Bottom-Up Healing

In a world that often tells us to think our way through everything, it's easy to forget that healing doesn't always begin in the mind.

Sometimes, it begins in the body.

This is the foundation of bottom-up healing — a trauma-informed approach that prioritizes felt experience, sensation, movement, and safety in the nervous system before diving into insight, story, or cognition.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up: What’s the Difference?

Most traditional therapies start with top-down approaches:

• Talk therapy

• Cognitive reframing

• Insight development

These are incredibly valuable — but they assume the nervous system is regulated enough to reflect, process, and apply insight.

But for many who carry chronic stress or trauma, the nervous system is stuck in patterns of survival:
⚡ Fight
🏃‍♀️ Flight
🧊 Freeze
😶 Fawn

In these states, it’s not that we won’t heal — it’s that we can’t access deeper cognitive work until the body feels safe again.

What Is Bottom-Up Healing?

Bottom-up healing starts with the body — not the story.
It focuses on working directly with the nervous system and the felt sense using practices such as:

• Somatic awareness (noticing sensation without judgment)

• Grounding and resourcing

• Breathwork and rhythm

• Gentle movement or shaking

• Polyvagal-informed touch or sound

• Nature, imagery, or safe ritual

Bottom-up doesn’t mean we ignore the mind. It means we honor the body’s intelligence first.

Why Does It Work?

Trauma isn’t just stored in memory. It’s stored in muscle tone, posture, breath patterns, and neurochemical loops.
Healing must speak the language of the body — not just logic.

When we engage the body slowly, safely, and consistently, we:
✅ Build capacity to stay with sensation
✅ Increase vagal tone (resilience)
✅ Restore a felt sense of agency
✅ Create space for integration and meaning-making

A Gentle Invitation

If you’ve tried to talk through your trauma and still feel stuck, you’re not broken — you’re just wired for protection.
And healing might need to begin somewhere deeper…
somewhere quieter…
somewhere that doesn’t need words.

That place is your body.

And it remembers the way home.