Many people come to the question of trusting your body not out of curiosity, but because something has quietly broken down. An injury, illness, anxiety, or simply years of living from the neck up can leave us unsure whether the body is friend or foe. When trust erodes, we often respond by moving deeper into the mind — attempting to manage life through control, analysis, and vigilance. What is lost in this shift is not just ease in the body, but a felt sense of belonging within our own experience.

In the ROOTED Series within The Embodied Way, T stands for Trust — not as an idea to adopt, but as a lived relationship with the intelligence of embodiment. Trust is not something we impose on the body. It is something that begins to return when we stop overriding what is already present.

The poet Mary Oliver names this with great tenderness:

You only have to allow the soft animal of your body to love what it loves.

The word allow is doing almost everything here. It suggests that trusting your body is not an act of effort, but a relinquishing of interference. To love what it loves is to follow the natural movement of bodily energy — to rest when tired, to move when alive with impulse, to soften when safety is felt. This is not indulgence; it is intimacy with Being as it is actually lived.

We see this most clearly in small children. Before the mind learns to supervise experience, the body moves freely within its own rhythms. Children sway, stretch, collapse, curl, and spring to life again, not because they have decided to, but because the body knows. There is an unselfconscious trust in the flow of energy, unmediated by strategy or control. This is what trusting your body looks like before it becomes complicated.

Over time, many of us learn to interrupt this flow. Softness may not feel safe. Expression may not feel welcome. Subtle layers of holding begin to form — not as a failure, but as a way of coping. Muscles tighten, breath becomes guarded, and attention retreats upward into the mind. The psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich described this adaptive pattern as body armor — an intelligent response to mistrust rather than a pathology to be fixed.

When the body is no longer trusted, the mind steps in to manage life on its behalf. This often deepens the experience of separation, as if we are living at a distance from ourselves. Alexander Lowen captured this division succinctly:

Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.

Trusting your body is not about tearing down this armor or forcing openness. It begins by recognising why these protections formed, and by gently allowing the body to soften in its own time. In this way, Trust is not a demand placed upon the body, but a relationship that is slowly restored.

I am aware of this personally. For many years, a deep anxiety around medical procedures lived in my body, beyond anything the mind could resolve. What changed was not medication or mental strategy, but the sincere practice of Yoga Nidra with a focus on allowing the breath — not controlling it. Over time, the body learned that it was safe to rest. The anxiety eased, not because it was confronted, but because the body was trusted to do what it naturally loves to do: return to stillness.

This is the quiet transformation that Trust makes possible. As Osho observed:

And once you have learned the art of trusting, you are beyond all fear — you will learn it, because there is no going back.

Trusting your body does not remove fear by force; it dissolves fear by restoring relationship. As the soft animal of the body is allowed to love what it loves, energy flows more freely, the mind relaxes its grip, and a deeper KNOWING begins to emerge — one that is not abstract, but lived.

This is both the ROOT and the ED of Trust: a principle grounded in embodiment, and a discipline lived through allowing. The invitation is simple, though not always easy — to remain close to bodily experience with Presence, and to let Trust grow where control once dominated. In this way, the journey is not about becoming someone new, but about remembering a deeper intimacy with Being that has always been waiting.

ROOT Series

• Introduction
• R — Return
• O — Openness
• O — Orientation
• T — Trust
• E — Embodiment – To be written
• D — Discipline – To be written

To trust the body is not to abandon discernment, but to rediscover a deeper partnership with The Embodied Way. When Trust is allowed to grow, the mind softens, the body relaxes its protections, and Presence becomes something we live from rather than think about.

In the next exploration within the ROOTED Series, we will turn toward the practice of learning to trust — how Trust is cultivated through gentle discipline, allowing, and embodied attention, so that the soft animal of the body can once again love what it loves.