Clearing the Path

Trauma, Muscle Memory, and the Biofield

Aug 01, 2025

When I was around 23 years old I worked in a small natural food store. One night around 6:00 I was behind the counter with my coworker when a man burst through the door pointing a gun in my face demanding we give him all the money in the cash registers. In my naivety, never having an experience like this before, I looked at my coworker beside me at the other register; surely this was a friend of his trying to be funny. But I could see on his face that this wasn’t a joke. So I obliged. As I followed the orders, I felt this deep sense of calm. While it was probably less than a minute, time felt long. I remember taking a paper bag from under the counter, opening the register, and taking the cash out one denomination at a time from each divided section of the drawer. I could feel the pressure of the gun pointed at me, but I experienced no panic whatsoever. In fact, I was at peace. I remember thinking, This might be my last day alive… that’s okay.

The robber left and the police came. I gave my description of the man, his clothing, his gun, what he said. I remembered everything in detail. Then I heard my coworker Luis give his description. He was panicked. He didn’t know what the guy looked like, hadn’t noticed the clothes he was wearing, and his description of the gun was altogether different than mine. It seemed strange because Luis had been in the military and he knew guns.

They say muscle memory isn’t in our muscles at all. It’s when our brain creates a neural pathway after we learn something new. That’s why when I got a bicycle for my birthday last year and had not ridden one since childhood, I hopped right on and pedaled off, no wobbles! In the 30 years since I had last been on a bike, every cell in my entire body had been replaced a few times over so the memory can’t be in the muscles.

Science says that a neuron is a specialized cell that carries electrochemical impulses through the body with sensory information. Once that pathway is there, your brain keeps using it. No different than using a path in the woods that’s been trampled down by hikers who came before you, rather than creating a new trail that would require ducking under branches and avoiding thorn bushes.

At the time of the robbery, I had a very strong yoga practice. Several times a week I was going to a studio that was run by an incredible teacher. She got me to connect my breath with my movements, taught me how to be present, experience mindfulness, and be aware of all the sensations in my body and mind. I concluded that the inner calm I had experienced, even as I pondered whether I was about to die, was thanks to this practice. After class as everyone put on their shoes and gathered their mats, I hung back, moving slowly, waiting for them to leave so I could have a moment alone with my teacher, Trisha. I told her the story and how calm I had felt, and finished with, If not for you teaching me how to be mindful and present, I wouldn’t have gotten through it the way I did, so thank-you. She looked a bit shocked and pushed away my gratitude, insisting it was me who did it on my own, nothing to do with her.

Despite my cool composure in the moment, the experience was more traumatic than I’d first realized. When I was at work things started to set me off. If I heard the slam of the cash register drawer, I’d tense up. One time I even hid. My conscious mind didn’t want to embarrass myself in a store full of people, so I didn’t get on the ground like I really wanted to—after a loud sound I froze behind the end of an aisle until I was sure we weren’t being robbed again. This didn’t happen a lot, but the behavior continued for several months. I had been at peace with a gun in my face interacting with the perpetrator, but after I processed all the possibilities of what could have happened, the distant sound of a cash register put my nervous system into fight or flight.

Just recently I ran into a woman who I met about a year and half ago and had not seen since. She told me she was going through a tough time. Her daughter who is in her 40s just lost one of her best friends. She’s had the same circle of friends since grade school. Last year one of them had a massive heart attack and died, and now this year another of the girls died of cancer. Only 3 of the 5 friends are left. She told me that when the friend died last year it came as a shock to everyone, but her daughter took it surprisingly well. This time with the most recent loss, her daughter was falling apart. She couldn’t stop crying and was inconsolable.

I suspect that’s the reason the 23 year old girl with little life experience could look down the barrel of a gun with a straight face and the combat war veteran by her side was a blubbering mess. In the things he had seen, he already had the neural pathways to know in his core that something really bad might be coming. In my “mindfulness” I knew I might be about to get murdered, but I didn’t have the “muscle memory” to tell my nervous system to prepare for trauma like Luis did. That came later, when any loud bang would have me ducking behind the cereal box display. That’s why I told the cops it was a small, brown, revolver-style handgun, and the only word wide-eyed Luis could say when they asked about the weapon was, “BIG!”

