The Body As A Portal: When Your Wound Becomes Your Gateway

The intimate connection between trauma, the body, and spiritual awakening is a journey many of us encounter but few fully articulate.

In my recent, profound conversation with Faye Laroux, we explored how the body serves as both a vessel for trauma and the ultimate portal to transformation.

Faye's path began on the prestigious stages of the American Ballet Theater, where at just 17 years old, she was immersed in a world of elite performance, perfectionism, and what she describes as "grooming" culture. The ballet world, while beautiful from the outside, contained darker undercurrents of control, misogyny, and voicelessness. As Faye explains, dancers are trained to let their bodies be shaped and directed by external forces, a pattern that can open vulnerabilities in other areas of life. This early conditioning created a foundation for both heightened sensitivity and susceptibility to manipulation.

What's particularly striking about Faye's experience is her perspective on trauma itself. Rather than viewing trauma solely as damage to be repaired, she offers a revolutionary reframe: "Trauma is the codex to psychic power." This perspective reveals how trauma breaks us open into heightened states of sensitivity, creating a critical choice point: we can either allow this opening to harden and close, or we can choose to maintain this sensitivity and allow it to reshape our lives entirely. The latter path requires tremendous courage—the willingness to feel everything and to live differently than most people.

The body's intelligence emerges as a central theme throughout our conversation. As Faye describes, the body isn't merely housing our subconscious mind—it is our subconscious mind made tangible. Through her work with Hellerwork (structural integration) and other modalities, she discovered that "the only pain is resistance." This profound insight applies not just to physical pressure but to all of life's challenges. When we resist what is happening, we create internal conflict that manifests as suffering. The alternative—learning to receive pressure, to let go under its influence—creates an entirely different experience.

Perhaps most compelling is Faye's description of the body as a portal. Through deep embodiment practices, we can move beyond the illusion of solidity and separation. "The form, the material, is just an illusion," she explains. By bringing consciousness into sensation, feeling ever more deeply, we eventually reach a point where the boundaries between inner and outer dissolve. This is where healing truly occurs—not by fighting against what has happened, but by allowing it to move through us completely, extracting its wisdom without letting it define us.

This understanding leads to important insights about the larger forces at work in our world. Faye speaks of energetic parasites that operate through disconnection and self-abandonment. Rather than focusing on blame, she points to the importance of sovereignty—recognizing how we unknowingly participate in these dynamics and choosing differently. True freedom comes when we can see beyond good/bad polarities into the larger evolutionary process unfolding through these challenges.

The path of healing trauma isn't about returning to who we were before it occurred. It's about becoming something entirely new—integrating the gifts of sensitivity and insight that come through these ruptures. This is the journey of the spiritual warrior, walking the edge between opposing forces, choosing again and again to stay present with what is arising. The warrior's heart is raw and exposed—painfully beautiful in its vulnerability and strength.

What emerges from this conversation is a radical invitation to reconsider our relationship with both trauma and healing. Perhaps the greatest transformation doesn't come from trying to fix or eliminate our wounds, but from allowing them to break us open to new dimensions of perception and being. Through the disciplined practice of embodiment, we learn not just to survive trauma but to alchemize it into wisdom, power, and purpose.

Listen to the podcast episode