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Before the Trigger: When the Body Speaks Before the Mind Reacts
- Juel McNeilly
- Nov 7
- 3 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Hello People,
What would it feel like to notice ten steps before you reach your breaking point that something inside you is saying no?
To sense the first whisper of tightening before it becomes the familiar shutdown, defense, or collapse.
To catch the signal—not the story—before it spirals into old patterns that seem to run your life, even when you know better.
This is the kind of awareness somatic work opens: a slowing down of time. A deepening of presence. A conversation with the language of your body that reveals you’ve always had more choice than you thought.
We often think triggers happen to us.
But what if your body had been communicating long before the moment of rupture?
A subtle contraction in the gut.
A micro-flinch in the shoulders.
A slight dulling of breath when someone enters the room.
Your system is always in communication—it’s just that we’ve been trained to override it. Conditioned to stay polite, keep peace, perform okayness. To say yes when the body is quietly, and eventually not so quietly, screaming no.
And over time, those unspoken no’s build layers of protection, exhaustion, and distance—from others, but mostly from ourselves.
Somatic inquiry invites a different path.
Instead of waiting for the explosion or the shutdown, we begin to notice what happens before.
We learn to listen in the micro-moments.
We learn to honour what the body is already doing to keep us safe.
That’s where transformation begins—not in changing your reactions, but in widening the space before them.
In NLP, we call this increasing choice.
In somatic language, we might say growing capacity.
In truth, it’s the same thing: creating the nervous system safety needed for freedom.
Imagine if, when someone made a request of you, you could still feel your own needs.
If you could sense your body’s natural yes or no—not as something to defend, but as information.
If, before saying yes out of obligation or no out of fear, you could pause and feel:
What’s true for me right now?
What’s alive in my body?
What do I actually need to stay in integrity with myself?
This kind of inquiry doesn’t make you harder. It makes you clearer. It reconnects you to your centre, to the part of you that remembers choice.
And from that clarity, your “no” becomes clean. Your “yes” becomes sacred.
We spend so much of life reacting from old maps—the ones drawn by childhood conditioning, trauma, culture, family, and all the moments when our safety depended on adapting.
But as we build relationship with the body, we begin to redraw those maps in real time.
We find the pause.
We discover the power in the breath between stimulus and response.
We realize we can move differently—not from habit, but from presence.
This is the quiet revolution of somatic work.
It’s not about perfection or control—it’s about returning to choice.
A Practice to Explore:
The next time you notice tension—small or big—pause. Don’t analyze it. Just notice:
Where in the body do you feel it?
What does it feel like?
What happens if you soften your breath around it?
What might this sensation be communicating, if it could speak?
You don’t have to fix it. Just stay with it.This is how you begin to hear the subtle language of your own intelligence.
Over time, that presence becomes your compass—helping you move through the world with more truth, more ease, more self-trust.
Because the body always knows, long before the mind catches up.
One love,
Juel
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Juel helps people return to the intelligence of their bodies—so they can lead with presence, resilience, and truth.
Her work is somatic, trauma-informed, and rooted in nervous system awareness, guiding real change where the body still carries what the mind has tried to move past.
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