Movement as Medicine: What the Body Knows That Words Cannot Reach
Before I trained as a therapist, I spent years as a dancer, yoga teacher and Pilates instructor. Long before I had language for who I am, my moods, ups and downs, meltdowns, and the times I had a deep sense of peace in my body, I had movement. What I didn’t know then and do know now is that movement did something for me that comprehension, words, and cognitive understanding never could.
It has taken me most of my life to understand that this was not a hobby. It was medicine. And it is medicine available to every one of us, whether or not we would ever call ourselves dancers.
Some Feelings Cannot be Processed with Words
We are so often told to talk about our feelings, to name them, to put them into words. And words matter. But there are states that language simply cannot reach.
Grief that sits too deep for sentences
Overwhelm that scrambles our thoughts before they can form into something coherent
Anxiety that hums in the body long after the mind has run out of things to say
For these, talking can feel like knocking politely at a door that will not open.
Movement enters through a different door altogether. When you sway, rock, stretch, or let your body follow the pull of a piece of music, when you allow yourself to move through your emotions instead of locking up against them, you are speaking the nervous system's own first language.
This is the one it knew long before you had any words at all. Your body knows instinctively how it wants to move and what it needs to do. But we have become so convinced societally that dance is not for us, only for a talented few or after a few drinks on a sticky nightclub floor, that we don’t use this ancient tool anymore.
This is what stimming knows
Many neurodivergent people already move to regulate, whether they call it that or not. The rock, the pace, the sway, the repetitive motion that soothes a jangling system.
This is not a symptom to be corrected. It is deep wisdom. The body reaching for the exact medicine it needs. If you have ever felt ashamed of the way you move to calm yourself, I would gently invite you to lay that shame down. Your body is not misbehaving. It is regulating, in the way it was designed to.
How to let your body move you
You do not need choreography or an audience or any idea of doing it right. In fact, movement that becomes performance goes against the very thing that movement actually does for our bodies and minds. As soon as you’re doing something to please someone else you are immediately pulled outside of your body and all the self-doubts, self-watching and stiffness flood out any benefit.
Instead, put on a piece of music that matches how you feel, not how you wish you felt. Something downbeat if you are heavy, something with a pulse if you are agitated. Then let your body do whatever it wants to do, even if that is only the smallest sway. Close your eyes if that helps. Let the movement come from the inside out, directed by feeling rather than by thought, expectation, or the drive to perform.
Think of how a child moves before they start learning how to censor themselves. Do that.
You may find, as I have countless times, that something shifts and loosens without a single word being spoken. The body has processed what the mind could not. That is not magic (although it kind of is if you think of it that way). That is how we are made.
This idea sits at the very heart of my new novella, Under The Willows, out in October. It is the story of a father and a grieving son who have lost the words between them, and of the boy who finds his way back to himself through movement when nothing else can reach him. If it speaks to you, you can pre-order it now.
