Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Befriending the Body
To slowly turn attention inward and gently notice, name, and tolerate the body’s physical sensations — building interoception so the body can become a safe place to inhabit rather than something to flee.
Befriend the body: Settle and feel safe. Start with a neutral area (hands, feet, the chair). Notice the raw sensation — warm, tight, heavy, buzzing, neutral. Name it plainly. Stay with mild curiosity for a few breaths; let it be. If it’s too much, return to feet/breath, then approach smaller. Befriend, don’t fix.
What it is
This is the foundation of van der Kolk’s whole approach: learning to feel, notice, and stay with the physical sensations inside the body. He argues that trauma lives below language, in the body and nervous system — “the body keeps the score” — and that you cannot reason your way out of it.
The only route back, he says, runs through interoception: the felt sense of what is happening inside. As he puts it, “In order to overcome trauma we have to befriend and be in touch with ourselves — our sensations and our emotions.” The practice is deliberately slow and small: you turn attention to a part of the body, notice whatever raw sensation is there (warmth, tightness, tingling, heaviness, hollowness), name it plainly, and let it be — building the capacity to inhabit the body safely.
It operationalizes the present moment (Everything Happens in the Now), creative attention (The Inner Creates the Outer), and feeling as the medium of change (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
A faithful distillation of the interoceptive noticing van der Kolk describes:
- Settle and orient to safety. Sit or lie comfortably. Look around; notice you are here, now, safe enough. Let the breath be natural.
- Choose a neutral region first. Begin somewhere unlikely to overwhelm — the hands, the feet, the contact of the body with the chair or floor. Feel the actual physical sensation there.
- Notice the raw sensation. Without a story, register the quality: warm/cool, tight/loose, heavy/light, still/buzzing, pressure, tingling, neutral. You are sensing, not analyzing.
- Name it plainly. Quietly label what’s present — “tightness in the chest,” “warmth in the hands,” “nothing much here.” Naming creates a little space between you and the sensation.
- Stay, gently, and let it be. Keep mild, curious attention on the sensation for a few breaths. You are not trying to change it — only to befriend it, to learn that you can feel it and remain okay.
- Watch it shift (or not). Sensations often move, soften, or change on their own when met with attention. Notice the change without forcing it.
- Return to anchor; titrate. If a sensation grows too strong, deliberately return to a neutral anchor (feet on floor, slow exhale, a calming object in the room), then approach again in a smaller dose. Stop while you still feel in control. (Sourcing note: the “befriend and be in touch with ourselves” wording is van der Kolk’s published phrasing; the step sequence faithfully paraphrases the interoceptive, titrated body-awareness work he describes throughout the book.)
Source & Lineage
Van der Kolk is a Dutch-American psychiatrist and trauma researcher whose The Body Keeps the Score (2014) mainstreamed the idea that trauma is held in the body and nervous system. The interoceptive emphasis draws on his collaborations and on body-based lineages — Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, and trauma-sensitive yoga (Emerson/Hopper). → (van der kolk bessel).
Common refinements
Going too deep too fast. Starting with the most charged area can flood or dissociate you. Begin neutral; titrate.
- Analyzing instead of sensing. The work is in the raw felt sensation, not the narrative about it.
- Forcing relaxation. The goal is to feel what’s there, not to make it pleasant. Safety, then sensation.
- Refinement: keep a foot in the present (eyes open, name three objects in the room) if you tend to dissociate; shorten sessions; pair with a trusted clinician for severe trauma.