The Part of You That Was Never Broken

By Fleet Maull, PhD

After more than forty years of teaching and coaching, I've noticed a pattern that shows up again and again, across wildly different people and circumstances.

Someone arrives having done real work on themselves. They've been in therapy, perhaps for years. They've read, reflected, and journaled. They have genuine insight into their history. They understand where certain patterns came from, what they mean, why they developed. And yet something remains stuck. The insights are there, but the body hasn't caught up. They can name exactly why they shut down in intimacy, or why a certain kind of conflict sends them into a spiral, but they find themselves doing it again the next day.

That gap between insight and embodied change is one of the most important things I've come to understand about healing.

I saw it up close as I was doing hospice work inside a federal prison. These years were perhaps the most raw and immediate classroom I've ever known. Sitting with men who were dying, men who had lived through profound trauma and inflicted it on others, I witnessed something that no amount of psychological analysis could have predicted: the body, in its final weeks and days, becomes the only teacher that matters. What those men needed wasn't more understanding of their past. They needed to find a way to be present, in their bodies, in the room, in the moment they were actually in. That was where any real peace was available.

It changed how I think about healing at every stage of life, not just at the end of it.

What the Body Is Actually Doing Here's what I've come to understand, both from decades of contemplative practice and from the science that has increasingly confirmed it: trauma isn't primarily a story we carry. It's a protection pattern the nervous system learns.

At some point, often early in life, sometimes in ways we can't consciously recall, our system was overwhelmed. And it adapted. It developed ways of bracing, contracting, shutting down, or going into overdrive, all in the service of getting us through something difficult. Those responses were intelligent. They were the nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do.

But the nervous system doesn't always receive the signal that the threat has passed. The patterns keep running. And over time, what once protected us can become what limits us.

This shows up differently for different people. For some, it's chronic anxiety or a persistent sense of being on edge. For others, it's a kind of numbness, a difficulty feeling present or connected. For many of us, it's a mixture… moments of flooding, moments of shutting down, a general feeling of being at the mercy of something we can't quite name or control.

When we try to address these patterns through thinking alone, we're working at the wrong level. The body is where the work actually needs to happen.

Going Slowly Is a Form of Respect One of the things I find myself returning to with students again and again is this: going slowly isn't a concession; it's the actual method.

There's a part of many of us that wants to push hard, go deep as quickly as possible, and burn through whatever needs to be cleared. That impulse is understandable. But I've also seen what happens when we try to force the pace with deep nervous system material. The system gets overwhelmed. And when it gets overwhelmed, it doesn't open; it contracts. We reinforce the very pattern we're trying to work through.

So instead, we learn to work in what I think of as a rhythm of approach and return. You bring your attention inward. You notice something (maybe a tightness in your chest, a heaviness in your belly, a subtle sense of agitation). You stay with it for a few moments, not trying to fix it or figure it out, just feeling it. And then, before it becomes too much, you come back out. Back to your breath, to the ground beneath you, to the room around you. In and out. Approach and return.

This rhythm is deeply natural. The nervous system learns, slowly and reliably, that it can touch these places without being overwhelmed. And as that capacity grows, so does everything else. We develop greater resilience, greater ease, and more access to genuine presence.

The Moment Everything Shifts

I've watched this happen with students more times than I can count, and I've experienced it myself. There comes a moment, often quiet and almost unremarkable, when someone realizes: this isn't all of me.

They've been anxious for years, or numb, or caught in the same relational loop. And then, for just a few minutes, something is different. There's a sense of openness. A breath that goes all the way down. A feeling of being, just briefly, okay.

That moment is not small. It becomes a reference point and index experience. The nervous system now has evidence it didn't have before. It experienced the felt sense that another way of being is actually possible.

And as the work deepens, something else begins to come into view. A part that hasn't been traumatized. A kind of basic okayness that was present all along, simply covered over. In the Buddhist traditions in which I've practiced for over five decades, there are many ways of pointing to this: our basic nature, basic goodness, our inherent wakefulness. The somatic work and the contemplative work converge here in a way I find endlessly meaningful, impactful, and actually transformative. We are not manufacturing something new. We are uncovering what was always there.

A Simple Place to Begin If you're wondering where to start, keep it very simple.  Bring your attention to your body, right now. Not to everything — just one thing. A sensation. The feeling of your feet on the ground. The rhythm of your breath moving in and out.

Stay with it for a moment. If it starts to feel like too much, let your gaze soften and open to the room around you. Feel something more neutral. And when you're ready, come back.

That's the practice. And it compounds, over time, in ways that are genuinely remarkable.

This is the territory we'll be exploring together in our upcoming summit, Healing Your Deepest Wounds,  alongside some extraordinary teachers working at the leading edge of trauma healing, somatic practice, and contemplative wisdom. I hope you'll join us.

The healing is real. And it begins right here.