Prey on Predatorless lands

Sometimes, when I move on all fours across the woodland floor, something in me begins to listen differently.

It is not listening with ears, exactly, although they do prick, tilt. It is not my mind listening for information, but the skin, the muscle, the blood. It’s a kind of whole-body orientation that belongs to the animal beneath the language. The one that does not ask if it’s safe,  it simply knows, or it doesn’t.

When I let this part of me lead, I do not feel like I’m moving through the land. I feel like I am  part of it,  one moving element within a larger, breathing field. My  rhythm slows. My  gaze softens. I start to feel less like a self, and more like a body. And not just any body, but  a prey body. 

Attuned. Responsive. Alive to everything.

And yet… there are no wolves here. No big cats. No bear or lynx or waiting teeth.

I live in a country,  like much of Western Europe,  that has long since eradicated its apex predators. And still, my body moves like prey.

So I find myself asking:

• What happens to the part of us that is born to be hunted when nothing is chasing us?

• Where does that alertness go, when there are no predators left?

• Where does it live?

And what does it do to us?  to our wounds, our senses, our truths, when our nervous system is still shaped by a threat that never comes?

To move as animal is not the same as moving like an animal. It is not a performance or posture. It is not becoming feral or wild for effect. It is  a kind of remembering,  one that happens in the bones, in the gut, in the space behind the eyes.

When I move as animal, I begin to notice the ground differently. I begin to track shifts in the wind. My weight spreads across my limbs and my breath changes. What begins as movement becomes something closer to listening,  or maybe attuning.  And what I feel most is not power, or freedom, or rage. What I feel most is sensitivity. Vigilance. Gentleness and a soft alertness.

My body is not braced, but it’s aware. Responsive. Relational. Every part of me is in contact with the space around me. And in that space, my nervous system begins to settle. Not into rest, but into readiness. Into truth.

There is a kind of clarity that lives in the prey body. A truth-telling that does not speak, but senses. That does not explain, but moves.

It reminds me we were all prey once.

Long before cities and clocks and names, we evolved under the gaze of something that could kill us. We were small. Soft-skinned. Slower than most things with teeth. For most of human history, we were not the top of the food chain. And our nervous systems,  the way we orient to the world, the way we respond to threat,  were formed in that ecology.

We are the descendants of the cautious. The attuned. The ones who sensed danger before it arrived.

Even now, the body carries those patterns. The startle. The freeze. The sense of being watched. The instinct to shrink, to vanish, to hide. These are not dysfunctions,  they are adaptations. Survival intelligence, still humming through us. But what happens when there are no longer predators?

What happens when the body is still wired to survive… but doesn’t know what it’s surviving?

Here in the UK, there are no wolves. No cougars, no bears. The last lynx was hunted to extinction over a thousand years ago. The land has been tamed,  or so we tell ourselves.

But the nervous system does not respond to data. It responds to perception. To felt sense. And when there is  no clear, tangible source of threat, the threat doesn't disappear,  it simply becomes internal.

We start to respond to social predators. To hierarchy. To judgement. To systems of control that demand our obedience but offer no real safety in return. We flinch under shame. Collapse under scrutiny. We learn to silence our instincts because there is no “real” danger,  and yet, our body still pulses with the expectation of it. It is like a prey animal caught in a field with no wolves, but who still feels them. Hears them in the night. Senses them in the grass. Only now, there is no direction to run.

And so, the body turns on itself.

Someone once told me, “Everything is born expecting to be eaten.” At the time, I thought they meant it poetically. But have  come to see how literal that truth is. Every wild creature enters the world into a web of relationship that includes death. Not as punishment,  but as ecology. We are born to be part of that cycle. To take and to be taken. 

To live, and to be prey.

But for humans,  especially those raised in cultures that deny the body, deny death, deny our animal lineage,  this expectation has nowhere to land. And when the nervous system cannot complete its survival response,  when we cannot run, cannot fight, cannot tremble, cannot rest, it gets trapped in the tissues. 

