Your Body Knows: A Guide to Inner Knowing and What Your System Is Telling You
You've felt it before. The slight tightening in your chest when you walk into a room. The pit in your stomach when someone you're supposed to trust starts talking. The way your shoulders climb toward your ears for no reason your mind can explain. Or, on the other side: that long exhale you didn't know you'd been holding, the slow softening of your jaw when you walk back into your own kitchen.
Your body knows before your mind does. The work is learning how to listen.
What Inner Knowing Is
Inner knowing is the term I use for the kind of wisdom that lives in your nervous system. It's the information your body picks up before your conscious mind has had a chance to parse it — cues from a room, a person, an energy — translated into sensations you can feel if you're paying attention.
It's not magic. It's also not separate from the spiritual. It's a form of embodied wisdom that humans have always had access to, and that women in particular have been taught to override.
Your body is constantly reading your environment. It notices microexpressions, tones of voice, room temperature, energy, smell. It processes that information faster than your thinking mind can. By the time you have a thought about whether you feel comfortable somewhere, your body has already filed a report.
The work of trusting your inner knowing is mostly the work of learning to read that report.
How to Recognize "Off"
Every body has its own dialect, but there are common signals. When something is off, you might notice:
A tightening in your chest, sometimes around your heart, sometimes higher near your throat
A pit or sinking feeling in your stomach — that classic uh-oh sensation
Your shoulders rising toward your ears without you choosing it
The urge to leave, even if you can't say why
A quiet flatness — not panic, but a kind of going numb, like part of you has already left the room
Your breath getting shallow, high in the chest instead of deep in the belly
These are normal nervous-system signals. They don't always mean danger — sometimes they just mean this isn't fitting — but they're worth listening to. Especially when they show up consistently around the same person, place, or situation.
How to Recognize "Safe"
The body has a different vocabulary for safe. When you walk into a space — or sit with a person — that fits, you might notice:
A softening, sometimes in your jaw, sometimes in your shoulders, sometimes in your whole spine
A slow exhale that comes on its own, deeper than you'd planned
Warmth in your chest — a kind of opening rather than closing
An expansion, like there's suddenly more room inside your ribcage
Stillness without alertness — your body doesn't need to scan for the exit
Safe doesn't always feel exciting. Often it feels a little boring at first, especially if your system is used to chaos. The body relaxes into something it doesn't have to manage. That ease is the signal.
A Daily Practice for Listening
You don't need a meditation cushion or an hour of free time to build this skill. You only need to start checking in.
Try this for a week:
Pause three times a day. Morning, afternoon, evening — whenever fits your life.
Notice your body without changing it. Where is there tension? Where is there ease? Don't fix anything; just notice.
Ask: what does my system say right now? Listen for the first answer.
Write it down. One line. The situation, what you noticed.
After a week, look back through the notes. Patterns will appear that you couldn't see in any single moment. Specific people, places, or situations that consistently land one way. Times of day your body shows up differently. The beginning of self-trust is built out of evidence like this — not from being told trust yourself, but from watching yourself be right about what your body was telling you all along.
When a Reading Can Help
For some women, this practice opens things up quickly. For others, the body's signals stay foggy — either because the nervous system has been overriding them for a long time, or because trauma has scrambled the channel.
A reading can be useful in both cases. Not as a way around your own inner knowing, but as a way of confirming what your body has been quietly saying. Often what I see in a session is exactly what a client has been feeling in her chest for months — she just hadn't let herself name it.
If your body's signals feel especially confusing, or if you have a trauma history where the line between off and familiar is hard to read, working with a qualified clinician — a therapist trained in somatic or trauma-informed work — is the right starting place. A reading can sit alongside that work, not in place of it.
FAQ
What if I'm numb and don't feel anything?
Numbness is information too. It usually means your nervous system has learned, somewhere along the line, that feeling everything was unsafe — so it turned the volume down. That's a protective response, not a failure of intuition. The way back to your signals isn't to force them; it's to build small, slow safety in your own body until your system trusts you enough to let them through. A trauma-informed therapist can support that work. You're not broken. You're just careful.
How do I know if it's inner knowing and not a trauma response?
This is one of the harder distinctions, and an honest answer is: sometimes you don't. Both can feel urgent in the body. Both can show up as a no. The general pattern is that inner knowing is steady — it lands once and sits there — while a trauma response loops, escalates, and often doesn't quite match the present situation. But this is exactly the kind of question that benefits from working with a qualified clinician if you have a trauma history. You deserve the support to sort it out without having to do it alone.
Can my inner knowing be wrong?
Your inner knowing isn't always reading the situation you think it's reading. Sometimes a body signal is responding to something old, not something present. That's part of why writing it down helps — it lets you check your impressions against what actually happens. Over time, you build a track record. Most women find their body's signals are far more accurate than they'd been told growing up.
Ready When You Are
You have been carrying inner knowing your whole life. Your body has been quietly reading every room you've walked into, every person you've sat across from, every choice you've considered. You've been told, in a thousand subtle ways, not to listen. You can teach yourself to listen now.
It's slower work than installing a new habit. It's the work of trusting yourself, one small piece of evidence at a time.
Book a Session → https://www.thesoulworkcenter.com/book-now|
Learn more about Sarah → https://www.thesoulworkcenter.com/sarah-dugas
In light,
Sarah
