It was late afternoon in November when I passed the houses. That particular time of day when the light is already failing, when dusk arrives early and the world takes on a muted, interior quality. The kind of afternoon that carries weight even before anything happens.
I was driving toward a pub to meet two friends when I passed a row of houses. And before any thought formed, something shifted in my body. A sensation appeared in my mid-back, that dorsal area between my shoulder blades and lower ribs, slightly to the side. Not painful. Just present. A quiet sense of not here. Not this. Not belonging.
The conceptual mind followed quickly behind: I don’t belong in a place like this. This world isn’t mine. I’m dislocated here.
But the body spoke first.
November does this to me. Not every day, not consciously, but there’s something about this month—the early darkness, the cold, the particular quality of late afternoon light—that carries old memory in my nervous system. My sister had a serious accident in November, years ago. She was run over by a car in a town far from where we lived, and my parents had to leave suddenly, traveling long distance to be with her. The house was left empty. Cold. Dark. I was picked up by family friends and taken elsewhere while my parents were gone, and somewhere in my young body, that abandonment—not intentional, but felt nonetheless—left its mark.
The uncertainty of that time. The house deserted. The not knowing. The sensation of the world continuing around me while something terrible was happening elsewhere that I couldn’t reach or fix.
I think my body still remembers that. Not as story, but as sensation. In November. In late afternoons. In moments when I see warm houses with lights on and feel the gap between me and that warmth.
But the pattern is older than that, I think. There were times in my childhood when I’d sit in the back of the car, looking out the window while my parents sat in the front. My father would be in the passenger seat—he didn’t drive. He was chronically ill, getting sicker, and I could feel his sadness the way children feel things: not with words, but with the whole body. My mother would sometimes get agitated with him, and he’d become agitated in return, but underneath it all I sensed his deeper sadness. The weight of illness. The diminishment of life.
And I’d look out the window at houses we passed, houses with lights on, and my young nervous system learned something it couldn’t articulate: That world is separate from this one. I’m in here with the sadness. That warmth over there—it’s not mine.
That’s not a thought a child has. It’s a sensation a child carries. In the back. In that dorsal area. The body creating protective distance from both the pain inside the car and the imagined warmth outside it.
So now, decades later, when I drive past houses on a November afternoon—houses that look settled, tended, held—my nervous system remembers. Not conceptually. Somatically. The back tightens. The dorsal system does what it learned to do: Withdraw. Create distance. Don’t reach toward that. Remember what homes actually contain. Remember dislocation.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
This is simply what the nervous system does when it encounters moments that trigger old patterns of not-belonging. It’s not pathology. It’s not a problem to fix. It’s the body remembering what it learned long ago about where we do and don’t fit, about what happens in November, about the gap between warmth glimpsed and warmth inhabited.
I arrived at the pub and found my friends already there. The conversation started easily, the way it does when you’re with people who know you. There was warmth, laughter, the kind of convivial atmosphere that should have grounded me completely. And for a while, it did. I was present—or thought I was—until my eye caught a shop window across the way.
It was lit with that particular quality of early winter light, the kind that carries the first whisper of Christmas. The glow was soft, inviting, faintly nostalgic. And in that moment, even while sitting at a table with friends, even while inside actual belonging, something inside me pulled away.
Not dramatically. Not in any way my friends would have noticed. But I felt my attention abstract. That same sensation in my mid-back returned—the dorsal area tightening, creating distance. The same quiet sense of being somehow adjacent to the beauty I was witnessing rather than inside it.
This is what I’ve come to understand: these moments of dislocation don’t just happen when we’re alone or in unfamiliar territory. They can arrive uninvited even when we’re already held, already inside warmth. The nervous system doesn’t always trust stability. It remembers November afternoons when the house went dark. It remembers backseats and sadness and the chronic uncertainty of illness. It remembers being near warmth but not quite inside it.
And the body, doing what bodies do to protect us, creates a small distance. A gap. Just enough space to say: Be careful. Don’t settle in too completely. Remember.
This isn’t pathology. This isn’t a flaw. This is the dorsal vagal system doing its job—the part of our nervous system that learned to protect us through withdrawal, through creating safe distance, through not investing fully in moments that might not hold us.