As Peter Levine writes in Waking the Tiger, trauma is not the event itself, but what gets stuck when the energy of survival can’t move through. Sometimes, trauma is not what happened, it is what didn’t happen. We were not hunted. But we were never safe. And the body never forgets.

I see the prey body everywhere. In the person who always says yes, even when they mean no. In the one who shrinks in group spaces, who hides at the edges. In the hypervigilance, the startle, the chronic tension in the gut, the jaw, the thighs. In the dissociation that looks like calm. In the shame that says: stay small. Stay quiet. Stay still.

These are not weaknesses. They are strategies. They were once brilliant, life-saving responses. But they are not truths. And they are not the whole story.

Because the prey body is also sacred. It is the deer who teaches stillness. The hare who dances at dusk. The mouse who knows every crack in the stone. The antelope whose legs are poetry. The lamb whose softness is its offering. The prey body is not just a wound. It is a way of knowing. Of relating. Of being in the world as porous, as aware, as wild.

Maybe this is the part the Temple Forgot

So much of modern spirituality has been built on the idea of ascension,  of leaving the body, overcoming fear, becoming light. We are taught to aim upward. To rise above. To master our thoughts. To dissolve the self. To stay calm. To choose love over fear.

But what about the parts of us that tremble?

What about the parts that cannot relax,  not because they are unevolved, but because they still remember?

In most spiritual spaces, the prey body is left out. Too animal. Too reactive. Too messy. She does not fit well in a clean white room full of mantras. But the prey body is not a mistake. She is an ecological intelligence. She is what Stephen Porges, founder of Polyvagal Theory, describes as the neuroception of threat, the body’s ability to detect safety or danger beneath the level of awareness. This is not mindset. This is biology.

When we ignore her signals,  when we push through, bypass, or shame her for not being “high vibe” enough,  we deepen the fracture between body and spirit.

Peter Levine speaks of how animals in the wild complete their stress responses by shaking, discharging, or resting. Humans, are conditioned to override and suppress these instincts. The energy remains locked in the nervous system, often manifesting as anxiety, illness, or emotional shutdown.

As somatic therapist Deb Dana writes: “The autonomic nervous system is not concerned with what’s right or wrong,  it is only concerned with what is safe or unsafe.”

To the prey body, silence can be dangerous. Eye contact can be threatening. Stillness can be collapse. We need to listen to the body’s truth, not override it with spiritual ideals.

Maybe the part the temple forgot is the part that lays in the leaves, wide-eyed and waiting.

Maybe the part the temple forgot is the body.

And maybe, just maybe, this is where we begin again.

What If  It’s Not Always a Mirror

There’s a quiet form of gaslighting that happens often in spiritual and healing spaces,  and most of the time, we do it to ourselves.

We feel uneasy around someone. Our breath shortens. Our skin pulls back. Something contracts, subtle but certain. But instead of honouring it, we are told:

“That’s just a mirror.”

“They’re reflecting something you haven’t healed.”

 “It’s your projection, not them.”

And maybe sometimes that’s true.

But not always.  As I have come deeper back into my Animal Body I know when my body says it is not safe, she shows it to me though heartburn,  muscle pain, stiffness in my hips, a tightening in my throat or a twist in my belly, or the way I feel a slow disassociating from my flesh.  

Sometimes, what we’re feeling is not  a wound,  it’s a warning. Not a trauma echo, but a real-time signal from the body.

The prey body is attuning before the mind can explain. It picks up incongruence, false safety, subtle threat. The nervous system reads these cues in the micro-muscles of a face, the stiffness of a smile, the pace of a breath. This is what Stephen Porges calls neuroception,  a below-conscious awareness of safety or danger

This is not paranoia. It is perception

When we turn every instinct into a personal failing, we begin to believe our own bodies cannot be trusted. And so, we stop listening. We override. We spiritualise. We stay in the room when every cell is screaming to leave.

Here are just a few of the ways we are taught to gaslight the prey body,  in the name of being “healed,” “open,” or “evolved.”

1. “What’s being mirrored to me right now?”

This is one of the most common,  and often well-intended reframes in spiritual and therapeutic spaces. But when it becomes a default response, it implies that every discomfort is your fault, a wound you have not integrated.

