Understanding & Unlocking The Body
Why Reactivity Isn’t a Moral Failure
While polyvagal theory’s idea of “befriending the nervous system” might sound reasonable—hopefully even feasible—as a clinician I often find myself thinking about something far less poetic: how hard it actually is to change.
A colleague once remarked, in reference to the Big Five personality traits, that while they can shift, they don’t do so easily. I’ve found the same to be true of reactivity. Moving the needle on it—actually becoming less defended—is not simple. Not spiritually. Not psychologically. Not somatically.
The first real hurdle is deceptively basic: how little initial space there seems to be between us and our bodies.
Are we our bodies—or not?
Nondual teachings have long emphasized that we are not merely our bodies. Ramana Maharshi famously said that suffering belongs to those who mistake themselves for form rather than Awareness itself. Nisargadatta titled a whole book I Am Not the Body, a phrase that has likely snapped more than a few people into paying attention over the decades.
Read with grounding, these teachings are liberating. They loosen the grip of over-identification. They remind us that Awareness is not confined to sensation, personality, or physiology.
Read without grounding, however, they can turn into something else entirely—a spiritual crowbar used to pry ourselves away from embodiment. Activation becomes evidence of failure. Reactivity becomes proof that we “haven’t arrived.”
Philosophically, nonduality always has a built-in escape clause—not this and not that. We are not the body, and we are not not the body. The body, after all, is everything too.
Intellectually, this is tidy. Experientially, I found it useless.
Watching online nondual spaces devolve into abstract sparring—often among people who seemed profoundly unacquainted with their own nervous systems—only reinforced my suspicion: trying to leave the body through the mind is just another way of getting stuck.
The body, meanwhile, does not care what you believe about it.
Two ways people lean—and a third
Clinically, I’ve noticed that people tend to lean in one of two directions.
Some live almost entirely in their heads. Psychotherapy, unsurprisingly, attracts a lot of these folks. We call them intellectualizers. Their primary strategy is to manage experience by thinking—compartmentalizing, analyzing, narrating—often with impressive skill. Feeling is deferred. The body is background noise.
This works…until it doesn’t.
I sometimes use an outdated metaphor from the era of landlines. A parent is on the phone. A child wants attention. The longer the parent ignores the child, the louder and more disruptive the child becomes.
Bodies behave much the same way.
Ignored signals escalate. Subtle tension becomes chronic pain. Fatigue becomes illness. Emotional overwhelm turns into something that can no longer be reasoned away.
Other people lean in the opposite direction: full identification with the body. These are often sensitive, perceptive individuals whose somatic experience feels overwhelming. Sensation dominates. Symptoms lead the way—digestive issues, headaches, insomnia, racing heart, low or excess energy.
Their hope, understandably, is to get rid of symptoms—preferably without having to stay present with them for very long.
And then there’s a third category—my category.
I spent much of my life oscillating between these two poles: leaving the body entirely, then falling back into full identification with it. A close friend once teased that I lived in extremes—periods of hyper-productivity followed by long stretches of sensual ease.
At the University of Chicago, my body mostly existed to fuel my mind: oatmeal, eggs, relentless thinking. During breaks, I returned to sensation—sun, ocean, strawberries, rest.
In 2017, something changed. I stopped being able to leave.
Fully inhabiting the body ceased to be optional. At times, this felt less like a gift and more like a curse. When you’ve spent a lifetime exiting whenever things get difficult, arrival can be…intense.
The body organizes around protection
Here’s what finally clarified everything for me: the body does not organize itself around awakening. It organizes itself around protection.
When the nervous system perceives threat, perception narrows. The world becomes a problem to solve. People become variables. Relationship becomes risk.
Clinically, we call this defense, projection, splitting. Spiritually, we call it ego and separation. Physiologically, it’s simpler than that.
The system senses danger. It runs an us versus them script.
From the inside, this doesn’t feel like distortion. It feels like reality.
Tight throat. Hot face. Collapsing belly. Thought follows faithfully: Something is wrong. Someone is wrong. I’m not safe. You’re the problem.
This is how “other” is born.
Sometimes it’s loud—fight, flight, urgency, anger.
Sometimes it’s quiet—collapse, withdrawal, numbness.
Different expressions. Same logic.
This is not a character flaw. It is a design feature.
And once you understand this, reactivity stops being a moral or spiritual referendum.
The myth of permanent regulation
One of the most damaging ideas I see—across both therapy and spiritual culture—is the belief in a static end state.
Once I process enough, I’ll stop getting triggered.
Once I wake up, I won’t react anymore.
The nervous system does not work this way.
It oscillates. It tightens and releases. It mobilizes and settles. This movement is not the problem. The belief that it shouldn’t be happening is the problem.
When we adopt models that promise permanent regulation, the body becomes a report card.
A calm day means success.
A dysregulated day means failure.
But if Awareness excludes nothing, then activation does not disqualify Awareness. It simply means activation is happening within it.
This distinction changes everything clinically.
If activation is treated as failure, we suppress or bypass it. If it’s treated as a body state, we can track it. Feel it. Stay present without obeying its urgency.
This isn’t resignation.
It’s precision.
Working with the nervous system
What polyvagal theory offered me wasn’t a new ideology—it was a way to let the nervous system speak for itself.
Breath, muscle tension, alertness, collapse, mobilization—these communicate far more honestly than our narratives do.
In practice, I now orient early to where someone tends to lean. Athletes, meditators, dancers, bodyworkers often have exquisite somatic awareness—and little neutrality. Intellectualizers often have enormous cognitive capacity—and limited body access.
Rather than trying to make people into something they’re not, I work across the divide.
For intellectualizers, the mind becomes an ally—tracking breath, heart rate, muscle tension as we explore different thoughts or relational themes.
For highly embodied clients, I introduce de-identification and cognitive scaffolding—enough prefrontal engagement to widen the field before re-entering sensation.
As Internal Family Systems and polyvagal frameworks came together for me, something clicked. Wherever attention landed in the body, information unfolded—like clicking a square in Minesweeper and watching a whole field reveal itself.
Parts became visible. States clarified. Pathways back toward ventral connection emerged.
Both ways is the only way
Nonduality eventually dissolves every false dichotomy—including the one between mind and body.
We are not the body.
And we are not not the body.
The mistake isn’t embodiment.
The mistake is trying to solve reactivity by leaving it.
When we stop demanding permanent regulation and start cultivating the capacity to return—to presence, to contact, to the wider field—the nervous system learns something new.
It no longer has to turn every contraction into a war.
And from there, something genuinely shifts—not because we transcended the body, but because we finally stopped fighting it.