what is stolen from a temple and what is done to its sanctity. The theft is one crime. The defilement is another. The second one is what sits in the sub-conscient.

It is a sludge. It coats living things. It is passed down. Not taught, not learned, passed. Generation to generation, through the species, below the level at which anyone is choosing anything.

I could feel it. And through it I could feel every child on this planet it has reached. Every child that had been desecrated by it.

There are very few who are free of the taint. Almost every human child carries a smear of this demonic violence, perpetuated on it generation after generation. Every time this monster wearing a human mask violated a child’s innocence, the vibration carried on.

There was a moment that afternoon when I was deep enough into that layer that I believed I could take it. All of it. Pull the entire imprint out of humanity, into me, and send it up to the Mother for transmutation.

My Adhara could not have held what I was proposing to pull in. It would have destroyed me that afternoon. So I did not.

What I did instead is the part I most want written down, because nobody talks about it and it is the part that actually worked.

By the middle of that day the hollow had a shape.

Mid abdomen, up into the solar plexus. Cold. Like a cave. And inside the cave, cold dry winds billowing. That is as close as I can get and the words are not enough. I have never had a sensation like it in this body.

That hollow was where the vital had been pulled out. That is why the strength went in the gym. Something had been removed and I was walking around with the space it left.

So I stopped trying to fill it from outside and began sending Light into it from the psychic being.

Then more than that. Light and Power from above.

This was not a technique or a visualisation. It was the only sane response to an empty space. That space was not going to stay empty. Either it refills with what was there before, or it refills with Light. Those are the options.

My own connection carried that. It has been built over years and it holds.

But I was not doing it alone. Another Sadhak, a teacher, stayed with me through the whole of it, guiding, correcting, and keeping me on the path. I was finding my way, his presence made it easier.

I am saying that plainly because of a claim I make further down about what a person needs in order to look at something like this. I had it. Even here, with a direct line of my own, I was not walking it by myself.

And the mind was entirely out of it. This is the strangest part. Normally when I am doing inner work the mind is right there, narrating, analysing, deciding what it all means. It was standing aside. No stories. No analysis. The body was processing independently with the psychic, and the mind had been sent off to do the day.

The physical signs were unglamorous. I burped for hours, like I had drunk two litres of soda. That is what it looked like from outside. A woman at a desk, running a company, burping.

The sequence matters, and I did not design it.

I did not go and find the memory and then try to heal what I found. The cavity was filled first. Only after that, in the evening, was the mind allowed anywhere near what was underneath.

That is the reverse of how we are taught to do this. Retrieve, then process. Excavate, then repair. Open the wound and then work on it.

My system would not permit it. It repaired first. It poured Light into the hole for an entire working day, and only when the structure could carry weight again did it open the door.

I worked the whole day. Externally I did what I do every day, with energy, with enthusiasm. Nobody from the team could see it. One person could, and came home with me that evening without being asked.

I made dinner. And then I told the mind it could go and look.

I started from a specific place. Not what happened, but how bad can it be? I have already been molested, at an older age, by someone else. I have heard enough horror stories from other women. I have read enough about the ones who died or were physically hurt irreversibly during attacks. I am alive and my organs are intact. Start there.

I also took a stance before I opened the door. This was not going to become about him.

No hate. No calls to relatives. He was already out of my life and out of my house. There was no illusion to shatter, no pedestal to knock down, no action left to take. Which meant the only reason to look at all was to meet myself in the darkest place I currently had, and not be afraid of whatever was in it, for me and for every other woman.

As the memory cache opened, as the firewalls came down, the abuse was not penetrative. That was clear immediately.

What it was is harder to say, because there is no single event to point at. But there were clear memories of an inappropriate touch. Multiple times.

But more than that, it was the pain of knowing that this was the way I was thought of. With Lust. Wanting Possession. A child regarded as something available to be used.

So the fear on Sunday, the doe, the scream that was not an adult’s scream, was never about an act. It was a child discovering that the thing standing guard is the thing she needs guarding from.

Two things confirmed it, and neither of them is a memory.

The first. When I was older I was molested by a driver who worked for a friend of his. I told my mother. She said I would never be alone with that man again, and she told my father.

As a child I could not comprehend it. Now the logic is obvious and it is the coldest thing I know. A man who has sexualised a child does not object to another man doing the same. It does not register as wrong to him, because that is what a child is to him. Not to him specifically. To the vibration moving through him.

The second time, something in me knew before I did. I got out of the car and ran.

The second thing. The favourite child treatment. The books. The attention. There was never anything under it, and my adult life has demonstrated that repeatedly. No real care. No courage to stand beside me, ever, on anything. So the attention was not love. It was the manufacture of compliance. It was grooming.

My nervous system never felt safe around that man. I did not know that, because I was in freeze mode.

And here is the part I will not leave out.

She was an exceptionally gifted woman. She knew what he was. She knew how he looked at things, at women, at girls. She knew it in her core and she put herself between it and her children. Nothing worse happened to me because I think at a subconscious level he was afraid of her.

Sit with that for a second. It was seen. It was seen clearly, by someone with the power to see it, and she could position her body in the way, and she still could not say it out loud.

And then, that same evening, another fear arrived and it was worse than the one about myself.

What if this has happened to her. What if there was a moment I was not there. What if it is happening now, in a house I am not in, because I believe this taint is on all men, and unless a man has done deep work or arrived already carrying Light, he will not know what came over him in the moment he harms a child.

There is nothing I can do about that from here. I know that.

I was exhausted after that, in the structure rather than the feelings. I went to bed very early.

I asked for protection before sleep.

