What Score is the Body Keeping Exactly?

Lately I've been watching a fascinating argument unfold.

On one side are neuroscientists and researchers pushing back against claims that trauma is "stored in the fascia" or that emotional memories are somehow physically embedded in tissue waiting to be released.

On the other side are movement practitioners, yoga teachers, and somatic educators who regularly witness people cry during hip openers, experience profound emotional shifts through movement, or describe years of tension dissolving after a body-based practice.

I cannot help but see this as another example of two camps talking AT EACH OTHER as oppose to LISTENING to each other.

For centuries, Western culture has largely treated the body as an object. A sophisticated object, certainly. An astonishingly complex biological machine.

But still an object.

An object has parts. Those parts have functions. Those functions can be measured, isolated, and studied. This way of thinking has given us modern medicine, surgery, neuroscience, and countless advances that have improved and saved lives. It is enormously useful but usefulness is not the same thing as completeness.

While we can study the body as an object, that is not how we experience being alive. Nobody experiences themselves as a collection of tissues. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks: "Ah yes. Today my connective tissue is having an experience." We experience ourselves as living, sensing, feeling beings moving through a world of meaning.

And that distinction matters.

When people say, "The body keeps the score," critics often hear a biological claim. They hear: "Trauma is literally stored inside tissue." That claim deserves scrutiny. Scientific claims should be tested. Evidence matters. But many of the people who resonate with that phrase are not trying to describe a tissue. They are trying to describe an experience. They are noticing that experiences from the past continue to influence the present. A difficult childhood shapes adult relationships. A frightening accident changes how someone moves through the world. Years of chronic stress alter posture, breathing, attention, and behavior.

The score seems to be there.

The word soma offers a useful distinction. In somatic education, soma does not simply mean body. It refers to the body as it is experienced from within.

The living body.

The felt body.

The body in process.

A soma is not a thing. It is a series of ongoing events. It is a conversation between tissue, nervous system, perception, memory, attention, environment, relationship, chemistry, movement, and awareness. The body-as-object can be placed on an examination table. The soma cannot. Because the soma is not an object. It is the experience of being alive. This is where I think much of the current debate gets stuck. One group is studying the body as an object. The other is working with the body as a lived process.

Both are looking at the same reality through different lenses.

From a somatic perspective, asking whether trauma is stored in fascia may be a bit like asking whether a symphony is stored in a violin. The violin matters. Without it, the music cannot emerge in the same way. But the music is not located in the wood. The music emerges through relationships; Strings., air., movement , sound, a musician, an audience., the performance itself.

Likewise, the patterns we call trauma may not be stored in a single tissue. But they are undeniably expressed through the living system.

They shape attention.

They shape perception.

They shape breathing.

They shape movement.

They shape expectation.

They shape what feels safe.

They shape what feels threatening.

In that sense, the score is not sitting in one location.

The score is being performed.

This distinction becomes even more important when we begin talking about healing. Many people experience emotional releases during movement practices. A memory surfaces. Tears arise unexpectedly. A long-held tension softens. Something changes.

If we insist that these experiences prove fascia stores trauma, we may be making claims that exceed the evidence. But if we dismiss these experiences because fascia doesn't appear to store autobiographical memory, we are missing something equally important. Human beings are not merely biological structures. 

We are meaning-making organisms. 

Experience reorganizes us.  Attention reorganizes us. Relationship reorganizes us. Movement reorganizes us. The nervous system is constantly updating its predictions about the world and our place within it. Sometimes a movement practice creates conditions where those predictions change. Sometimes a breath practice changes them. Sometimes a conversation changes them. Sometimes being deeply seen by another human changes them. The transformation is real, even if our explanation for it requires more nuance.

I suspect the deeper lesson extends far beyond the trauma debate. Because this tendency to see objects instead of processes shows up everywhere. We think of health as an object we possess. Purpose as an object we find. Identity as an object we discover. Relationships as objects we maintain. But life rarely behaves this way. Even the self may be less like a thing and more like an ongoing conversation.

The more I work with people, the less interested I become in what is stored where. I am far more interested in what is currently being expressed. How is this person breathing? How are they moving? What captures their attention? What do they anticipate? What feels safe? What feels dangerous? What stories are being enacted through the living system right now? Those questions tend to reveal far more than arguments about tissue ever could. Because regardless of where the score originates, we are always interacting with the performance. And performances can change.

There is a larger invitation here;

To stop seeing ourselves as objects that need fixing.

To start seeing ourselves as living systems capable of ongoing reorganization.

Not machines.

Not mechanisms.

Not collections of parts.

But processes; ever changing and full of alive-ness.