The psychiatrist Bessel Fender Kolk is an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences on people and society.

We call this trauma when we encounter it in life and news, and we tend to leap to address it by talking.

But he knows how some experiences imprint themselves in the body beyond where language can reach and how our brains

take care of our bodies.

This is Becoming Wise, an inquiry into the mystery and art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett. to tip it.

Way back already in 1872, Charles Darwin wrote a book about emotions, in which he talks about how emotions are expressed in things like heartbreak and gut-wrenching experience.

So you feel things in your body.

And then it became obvious that if people are in a constant state of heartbreak and gut-wrench,

they do everything to shut down those feelings in their body.

One way of doing it is taking drugs and alcohol.

And the other thing is that you can just shut down your emotional awareness of your body.

And so a very large number of trauma these people who we see, I'd say the majority of the

people we treat at the trauma center and in my practice have very cut-off relationship to their bodies.

They may not feel what's happening in their bodies.

They may not register what goes on with them.

And so what became very clear is that we needed to help people for them to feel safe, feeling the sensations in their bodies, to start having a

relationship with the life of their organism, as I like to call it.

I wonder if you have ever heard of somebody named Matthew Sanford, who I've had on my program.

He's actually, he's a yoga, he's a very renowned yoga teacher.

He's been paraplegic since he was 13.

He had no memory of the accident in which he was disabled and his body remembered it.

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