 I once sat in circle beside someone whose presence made my whole body recoil,  gently, but clearly. My breath shortened. My shoulders tensed. They were not  doing anything wrong, but something was off.

 And when I voiced it later to a facilitator, I was asked:  “What part of you do they reflect that you are rejecting in yourself?”   

I nodded. I tried to find the answer. But something in me hardened, not in defence, but in knowing.

It was not  a reflection. It was a signal. I discussed this with my therapist and who responded simply  ‘ and sometimes your body is telling to leave, it telling you this is not safe.    He was correct.  

Sometimes, your body isn’t mirroring the past. It is responding to the present

2. “I must be in fight-or-flight,  I just need to regulate.”

We have been told that if our nervous system is activated, we need to downshift, soothe, “come back to centre.” And yes, this can be essential. But as Deb Dana reminds us: the nervous system’s job is not to keep you calm. It’s to keep you safe.

 I have watched people sit in rooms with manipulative leaders or unstable group dynamics and tell themselves they were just being “triggered.” They tried to regulate. Breathe deeper. Ground. But their body wasn’t dysregulated,  it was accurately reading the environment. 

It was saying: “Get out. This is not a safe place to open.” Regulation is not  always the goal. Sometimes, activation is intelligence

3. “If I were truly embodied, I wouldn’t feel this way.”

This one runs deeper than language. It is the quiet belief that feeling threatened means you are not “doing the work.” That if you were healed, you would feel peaceful. Open. Unbothered.

But embodiment does not mean neutrality. It means being able to notice, trust, and respond to what’s happening in your internal and external landscape.  Gabor Maté writes that trauma is not what happens to us,  but what happens inside us when we’re left alone with overwhelm.

The prey body is often the one who was not allowed to respond,  who froze, submitted, dissociated , and was never helped down the other side. To be truly embodied is not to stay open all the time. It is to close when you need to. To pull back when the field is wrong. To not betray yourself in the name of presence.

What if you let her speak?

Not every contraction is a childhood story. Not every boundary is a block. Not every fear is dysfunction.

Some discomforts are not mirrors,  they are messages The prey body was not meant to be spiritually analysed.

She was meant to move.

To orient. To flee. To choose. To rest.

If we only ever treat her as a projection of past pain, we forget that she is also a source of present truth. She is your barometer, your tuning fork, your mythic animal companion. She knows. Let her speak.

The Posture of Prey

I was once in ceremony with a shaman from Ecuador,  a man born into a long lineage of land-wisdom, where childhood meant walking in forests, listening to trees, and learning from the plants. As we prepared for journeying, I laid down on the forest floor  the way I had seen in many spiritual spaces.

He laughed. Not unkindly. But with some surprise.  “How can your body move if something happens?” he asked.

“How can you listen if you lie down like you are already gone?” He wasn’t mocking. He was speaking a truth I had forgotten. In his world, the body is always in relationship  with the land. Not flattened out. Not surrendered beyond usefulness. But alive, alert, connected. He crouched in a low squat,  relaxed, but ready. Listening with his whole body. A nervous system not in fear,  but in dialogue

We forgot that Prey Is not passive. Our ancestors did not sit cross-legged on yoga mats. They squatted low. Weight in their heels. Eyes wide. Ears alert. They were not collapsed. They were not checked out. They were present, with the possibility of sudden movement. This was not  trauma. This was truth. We evolved to move  if needed. To orient. To track. To spring.

Modern spirituality often confuses surrender with stillness. But sometimes stillness is just social obedience. A learned posture of “safety” that is actually disconnection from instinct. The prey body is not collapsed. It’s coiled.  Not powerless ready

What If We Let Her Move?

So I wonder, What would happen if we let our prey body move? Not in performance. Not in reenactment. But in truth. In instinct.

What would happen if we let her tremble, run, hide, re-emerge,  instead of holding her still under the weight of being “fine”?

What would happen if we stopped telling the animal she is overreacting?

What would happen if we listened to her?

What would she say?

Maybe this:

“I was never broken. I was never dramatic. I was never too much. I was just listening. I was just trying to live.”