What the Body Remembers

There are things we are drawn to before we have language for why.

Not intellectually drawn, the way you might be curious about something new. The other kind. The recognition kind. The kind where something arrives and some part of you, deeper than thought, says: I know this.

I have been sitting with that feeling for most of my adult life. And in this particular season, when the veil between what is seen and what is felt grows thin, it feels worth naming.

What finds us when we aren’t looking

I was never supposed to be a tarot person.

I had grown up in the particular way many of us did, surrounded by the quiet understanding that certain things were nonsense. Psychics. Cards. The suggestion that something beyond the rational world might be available to those willing to pay attention. I absorbed the dismissal without fully believing it, carrying an undercurrent of something I couldn’t name.

Then a friend handed me their tarot deck to “play” with.

I shuffled it the way I have always shuffled cards; deftly, without thinking, in a way people have commented on my entire life without me understanding why it came so naturally. Then I read.

Not haltingly. Not tentatively. As if I had been doing it all my life.

Because some part of me had.

That is the thing about the practices that find us when we aren’t looking. They don’t feel like learning. They feel like remembering. The body moves before the mind catches up. The hands know what to do. The knowing arrives fully formed from somewhere that has nothing to do with this lifetime’s education.

What we resist and why

The flip side of the inexplicable attraction is the inexplicable resistance.

The things that create a visceral reaction; not boredom, not disinterest, but something more charged than that. An aversion that doesn’t have a rational explanation in this life. A closing off that happens before conscious thought.

I have wondered, more than once, whether the things we resist most strongly are the things that cost us something in a different life.

There is a line from Practical Magic 2 that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

“We’re all pallbearers of our ancestors’ pain.”

It landed hard when I heard it. It names something I had been circling for years without quite finding the words; that the things we resist most strongly, the aversions that arrive before rational thought, the instinct to qualify every true thing with “I know this sounds crazy, but…”, they didn’t necessarily originate with us. We inherited them. We carry the weight of what it cost someone before us to know what we know.

The soul remembers not just what felt like home. It remembers what it felt like to be punished for living there. …and it speaks through the body; in the hands that know how to shuffle, in the chest that tightens before the mind understands why.

The permission we stop waiting for

Something shifted for me this year that I’m still finding words for.

I have barely decorated for Halloween. I haven’t been watching the same movies with the abandon I usually bring to October. The season that used to feel like the one time of year I could let the stranger parts of myself breathe - the curiosity about things unseen, the pull toward practices that don’t fit neatly into rational frameworks, the knowings I couldn’t explain - doesn’t feel the same.

It took me a while to understand why.

I don’t need it anymore. Not in the way I used to.

For most of my life, Halloween was the season I was allowed. The one window in the calendar where the things I actually believed could be a little more visible, a little more celebrated, without requiring explanation or apology. I leaned into it hard because it was the only time the door was open.

Somewhere in the last year…in the writing, the research, in the naming of things I had carried quietly for decades…I stopped waiting for the door to open. I walked through it and kept going. The practices I once had to justify are simply part of how I move through the world now. The things I used to save for October I live in every day.

I still love this season. I love the quality of October light and the particular energy that arrives when the veil thins and the ancestors draw closer. I love what Samhain represents in the oldest traditions, the harvest complete, the darkness welcomed, the stories told by firelight (aka hibernation time!).

But I no longer need it as permission.

That is, perhaps, what the body remembers most reliably. Not just the practices that feel like home. Not just the resistances that carry old warnings. But the slow, cumulative work of learning to trust what it knows; in October and in every other month of the year.