Have you ever had a doctor tell you they couldn’t explain what you were feeling?

I’d read the theory. I didn’t expect my own legs to prove it true.

For a long time, my body was trying to tell me something, and I didn’t have the language for it. There were symptoms that came and went, that never quite fit into a diagnosis, and eventually a doctor said the words I think a lot of us have heard in one form or another: we have done all the tests and can’t explain what’s causing this.

I didn’t stop seeing my doctors. I kept doing everything that was asked of me. But alongside that, I started looking for something that could help me understand what was happening in a way medicine hadn’t been able to. And as with everything I do, I don’t settle, I go searching.

That’s when I came across the book The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine who has spent over fifty years researching trauma. His work argues that chronic stress doesn’t only live in our thoughts, it settles into the nervous system, into muscle, into breath, and it can show up as physical symptoms that have no clear medical cause. I remember reading that and feeling something click into place. It didn’t fix anything, but for the first time, what I’d been living through made sense. It gave me hope that perhaps things could change for me, which started with curiosity. If the body does keep the score, is there perhaps something that can help you release it?

It also made me wonder about something much older than any of this research. How did people release stress and difficult experience before modern medicine came into play at all? Long before therapy rooms and diagnostic manuals, humans still lived through war, loss, famine, and fear. They must have had some way of moving it through the body, even if nobody called it that.

Curiosity leads to many new discoveries, and that’s when I discovered the work of Dr David Berceli. Berceli spent around two decades living and working in conflict zones and disaster areas, places like Sudan, Uganda, Lebanon, and Israel and Palestine, running trauma relief workshops for people who had lived through war. He quickly saw the limits of one on one talk therapy when he was standing in front of entire communities who needed something more immediate. Drawing on his background in social work and psychotherapy, along with practices like bioenergetics, yoga, and tai chi, he developed the theory that a stressed body instinctively contracts to protect itself, and that when the danger passes, it’s meant to release that contraction through shaking, the same way animals do. Out of that came TRE, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, a set of simple movements designed to activate that natural tremor safely.

Not long after learning about his work, I came across a video online of a Navy Seal in a TRE session. Watching his body tremor, releasing something that had clearly lived in him for years, I felt a strange kind of recognition. It wasn’t performed and it wasn’t controlled by his mind, it was just happening, the way a shiver happens. I remember thinking, I want to understand what that is. I’ve since discovered hundreds of videos demonstrating TRE.

So I tried it myself. And this led me into the world of somatic experiencing, developed by Dr Peter Levine. Levine holds doctorates in medical biophysics from UC Berkeley and in psychology, and he’s spent more than fifty years developing what became Somatic Experiencing. His path into it started with his background in stress physiology and his fascination with how wild animals, constantly under threat of predators, don’t seem to carry trauma the way humans do. He spent time studying how they discharge the survival energy of a threat through movement and shaking once the danger has passed, rather than staying braced against it. From that came the idea that we have the same built in capacity, we’ve just learned to override it, and that a different relationship with stress could come from slowly renegotiating those trapped physical responses, rather than only talking through them. It’s a gentler cousin of what Berceli developed, more tracking and pacing than exercise, but rooted in the same understanding that the body has its own intelligence.

I still remember the first time I tried TRE. I was following a set of instructions that tire the body, then a warmth built low in my thighs, almost like the ache after a long walk. Then a small pulse took over, moving up through my hips and my lower back, entirely on its own. I wasn’t doing it, and that surprised me more than anything, because the instinct is to think you’re imagining it or making it happen. You’re not. It moves through you because some part of you finally felt safe enough to let it.

It can look dramatic, and it did in that video too. But it happens gently, at whatever pace the body needs, in a space that’s built to hold it. To stop the session, you just rest your legs. Dramatic doesn’t mean out of control, it is unique to you and the experience you are holding onto. Emotional work, it surely was for me.

The session was mind opening, and a lesson in how intelligent our body is. After my sessions, I noticed my breath had opened up. My shoulders had let go of a tightness that was held in my body. There was a kind of presence in my own body that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It did not feel like a stranger to me.

I think that’s the part that’s hard to grasp until you’ve lived it. You can read about the body keeping score and find it fascinating, even convincing. You can debate whether it’s valid scientifically, but there’s something different about carrying symptoms nobody could explain, watching a stranger’s body tremble on a screen and feeling curious instead of alarmed, and then feeling your own body do the same thing, unasked, and realising it had been trying to tell you something the whole time.

The book gave me a way to understand it. My body is what actually taught me it was true. So does the body keep the score? Surely mine did.

If reading this makes you curious the way that Navy Seal video made me curious, TRE was actually designed to be accessible this way. Berceli built it with self-guidance in mind, and there are certified TRE providers who run in-person and online introductory sessions if you want to be guided the first time rather than going in blind. Somatic experiencing is a little different, that one is generally practitioner-led rather than something you’d start alone, so if that’s the piece that draws you in, look for a certified SE practitioner rather than trying to recreate it solo.

This reflects my own experience and isn’t intended as medical advice. If you’re navigating symptoms or stress, please continue working with your doctor, and only try TRE or somatic experiencing with a qualified practitioner.

Larisa Sipek