The work carried on without me. The Mother came, and Mahakali came with Her. Less a dream than a conversation. Both of them doing something on and through this body while I was nowhere available to supervise it.

MahaKali is Her Force of pure strength, of courage. Hers is the form the Mother takes to do something like this. The strength and the courage it takes to see a thing like this all the way through does not come from the person. It comes through that Form of Shakti.

I slept deeply and woke up able to continue. Which is its own piece of evidence. Whatever was running this had access to me through all states of consciousness.

Showed up at work as usual, did what I do best. But in the evening I asked my somatic therapist to come back for another session and we worked on the abdomen again.

What came up is the saddest part of all of it.

That energy is meant to sit dormant through childhood and open at puberty. It is meant to begin moving through the cells and through the womb. The girl becoming a woman is meant to come into a very deep relationship with it. To understand the womb as a portal. To understand that she is selecting genetic material and calling a soul forward. Not producing the next generation. Choosing the next version.

That is what the body is for. That is what a woman is engineering when she is doing it consciously.

My body could not open it, because predators come looking for exactly that. So it stayed shut.

Which means that through my entire reproductive prime I did not have access to my own primary power. Not the energy, not the knowledge, not the wisdom.

And I can see now what that looked like from outside, because it was never hidden. It was what I wore and how I stood and what I could not stand in other women.

I am telling you this because it is the visible half of what I have just described. The body sealed that energy shut because it was unsafe to hold. And the personality organised itself around the seal. Dress so nothing is signalled. Despise the ones who signal freely, because if that thing is not available to you, watching someone wear it lightly is unbearable.

I did not experience any of that as damage. I experienced it as preference. As personality. As simply who I was.

And I am not going to tidy up the ending. I am still most comfortable in my masculine aspect. That has not changed and I am not claiming it has. What has changed is that I now know where it came from, and that it was a decision made on my behalf by a body protecting a child.

I found the key at the end of my fertile years. Almost menopausal. At the precise point where the turning happens, from woman into matriarch.

All that day my body was sad and enraged at the same time. Outwardly, none of it showed. Inwardly something was growling. I could have made the sound out loud in the middle of a work day like a caged animal, but the restraint of the sadhana took over.

In the session, the rage found words.

This is a good body. The lineage is powerful. My mother’s genes carry real occult capacity. This body lets me move between visible and invisible realms easily, bring back hidden knowledge, and feel Force through matter. That is not a small inheritance. Biologically it is a gift.

Then the body made a decision, a visceral one.

The twenty year olds. The twenty five year olds. The women who are in their prime right now with the door still open. How to be in their own bodies. What the womb actually is. How to recognise this energy in the men around them. How to make it safe enough to open whatever is sitting behind their own firewalls, and then to bring that energy back into use, and point it in the direction it was made for.

No. Not in the way we have been told.

Keeping the score means storage. It means the body is the archive and the mind is the investigator, and healing is a matter of finding the file and reading it.

That is not what happened.

Look at the sequence. It gave me terror on Sunday with no content attached, and no explanation for three days. It gave me the collective layer in the middle of Tuesday and refused the personal incident. It withheld the specific memory until I was home, fed, off the gym floor, with nothing required of me. It emptied my core so I could not keep lifting, because lifting was not the work that morning.

My mind asked, repeatedly. My mind is curious, that is its nature, it wants to know and it wants to know now. It was refused. Firewall after firewall. It was told to stand aside and go through the day doing what it was best designed for. Solving problems at iThrive. Bringing growth and abundance into my reality.

That is why none of this had to be forced. And it is why none of it was spiritually bypassed. The body would not let me skip and the body would not let me rush.

This is not going to be resolved by therapy. It sits below the level at which therapy operates. Freud was inside it. Jung was inside it. An entire discipline was built by men carrying the thing they were describing, which is why it can describe it endlessly and cannot remove it.

But Light needs a doorway, and the doorway is speech. Every time this stays unconscious it passes down intact. Every time it is made conscious, named, said out loud in a room where it is not welcome, it loses grip.

And most people carrying it will not look at it.

I want to be careful here, because that is easy to mistake for cowardice and it is not.

There are women who can feel it. Who have years of childhood they cannot reach. Who carry a settled inner certainty that something happened, and who will tell you plainly that they do not want to know what. That is not denial. Denial is not knowing. This is knowing and declining.

My own system refused my own mind for three days and it was right to. Look at what I had that week. A somatic therapist. A trainer who stayed with me on the floor of a gym. Years of breathwork, so that when the terror came I had a way to stay inside my own body instead of leaving it. An Integral Yoga teacher on the other end of a Telegram thread, hour by hour. Where to send the Light. When to ask for Power from above and not only from the psychic. When to keep the mind out of it entirely. A friend, a partner and an absolutely amazing human who saw the state I was in and came home with me without being asked. Years of this work behind me. And the Mother telling me directly what my Adhara could and could not hold.

Take all of that away and my system would have refused too. Indefinitely. And it would still have been right.

Which is exactly how it keeps moving. Not through monsters alone. Through the perfectly sound protective arithmetic of everyone who is not yet resourced enough to look.

So the work is not to demand that people look. The work is to build enough around them that their own system eventually decides it is safe to open the door. Real support. Rooms where this can be said. Someone who will sit on the floor with them. And Light, poured in first, before anything is asked to come out.

Part of that scaffolding is the men.

Older men teaching younger men about this. Not shame. Shame is just another place to hide, and this thing feeds well in there. Only the plain fact of it. That it exists. That it moves through men. That most of them have never once been asked to look at it. And that having it in you is not the same as being it.