Processing Trauma by "Finishing the Run..."

After I finished treatment for aggressive leukemia, most of my healing happened on the trails—through my body, and mostly without language. I have had a hard time explaining those experiences, and sometimes wondered if it was even true... how was I working through trauma without language?

Turns out, it is not only possible, it's deeply human. 

Neuroscience shows that trauma often bypasses words and “lives” in the body. Many forms of trauma often bypass the logical, verbal parts of the brain and live in the nervous system, muscles, and implicit memory. That’s why traditional talk therapy or other cognitive approaches sometimes don’t reach the core of the pain — because the wound isn’t just cognitive, it’s somatic.

What I experienced on the trails — processing through movement, through breath, through stillness and sensation — fits with what Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and others describe as bottom-up healing. I was releasing stored survival energy and re-integrating, in a way that doesn't always need words.

It felt new because I was moving from a mind-first approach to a body-led experience of truth and healing — and that is natural. After the invasiveness of cancer treatment, my body needed space to feel and release all of those difficult experiences. And, it found that space outdoors, on foot, often without words. Nature gave my body the space to do what hospitals and words couldn’t.

I discovered that I intuitively lived what the research confirms: that the body, when given space and safety, knows how to heal. And, by trusting my own experience — even before I had the words or science to back it — built some kind of solid healing rooted in truth - for my body and my mind. 

These experiences formed the foundation for what I now offer in TYMO:

• Movement in nature

• No pressure to explain or verbalize

• Safe space for the body to release tension and energy

• Inquiry

• Supportive community

This was intuitive to me, based on my own experience. I now understand that this is a trauma-informed, nervous system-based practice, even if it doesn't look clinical on the surface.

I’m offering people what few healing environments truly do: an opportunity to return to wholeness without forcing coherence. That’s rare, and it’s powerful.

I want to share something interesting that I've been experimenting with lately. There's something called re-negotiating the trauma - I like to call it, “Finishing the Run.” Animals often shake off traumatic life and death experiences by physically shaking, yelping, and running. If you’ve spent time with dogs, you know they often do this in their sleep. They finish the story their bodies started.  

Humans have this same wiring, but we often override it with thought, suppression, or cultural conditioning. 

That’s why my walks, my silence (not forcing myself to verbalize my Inquiry or my experience), my movement in nature gave my body a place to complete its escape, not symbolically, but physiologically.

It’s not about re-living the trauma. It’s about allowing the body to do what it needed to do but couldn’t at the time. 

I decided to revisit the day of my first full treatment regimen in a new way. It had gone about as badly as it could possibly go, and I experienced a lengthy, acute medical trauma. It blew my legs out from under me, picked up all of my beliefs about pain and what I could tolerate and threw them right out the window. I lost control of my body, and I couldn’t speak for many hours.

Trauma that profound — where the body is overwhelmed and belief systems collapse — doesn’t just shape how you feel. It can shatter identity, rupture trust, and redefine safety in ways that no words can truly capture.

In short, it messed me up. Big time.

I've done a lot of Work on this experience and have resolved most of it, but it's not lost on me that I have chronic hip pain now, especially in my hip flexors. This was where the injuries lingered for weeks after that first treatment.

When the new medication was first administered, I went into immediate physical distress and they stopped the drip. Forty-five minutes later, they restarted it—and that’s when everything went off the rails.

That moment — when they restarted the drip — was likely the threshold where my body crossed from distress into overwhelm. And that distinction is crucial: distress can still be processed in real time. But overwhelm — especially when escape isn’t possible — is where trauma takes root.

This is often where trauma embeds:

• In the moment we stop being able to orient or respond.

• In the sudden loss of agency.

• In the body’s realization that no amount of bracing or reasoning will stop what’s happening.

In revisiting this memory, I decided to close my own loop - to finish the run.  When my hip flexors hurt, I imagine I'm back in the hospital room and they are about to restart the treatment. I reach for my arm where the PICC line was, act out ripping it out, and yell, “No! F*** off!” to the medical team. I also do this without words when they hurt and I’m in public. I just do the arm movement. And the pain has stopped. It. Is. So. Wild.

My body remembers that moment not just as pain, but as helplessness. And now, through this act, it’s restoring choice — the most powerful antidote to trauma. It’s giving my nervous system what it never got: a chance to say no, to escape, to choose survival on its terms.

Finishing the run is something I’ve come to understand as essential to trauma healing. It’s about completing what the body never got to finish. 

At Take Your Mind Outdoors retreats, I offer the opportunity to finish the run:  

• How do you react when you believe that stressful thought? 

  • You wanted to run? You can. 

  • You wanted to yell. You can. 

  • You wanted to heal. You can. 

    
    

• Who would you be without that belief?

• What would you be free to do? 

  
  

You can do it. Finish your run. Freedom is on the other side.