Your body has been trying to tell you something. The question is: are you listening?

Your nervous system doesn’t speak in words. It speaks in tightness, pain, and the way your stomach drops when something feels wrong, even though, on paper, it looks fine. It speaks in the heat that rises in your chest before you’ve consciously registered you’re angry. It speaks in the way your throat closes right before you’re about to say something uncomfortably true.

This is what I mean when I say your nervous system is an energetic messenger. It’s constantly reading your environment, your relationships, your thoughts, and your choices, then translating what it senses into something you can feel.

The problem is that most of us were never taught to speak this language. We were taught to override it. To push through the signals. To talk ourselves out of what we feel. To trust logic over sensation. To believe that if we can’t explain it rationally, it doesn’t count.

So we miss the messages. Or worse - we receive them and dismiss them.

Then we wonder why we keep ending up in situations that drain us. Why we ignore red flags until they become catastrophes. Why we abandon ourselves and call it being flexible. Why we feel disconnected from our own truth even while we’re “doing the work.”

Your nervous system has been telling you the truth the whole time. You just weren’t trained to listen.

The language your body speaks

Your nervous system communicates through sensation, the felt sense of things before your mind labels them.

It tells you when someone feels safe or unsafe, not through a list of green and red flags, but through whether your body softens or braces in their presence.

It tells you when a decision is aligned or off, not through pros-and-cons lists, but through expansion or contraction, ease or resistance, and the quality of your breath.

It tells you when you’re about to abandon yourself, not with moral judgment, but with that sinking feeling in your gut, the tightness in your throat, the way your energy drops right before you say yes to something that is a no.

It tells you when something needs attention, not through logic, but through symptoms, fatigue, recurring patterns, and the place in your body that won’t stop hurting.

This is energetic information. Your nervous system is reading what your thinking mind can’t always perceive and translating it into sensation.

The real question is not “What do I think about this?” It’s “Do I trust what I feel?”

Why we stop listening

Most of us learned early that our signals weren’t safe to follow.

You felt scared, and you were told you were overreacting. You felt uncomfortable and got told to be polite anyway. You felt tired, but you were told to push through. You felt angry and got told it was inappropriate.

Over time, you learned that what your body was telling you mattered less than what other people needed from you. So you got good at overriding. Ignoring the tightness. Smiling through the discomfort. Talking yourself into what felt wrong. Calling it maturity. Calling it being a good person.

Here’s what actually happened: you stopped trusting your own messenger.

When you don’t trust the messenger, you start needing external permission for everything. You second-guess every signal. You wait until you can explain it logically before you honor it. You stay in situations your body has been trying to exit for months because your mind can build a case for staying.

When you dismiss the messenger, the message gets louder

When you consistently override your nervous system’s signals, it doesn’t stop sending them. It escalates.

The subtle tightness becomes chronic anxiety. The occasional exhaustion becomes burnout. The quiet discomfort in a relationship becomes a full crisis. The intuitive hit you ignored becomes the pattern you can’t escape.

This isn’t punishment. It’s protection.

Your system is trying to keep you safe and keep you in integrity with yourself. But we’ve been trained to treat these escalations as problems to fix rather than messages to receive. We medicate anxiety without asking what it’s protecting us from. We push through fatigue without asking what needs to stop. We try to save the relationship without asking why our body has been bracing every time the phone lights up.

We treat the symptom and call it coping. Meanwhile, the message keeps knocking.

The nuance most people miss: not every “no” is intuition

Here’s where I’m going to be honest, because this is where people get confused.

Your nervous system can signal “danger” for two very different reasons:

1. because something is actually unsafe or misaligned, or
2. because something is unfamiliar and your system equates unfamiliar with threat.

If you’ve lived through chaos, betrayal, chronic stress, or years of self-abandonment, your nervous system may brace even when something is good, because “good” is new.

So the goal isn’t to treat every contraction as a command. The goal is to learn discernment.

This is one reason energy healing matters. It helps you clear the static so you can tell the difference between a true signal and an old alarm.

Mental stories vs somatic truth

Your mind tells stories. Your nervous system gives data.

Your mind will spin narratives about why you feel the way you do. It will pull from the past and project into the future. It will try to make everything make sense.

But your nervous system doesn’t care about the story. It cares about the signal.

You can mentally convince yourself that someone is trustworthy. You can list all the reasons they’re a good person. You can explain away every red flag. But if your body tightens every time they text you, that’s information.

You can tell yourself you should be grateful for the job, the opportunity, the relationship. You can remind yourself how lucky you are. But if your energy drains every time you think about it, that’s information too.

The mind seeks comfort in explanation. The body seeks truth in sensation.

When the two conflict, your body is usually pointing to something your mind hasn’t yet admitted.

How to start listening (without turning it into another thing to “do right”)

You don’t need a complicated practice to begin. You need a different order of operations.

Sensation first. Story second.

Start by noticing what’s happening in your body without immediately trying to explain it. “My chest is tight.”
“My stomach dropped.”
“My jaw clenched.”
“My breath got shallow.”

Then ask one clean question: What is this protecting me from? Or what is this trying to show me?

Don’t force an answer. Don’t interrogate yourself. Just listen long enough to let the first honest thing rise. The thing that comes before you edit it.

And then—this is the part most people skip—practice honoring what you receive in small ways.

Because if your body says no and you say yes anyway, you train yourself not to trust your signals. If your gut says “leave” and you stay, you teach your nervous system that speaking up is pointless.

Listening is receiving. Honoring is responding.

Alignment is a felt experience

Your nervous system isn’t only reading safety and threat. It’s reading integrity.

It knows when you’re living in truth versus performing who you think you should be. It knows when your choices align with your values and when you’re betraying yourself to keep the peace. It knows when you’re speaking honestly versus managing people’s reactions.

This is where nervous system work and soul work meet.

Your soul doesn’t always speak in grand revelations. Most of the time, it speaks through your body: the way one path makes you feel more alive, and another makes you feel like you’re disappearing.

Your nervous system is the translator. The bridge between your deeper knowing and your conscious mind.

When you learn to listen, you stop needing external validation to know what’s true for you. You stop outsourcing your decisions. You stop second-guessing yourself into paralysis.

You start trusting the messenger. Which means you start trusting yourself.

When you want support (and why Reiki helps)

Sometimes the message is clear, but your system is too charged to interpret it cleanly. Sometimes the signal is buried under years of stress, grief, and survival mode. Sometimes you can feel that something is off, but you can’t access the “why” without spiraling.

That’s where Reiki can help.

Reiki supports your nervous system and energy field in settling enough for the truth to surface without force. It helps release what’s been held in the body for too long, so you can hear your own signal again, without the static.

If you’re ready to stop overriding yourself and start trusting what your body has been saying, book a Reiki session here.

Your nervous system has been trying to tell you something. Maybe it’s been trying for years. Maybe it’s been escalating because you keep dismissing the quiet messages. Maybe you’ve been so trained to override that you don’t even notice anymore.

But it’s still there. Still communicating. Still guiding you toward the truth.

You don’t need to learn a new language. You need to remember the one you were born speaking: sensation, honesty, and the kind of knowing that lands in your body before your mind catches up.

Are you ready to listen?