Although the word “triggered” has become almost meaningless due to overuse and hyperbole by the millennial generation, it’s not inaccurate. The repetition of an experience, or more often the perception that an experience might occur, shoots us down the neural pathway to react to an old trauma.

To lose a best friend unexpectedly at middle age was a shock, but it was a new experience. When it happens again only a year later, the memory of the pain, sorrow, emptiness, grief, floods right to the surface, and the body cries all the tears it didn’t know to cry before. It anticipates all the pain that is coming that was unknown the first time. And the pathway becomes a bit more trampled and defined. For me, nothing that bad actually happened the night of the robbery. I was never touched, was left completely unharmed, and as I said, actually felt fine. It was all the story telling to the police, my boss, my boyfriend, my parents, with the emphasis was on how lucky I was to be okay, and how tragic it may have been. That was enough to create muscle memory that would prepare me for trauma when I heard a loud noise, even though I hadn’t experienced any harm.

In Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Franz Perl says, “Whenever you leave the sure basis of the now and become preoccupied with the future, you experience anxiety. And if the future represents a performance, this anxiety is nothing but stage fright. You are full of catastrophic expectations about the bad things that will happen, or anastrophic expectations about the wonderful things that will happen.”

It takes presence and mindfulness to be conscious of the real life situation happening in the current moment and not get pulled down the path of reaction to the past. Then you can allow new reactions, behaviors, and states of mind to happen. It’s more than trying to undo well established muscle memory. Even after your blaze a new neural trail, the old one continues to call you down its path as occasions arise. I remember Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken; one path is less traveled than the other, but they’re both still there, giving us the option to go down either one we choose.

green trees on green grass field during daytime — Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

And not only does it remain in our brain, but the past trauma stays in our body’s electric field as well. Just as the axons and neurons send electric impulses through our nerves (so they say) our whole body is electrically charged. The NIH has called the electromagnetic field surrounding all living things the “biofield” which they define, “a massless field, not necessarily electromagnetic, that surrounds and permeates living bodies and affects the body.”

Eileen McKusick has worked with the human biofield extensively using tuning forks and sound frequencies. She developed a technique called Biofield Tuning where she uses tuning forks to identify areas of the biofield that are “out of tune” or incoherent, and “retune” them or bring the biofield back into coherence. In her book, Electric Body, Electric Health she writes about using tuning forks over a person’s body, “There seemed to be this whole vibro-acoustic structure that appeared to exist in the atmosphere around the body. What soon became clear was that the energetic disturbances I was picking up correlated with the emotional and physical traumas that people had experienced throughout their lives. The energy field seemed to be acting as a record of our life experiences of pain, stress, and trauma from birth onward, with older experiences moving out like rings on a tree.”

She goes on to explain that every cell has microtubules, which vibrate differently based on the vibrations of the environment, like antennas, and says, “Scientists have recently discovered that microtubules start to fail in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s. Based on my own understanding, if our memories are indeed stored in standing waves in the field, and if the microtubule is an apparatus for retrieving these memories but the microtubule is not functioning properly, then it would make sense that these people are not able to retrieve their memories. The memories are not physically located in the brain; they’re actually stored in the field (or perhaps they are stored in both).” (Emphasis added) This raises some very interesting questions about the nature of memory, learned behavior, traumatic events, and neural pathways.

After reading this book I was very interested in experiencing a Biofield Tuning session, but didn’t know where I would ever find a practitioner because it seemed to be such a niche technique that wasn’t well known. A few weeks after finishing the book, I was leaving a small natural food store with my groceries, and as I reached for the door, there tacked at eye level was a flyer for a Biofield Tuning practitioner right in my area! I made an appointment for a 1 hour session, and assumed she would use tuning forks to comb through my whole biofield and harmonize any incoherent vibrations.

I arrived to my appointment and settled in, telling the practitioner, Ariana, why I was there. I had never seen a tuning fork in person before, and I didn’t know how it was supposed to sound, but on the first strike I knew, it’s not supposed to sound like that! It rang out a very off-key, howling tone. As she continued to strike it, over and over in one area of the outer edge of my field, the fork played its note much more clearly. She stayed in this part of my biofield for most of the session and focused on trauma from the day I was born, something I had never really thought about. It was sort of like thinking you were going to get a full body massage, but instead the masseuse spends the whole hour on just your left shoulder. It’s still great to get the shoulder worked out, but there’s a lot of work left to do. I had gone in with an expectation that I would be hearing, Wow! Your biofield is so clear and amazingly coherent! You must do a lot of work on yourself! I was wrong. I went back for about a dozen more sessions, each time working on another area of my field.

