March 2025 - Reclaiming Your Authentic Expression Through the Body
Have you ever felt like you needed to hide parts of yourself to be accepted? Like you’re shrinking to fit into the neat little boxes society creates so you can “fit in”?
Many women feel this way, especially as we expand our consciousness and start noticing how often people mask their real feelings in day-to-day life. But suppressing who we are isn’t how we find fulfillment and it’s certainly not how we attract the right people either. If you want to build healthier relationships with others, you first need to build a healthier relationship with yourself. And that starts with listening to your heart.
Authentic expression isn’t just about the words we use, it’s about how we move, how we hold ourselves, and how we embody our truth. No one can tell you how to be authentic. It’s something you have to discover within yourself. It requires you to tune in, to connect with your heart, and to listen to that little voice inside saying, “Follow that feeling.”
But what if that voice is buried beneath years of self-doubt, conditioning, and survival mechanisms? What if you’ve been so disconnected from your body that you don’t even know what feels right anymore?
This is where somatic awareness comes in.
It means learning to recognize the physical sensations and signals your body produces before they become overwhelming. The tension in your chest when you hold back your truth, the tightness in your throat when you want to speak up but stay silent, the weight in your stomach when something isn’t aligned but you force yourself to say “yes” anyway.
Our bodies hold the stories of our past, whether we acknowledge them or not. When we suppress our emotions, we suppress our somatic awareness aka our body’s natural ability to process and release what we feel. The energy doesn’t just disappear. It lingers, trapped in our muscles, in our posture, in the way we breathe. That stuck energy manifests as exhaustion, anxiety, overthinking, or even physical pain.
By leaning in, tuning into our emotions, and allowing the body to move through them, we strengthen our connection to ourselves, to our hearts, and to our souls. Emotions are energy in motion. When left unexpressed, that energy becomes stagnant, weighing us down in ways we don’t even realize.
But when we move? When we breathe? When we allow ourselves to fully feel? That’s when we release. That’s when we create space for something new.
Somatic awareness begins with the body, not the mind, because the body feels emotion before the brain even labels it. We often think of emotions as mental states, but they are first and foremost physical. Think about when you get butterflies in your stomach. Sometimes it’s anxiety, sometimes it’s excitement. You don’t necessarily know the difference until your brain interprets the sensation. But with somatic practices, you can learn to decipher these feelings before they overwhelm you.
I first learned about somatics through intense trauma therapy after leaving an abusive relationship. My therapist recommended some books, and I dove in. The first one I read was The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, and it has stuck with me ever since.
It connected so many dots about my own healing journey, helping me understand trauma not just as an emotional experience, but as something deeply stored in the body.
That book opened a whole new pathway of healing for me and it also helped me understand why dance had been so pivotal for me growing up. In high school, dance wasn’t just a form of expression, it was an escape. Until I read The Body Keeps the Score, I didn’t fully grasp why I felt so deeply passionate about it. Dance was the one space where I could be my authentic self. It allowed me to express emotions as big as they felt, to connect to my intuition through improvisation, to take up space instead of shrinking myself.
But like so many things, I lost that passion after leaving my abusive relationship.
When we go through trauma, we often disconnect from the very things that once made us feel alive. We numb ourselves in an attempt to stay safe. We shrink in the hopes of not being seen. We detach from our bodies because feeling is too much.
But as I slowly reconnected with movement, encouraged by my therapist, I started to feel more like me again. I reclaimed my power. I learned that healing isn’t just about thinking differently. It’s about moving differently. It’s about creating new patterns, not just in the mind, but in the body.
Every time I dance, it’s as if the world stands still. It’s just me and the music. Freedom moves through my body as I move through my emotions. I become more myself; without judgment, without worry, without concern for how I look to others.
When I dance, I feel like a star gliding through the night sky, radiant, untethered, and luminous. I feel rooted in the earth, yet expansive as the universe itself, because we are part of something greater, and we are all deserving of feeling as magical as the Milky Way.
And this is why I’m so passionate about helping others reconnect with their bodies. Because when you move, you heal. When you release, you return to yourself. And when you reclaim your expression, you step into your power.
With love,
Zofia
