You were not bad at being in your body. You just left.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about using alcohol, or anything else that blunts sensation, consistently enough and long enough: it works. That is the whole problem.

You stop feeling the low-grade tension that has been running in your shoulders since 2019. You stop noticing the way your chest tightens before certain conversations. You stop clocking the ambient discomfort of being a person with a nervous system, memories, and an inbox. The relief is real. That is why it becomes a habit. Something effective rarely stays occasional.

What you also stop feeling is everything else. The body is not selective in what it muffles.

Somatic teachers and trauma therapists describe this as dissociation from the body. It sounds clinical, but it describes something most people recognize from the inside. The vague sense of watching yourself from a slight distance. The difficulty knowing what you actually feel versus what you think you should feel. The way physical sensation has gone slightly flat. The peculiar experience of being very busy and very absent at the same time.

The path back is slower than the path out. That is the honest version.

Somatic work and yoga, specifically the kind with enough stillness to qualify as more than exercise, are two of the more reliable routes. Not because they are uniquely healing in some abstract sense. Because they share a basic method: they ask you to notice what is happening in your body right now, before you explain it or name it or decide what it means. That noticing is the practice. Most of us have been avoiding it.

In yoga, it looks like holding a shape long enough to feel something beyond the initial stretch. Long enough for the next layer to surface. You have a thought. You notice the thought. You come back to your breath. You notice where the breath catches. This is not exotic. It is just paying attention in a direction you have not been paying attention to.

In somatic work, a practitioner might ask: where do you feel that in your body? Not: tell me about the time something difficult happened. Where is the weight right now? What is happening in your chest, your jaw, your hands? The body has been keeping very good records. The work is learning to read them.

The re-entry is uncomfortable in a specific way. You start noticing things you were successfully not noticing. Old feelings come back up. Your shoulders do something in the car that they used to do before they were anesthetized. You feel slightly more present and slightly less comfortable at the same time. This is sometimes described as "the work getting harder before it gets easier," and it is real, though a skilled facilitator can pace this so it does not become overwhelming. That pacing matters. Going too fast undoes the point.

The most important reframe: you were not bad at being in your body. You just found something that made leaving very easy. The nervous system learned that inside was uncomfortable and outside was relief. Now it needs different evidence. Slowly, with repetition and a little support, the body learns that it is safe to stay.

You do not have to go fast. The pace, for once, is not a limitation. It is the method.