One of the things I like about this technique for dealing with trauma, is that although I occasionally verbalize stories of past experiences as Ariana retunes me, there is no need to relive the trauma in order to clear it. I believe that reliving trauma, although there may be some beneficial insights gained, reinforces the “muscle memory” neural pathways that create patterns of behavior and emotions that we don’t desire. Whereas a biofield tuning reinforces a strong, coherent, harmonious vibration, that doesn’t require attempting to mentally sort out a traumatic experience and move on from it despite the brain trying to follow the same old neural pathways.

On the Biofield Tuning social media, they put it more simply, “In Biofield Tuning, we understand the body has an electric system—and the biofield as the electromagnetic field that surrounds and informs it. When sound enters this field, it interacts with areas of dissonance—regions of turbulence, stagnation, or unresolved memory—and helps bring them into a state of greater coherence. Whether it creates a subtle shift or a profound release, sound works by signaling the system to reorganize. It helps the body regulate, recalibrate, and remember its natural rhythm—restoring flow, clarity, and connection beneath the static.”

There’s not much that’s more infuriating to me than expressing feelings of deep hurt to someone who responds with, “Let it go.” My Christian family always told me to forgive, but they never taught me how to do it. I don’t think they know. They made it sound as if saying, I forgive you, would act as an incantation--poof! the issue would be resolved forever and I would become more Christ-like with no real effort. Some say that forgiveness is for your own peace, not for the person who wronged you, but all my life I’ve struggled with figuring out how to achieve this. It doesn’t happen spontaneously like my parents described. It’s especially difficult with family members you have so much history with. Rather than the impossibly simplistic “forgive and forget,” it’s far easier to put their trespasses out of mind and “just forget.” But it isn’t forgiveness and it isn’t healing. It’s sort of like shoving clutter in the closet or under the bed before guests come over. They can’t see it, but your house is still filled with junk.

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After having a few Biofield Tuning sessions, a number of instances occurred in my life where people I love hurt me emotionally. It felt like a series of metaphorical stabbings over the course of 3 weeks. I’ve rarely cried as an adult, but now I couldn’t even control my tears in public. Despite being extremely emotional, I knew none of it was my fault. The problem was with them, not me. I can’t say for sure that it was because of the Biofield Tunings, but I wonder if clearing out the energetic remnants of old traumas along with my own aura being stronger and brighter, allowed me to recognize that this painful energy didn’t belong in my field.

At earlier times in my life, when things like this happened I might have just accepted them into my field and allowed them to penetrate me. Then as future events triggered me I’d unconsciously react to the old experience in different ways, maybe over and over for years. This time I felt the feelings, but was able to recognize that the hurtful situation wasn’t a vibrational match for me, and this allowed me to not internalize it or embody the negative energy.

Life is a series of traumatic and hurtful events. Of course there’s lots of other things, but pain is part of it. A technique like Gestalt therapy requires a new mindset, a new way of dealing with the present to create new neural pathways. Working directly with the biofield is a way to clear lingering trauma no matter what our mindset is. Massage and chiropractic adjustments can clear emotional tension held in the physical body. Forgiveness may exist, but only in a highly evolved spiritual form, a level I haven’t been able to stay on consistently. I’m sure there are many more ways to embark on this venture of healing and self-improvement. In my experience a combined approach has been the best way to eliminate reactionary behaviors that stem from past experiences.

If memories do exist as waves around us, not just in some compartment of the brain, and we want to be free from reacting to our traumatic past, we need to separate those experiences from our energy field, which some people consider to be our soul. I believe that when you come back to your true self, with clarity on what you truly are, then you can feel and process the hurts of life without getting caught up believing that they’re you. This might allow us to move on from pain and not integrate it into who we are or how we feel and behave. It makes it easier to see the trampled down, old pathway for what it is, and choose a better way through this wilderness of life.