You Were Never Broken: A Somatic Therapist on Returning to Your Whole Heart

One Conscious Breath: Issue 03

Today’s issue is about embodied knowing. Something lived, felt and ultimately remembered. Not just intellectually. Whole-heartedly. My wish for you is to embody this remembrance, too.

Eye-level view of a serene therapy room with comfortable seating and calming decor

Before we begin, I invite you to take one conscious breath.

Feel the cool air as it enters your nostrils. Follow it as deeply as it goes into your body. Now pause.

And then exhale, slowly, out of your mouth. Really elongate the release as much as you can. And as you exhale, feel your shoulders drop. Feel your cheeks soften. And feel your feet firmly on the floor.

In this exact moment, for this one conscious breath, you are safe. In your body, Right here. Right now.

Taking one conscious breath and orienting ourselves back into safety within, in the present moment, allows us to feel, really feel, what present moment safety feels like in our bodies. One conscious breath at a time. And from this place of safety, one breath at a time, allows us to engage with whatever comes next from a more resourced place. The more grounded you are as you read this, the more your nervous system will be anchored in the present now rather than the historic then. And the more open you will be to receive what your body is signaling to you.

So, one more conscious breath.

And when you’re ready ~ let’s begin.

There is something I want you to not only know, but to feel, today.

Not as a therapist behind the professional scaffolding of over twenty years of training and experience, however true and hard-earned that was. Not even as someone who has sat with thousands of people in their most undefended moments. But, quite simply, as someone who has sat within her own fires. Who has traversed depths within her own self and continues to arrive, again and again, through all of it, at the most important thing I know:

We were never broken.

I invite you to breathe this in. Not only read it, but feel it. Let it envelop you the way true knowing feels, not as information entering the mind, but as recognition rising from somewhere deeper. The kind of knowing that doesn’t announce itself loudly. Rather, arises quietly in the body, remembered rather than learned.

Intellectual knowing and embodied knowing are very different. Intellectual knowing understands, figures out, learns. Embodied knowing feels, trusts, remembers. Embodied knowing resonates. You know it, not simply because you can explain it, but because you feel it. It’s a quiet, cellular yes that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with trust.

And when intellectual knowing finally meets embodied knowing, when what the mind has grasped descends all the way into the body and lands, a reckoning occurs. A remembrance. A resonance from deep within. A remembering from your heart. You remember that it has been there all along. Intact, whole and wise. Waiting not to be repaired, earned or finally deserved, but simply to be reclaimed.

This is my wish for you in reading this.

Take one conscious breath before you continue.

You were never broken.

You, your heart, are wholly intact underneath everything that has happened to you.

During the childhood that required you to dim your own light, or make yourself smaller, quieter, more compliant. In the relationships that cracked you open. In the burnout, the breakdown, the long seasons of running, feeling lost or numb or too far from yourself to find your way back. Underneath it all, you were protected. Your heart was always safe, intact, whole.

You were never broken.

I know this is not what the story tells you. The story says something went wrong, or you are wrong, and the task of your life is to fix it. The story says you are broken or not enough. Maybe it says you’re a work in progress, a damaged self in need of repair, a person who will finally be whole when you have done enough therapy, enough meditation or enough self-examination to have sorted through all the wreckage.

I

promise you: the story is wrong.

You were never broken. Your heart is whole.

This is the truth: Your nervous system adapted to help you feel safe in the world before you had any choice in the matter. In its extraordinary intelligence, it wired around protecting you and helping you stay connected and survive in the environment in which you were born. The strategies, the armor, the vigilance, the performance, the relentless doing, the disappearing, none of them were mistakes or fatal flaws.

They were adaptive. They were brilliant. They did precisely what they were designed to do: protect you. And they did. They got you here.

You survived.

And, beautifully, underneath all that protective layering, untouched and unchanged by everything that happened to you, is your tender heart. It’s been there since the beginning. It existed before the first survival strategy was installed. Before the first wound required adaptation to protect it. Before the world taught you that your worth was conditional or love had to be earned.

Your tender heart needs no fixing. It needs no repair. It is perfectly whole and intact. A whole heart is not the reward at the end of a long enough healing journey. It is not something you achieve when you have finally done enough work.

It is already whole. It has been whole the entire time, whispering for your reconnection, patiently awaiting your remembrance.

You were never broken.

I invite you to feel that land in your body, not simply pass through your mind. Take another breath. Breathe it into every cell, every muscle, every tissue in your body. Feel it land softly in your chest. In your belly. Notice what happens when you allow yourself to actually feel into this truth.

“You were not broken. You were always whole, simply finding your way back to your own heart.”

This is what my book is about: the journey back to our authentic self, back to our tender heart. The one that was, is and always will be, whole. It’s a book about the fires that come to burn away the armor. And about the wisdom the body holds that the mind keeps trying to silence. Ultimately, it’s about the alchemical work of turning our deepest pain into our greatest wisdom and using fear as the pathway back to our own hearts.

And I know inside the book is not where this truth ultimately lives. It lives inside you, inside me, inside each of us. It lives in the depths of someone reading this and feeling, somewhere beneath an outdated story about being damaged or incomplete or not-yet-enough, a faint, but persistent, recognition begins to emerge.

Yes. I knew this. I have always known this.

That recognition is not you learning something new. It is you remembering something ancient. Something that was true of you on the day you were born and has been true every day since, regardless of all that you’ve been taught or all that has happened in between.

You are not a project to fix. Nor a wound in progress. At your core, you are whole, intact, complete. You are whole in the way a seed is whole before it has emerged. Whole in the way your heart remains whole even when it is buried under years of armor that was erected in service of your survival.

And here is what I hope you understand about that armor: it was never the enemy. When you were small, when you had no other resources to help you feel safe, it was the most loving thing your nervous system could offer you. It kept your heart safe and intact when the world could not. It deserves gratitude, not shame.

And you are not small anymore. You have many more resources now than you did back then. You have more knowledge, more awareness, more safety and more choice than you ever had when that armor was first built to protect your tender heart.

But, please know this, what once protected your heart may have become the very thing that is keeping you disconnected from it now. That outdated armor may be standing between you and the capacity to live fully openhearted. It may be hindering you from fully connecting to yourself, as well as being fully available to connect with others.

The work is to acknowledge the armor. Remember, it’s not your enemy. Honor it for the work it did when you didn’t have as many resources as you do today. And gently, with great compassion for what it protected, thank it. And then put it down. Let it go. Release it, one conscious breath at a time.

Our journey is simply the return to wholeness. It’s at the very core of who we are and have always been. There is nothing we need to cultivate. There is nothing to find or fix or know. It is a return. A remembrance.

To our own heart.

To the love that is our truest nature.

It doesn’t need to be earned, nor is it contingent upon doing everything right.

It simply is our birthright.

So let me say this one more time. As a truth I hope you carry with you when you close this letter and return to your day.

Take one more conscious breath.

Feel your feet on the ground.

And let this sink in, all the way in, as deep as it will go:

You were never broken.

Your heart is whole.

It has been whole this entire time.

And it’s whispering, patiently beckoning you home.

With love and one conscious breath,

Jody

P.S. — If you’re new here: I’m Jody Allen, a somatic psychotherapist in San Francisco and Berkeley. These letters are where neuroscience meets the heart, the foundation of a book in progress. If someone forwarded this to you and it resonated, you can subscribe at jodyallenlcsw.substack.com. It’s free. It always will be.