And here’s what matters: this is so much more common than we admit.
So many of us walk through the world carrying these subtle moments of not-quite-belonging, not-quite-here, not-quite-inside-the-moment. We pass houses on November afternoons and feel the quiet rupture of dislocation. We sit with friends and still feel slightly removed. We encounter warmth and can’t quite let ourselves land in it. And we think it’s just us. We carry it alone, convinced we’re uniquely stuck, uniquely unable to be present.
But we’re not.
This is the body remembering what it learned to do to keep us safe. Maybe in backseats, watching parents navigate their own pain. Maybe in November, when the house went dark and cold. Maybe in a thousand small moments when warmth was glimpsed but not quite reached. And the more we talk about it—the more we name these moments without shame—the less alone we feel. And in that shared recognition, something begins to shift.
Because here’s what I’ve learned from somatic work, from Polyvagal theory, from practitioners like Peter Levine: the sensation itself isn’t the problem. The problem is feeling unsafe with the sensation.
When we brace against the feeling, when we make it mean something’s wrong with us, when we decide we’re broken because we feel dislocated—that’s when we suffer. But when we can simply let the sensation be a sensation, when we can befriend it rather than fight it, something different becomes possible.
This is what Michael A. Singer meant when he said that freedom comes not from controlling the experience, but from experiencing the experience—being the witness to what arises rather than the judge of it.
When I noticed the sensation in my back—really noticed it, without trying to change it—I could name it: Back. Tension. Dislocation. Just simple words that acknowledge what’s present. Not analyzing it, not solving the childhood origin, just being with what’s here now.
And then I could breathe. Not forcing anything, just allowing my breath to deepen slightly, to reach that dorsal area, to signal to my vagus nerve: You’re safe. This feeling can move through. You don’t have to hold it.
This is the practice of regulation—not eliminating the sensation, but befriending it. Noticing it. Naming it. Breathing with it. Allowing the nervous system to remember that it can return home to itself, that wholeness isn’t about never feeling dislocated, but about being able to move through dislocation without collapsing around it.
This is metabolization. Not thinking our way out of what the body carries. Not analyzing every November afternoon or backseat memory. Just allowing the sensation to be witnessed, to move, to complete itself. The body knows how to do this. It just needs permission. It needs to feel safe enough to let the feeling pass through rather than storing it again in the dorsal back, in the protective distance, in the old pattern of withdrawal.
The sensation in my back didn’t disappear. But it softened. It shifted. It became just sensation passing through rather than evidence of something wrong with me.
And this is where somatic literacy changes everything. When we shift from labels to lived experience, from stories to sensations, something in us unlocks. The body begins to reveal its quiet intelligence—not dramatic, not overwhelming, just honest.
You feel the breath move differently. You feel the back soften slightly. You notice that the experience isn’t trying to harm you; it’s trying to be witnessed. It’s asking: Can you be with me without making me wrong?
What if we normalized this? What if we told the truth that most of us move through moments of dislocation regularly, especially in certain seasons, certain times of day, certain qualities of light that touch old memories? What if we recognized that the dorsal vagal response isn’t a malfunction but a protective pattern we can learn to work with? What if we understood that these sensations aren’t signs of failure but invitations to practice—to notice, to name, to breathe, to regulate, to let the body metabolize what it’s been holding since childhood?
You’re not strange for feeling this.
You’re not failing at presence.
You’re not uniquely broken.
You’re simply living in a body that learned to protect itself through withdrawal—in backseats, in November, in moments when warmth was near but uncertain—and is now, slowly, learning that it can feel dislocation without being defined by it.
This is the practice: befriending the sensation. Experiencing the experience. Noticing what arises in the back, naming it simply—back, tension, distance, November—and breathing in a way that tells the vagus nerve it’s safe to come home. To remember that you are whole. That dislocation is just a pattern, not a truth. That the body’s protective wisdom was never the problem—only the loneliness and shame around it was.
The more we speak about this, the more human the world becomes.
The more we notice, the less we collapse.
The more we befriend what we feel, the more we belong.
Already mindful.
Already human.
Already enough.