Where the Body Leads, and the Mind Lets Go: What Somatic Work Reveals About the Three Principles

Where the Body Leads, and the Mind Lets Go: What Somatic Work Reveals About the Three Principles

As I spend more time immersed in the coaching world, I keep seeing something quietly powerful: many modalities — somatic work, mindfulness, even nervous system regulation — seem to be pointing back to something the Three Principles have been pointing to all along.

In somatic work, there’s often an emphasis on “feeling the feeling” — on getting out of the mind and into the body, where unprocessed emotion and trauma are said to live. Practitioners guide clients to slow down, notice sensations, move gently between activation and calm, and allow the body to complete the stress cycle. The nervous system, in this model, becomes the place where healing occurs.

It’s beautiful work. But what I love about the Three Principles is that they take it even deeper — and simpler.

The Three Principles don’t ask us to manage or manipulate what’s happening in our body or mind. Instead, they show us something foundational: that we are designed to come back to balance. That beneath all of our experience — physical, emotional, psychological — is an intelligence that’s always trying to restore us. Not because we do it right, but because it’s our nature.

Somatic work is just another way of pointing to the feeling. And the feeling is everything.

When we learn not to analyze our feelings, not to label or fix or process them — but to feel them — they move. Often quickly. There’s nothing to “release” from the body when you stop feeding the feeling with thought.

Sometimes a big emotion comes, and our instinct is to think into it. To figure it out. But that thinking often amplifies the emotion, making it stickier, heavier.

When we get quiet instead — when we allow the feeling to pass through without story — it moves. Because it was never stuck in the body. It was stuck in the mind.

That’s the beauty of this approach: it reconnects us to our design. Just like a cut on the skin begins to heal immediately without our interference, our mind and body know how to reset — if we don’t get in the way.

And what makes the Three Principles more than just “somatic work without the work” is this: It’s not just about feeling better — it’s about realizing who you are.

When you begin to see that you are not your thoughts or your moods or even your trauma — but something deeper, connected to the formless energy of all life — everything changes. You stop trying to earn peace or chase regulation, and you start to feel the steady presence of something bigger than you… that is you.

It’s this connection to formless Mind — the intelligence behind life — that allows not only healing, but insight. That’s the added dimension: not just relief, but realization. Not just calm, but creativity. A fresh thought. A deeper knowing. A felt sense of possibility.

To me, this is where the Three Principles shine. They don’t exclude somatic awareness — they include it, but from a deeper source. They show us that feeling is not the enemy of healing. It’s the door to it.

This understanding bridges what so many modalities are reaching for:

The unity of psychology and spirituality.

The intelligence of the body and the wisdom of the mind.

The truth that we don’t need to be repaired — just reminded.

And once you see it… you see it everywhere.