When the Body Remembers
Not everything remembered is a thought.
When I was a little boy, into my teens, and later my college years, I was a self-assured, confident individual. I didn’t know yet the concept of fear. Or maybe I did, but it hadn’t claimed a home inside me. Like most young men, I felt invincible, not because I believed I couldn’t be hurt, but because the world hadn’t yet demanded proof of that vulnerability.
But when I returned home from college, the illusion cracked.
Almost immediately, I was confronted with real danger. I was carjacked at gunpoint on my way back home from work. For a moment I thought I was being kidnapped. And something in me broke. I didn’t name it at the time. I didn’t even understand what had been activated. But from that moment forward, the presence of fear became part of my emotional architecture. And as the years passed, living through the narco violence of 1990s Colombia, that fear didn’t dissipate, it calcified. The external danger may have come and gone, but the internal system adjusted. And it never quite adjusted back.
I didn’t walk around trembling. I wasn’t scared of everything. But a new operating logic had taken hold beneath the surface. I became cautious, alert, sometimes overly so. My nervous system, once tuned to ambition, now had a second frequency: vigilance.
And here’s the part that confounded me for years: if you met me, you wouldn’t know. I appeared strong, composed, even commanding. I built things, achieved, performed. But underneath that? A quiet tremor. A split. The man I projected and the man I carried were not always in sync.
I’ve often wondered: why did I process those events differently than others? Some peers lived through similar dangers and seemed unshaken. I have no precise answer. Maybe it’s temperament. Maybe it’s some deeper sensitivity I carried from childhood. But I suspect it has to do with my lifelong relationship with uncertainty.
Even before the violence, I wrestled with the unknown. Not intellectually, but somatically. I hated not knowing. Not being in control. So when life confirmed that danger could arrive unannounced, it didn’t just startle me, it affirmed something I already feared: that the ground could vanish at any time.
Years later, I see it more clearly. I see how that early trauma shaped the filter through which I experience risk. And more importantly, how that filter still colors my behavior, especially in trading, my work.
Fear in Trading: The Silent Saboteur
Trading is often framed as a game of logic, systems, and probability. But for those like me, it becomes a mirror. And the reflection isn’t always flattering.
I’ve built a system. It works. It’s clean, disciplined, elegant. It’s the product of experience and deep thought. And yet, I sabotage it. Not always. But often enough to know something deeper is at play.
The pattern is clear: I see the signal. The setup is there. I know what to do. But then something shifts. Doubt creeps in. I question what I just saw. I hesitate. I delay. Or worse, I do the opposite.
This isn’t poor analysis. It’s fear.
And not the kind that shouts. The kind that whispers: “What if you’re wrong? What if it turns against you? What if this is just like last time?”
Fear distorts perception. It short-circuits trust, not just in the system, but in myself. It creates a gap between knowledge and execution. Between clarity and action.
And in that gap, performance dies.
Fear as Strategy, Not Emotion
The body doesn’t distinguish between emotional threat and physical danger. That’s the trick. That’s the betrayal. The same mechanism that saved me during a real carjacking, fires when a chart moves against me. The nervous system doesn’t ask: “Is this life-threatening?” It asks: “Have we seen this before? Should I shut you down to keep you safe?”
That’s fear as a protective strategy, not just an emotion.
The problem is, in trading, protection often looks like sabotage: doing too much, or too little, waiting too long, exiting too early. The symptoms vary, but the source is the same. When fear takes the wheel, the system doesn’t execute. It flinches.
And here’s what’s even harder: sometimes I don’t know fear is present until after the damage is done.
That’s the sophistication of embedded fear. It doesn’t always roar. It rides quietly, just beneath the threshold of awareness, until it steers the ship off course.
Body as Barometer
The only way I’ve learned to detect fear in real time is through the body.
For me, it lives in the chest. Not the gut. Not the shoulders. Always the chest. A tightness, a constriction, a slight holding of the breath. It doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it’s subtle, like a faint signal beneath noise. But it’s there. And when I catch it, when I really catch it, I can stop the cascade.
I put my feet on the ground. I sit up. I breathe.
Not just any breath. A very specific rhythm: inhale for four seconds, exhale for eight. I repeat it six times. Slowly, deliberately. This isn’t spiritual. It’s neurological. The longer exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It tells the body: _”You’re safe. This is not an ambush. You can see clearly.”
Is it magic? No. But it works. It interrupts the fear loop. It creates just enough space between impulse and action for me to remember who I am.
The Illogical Logic of Fear
The most frustrating part of all this is how illogical it feels. How can I work so hard to build something coherent, only to abandon it in the moment that matters most? How can I spend hours training my mind, only to let it be overtaken by a feeling I can’t even name in the moment?
But that’s what fear does. It doesn’t argue. It overrides.
It doesn’t need to make sense. It only needs to be felt.
Which is why the answer isn’t more knowledge, more backtesting, more preparation. I have all that. The answer is presence. Not as a concept, but as a daily practice. As a lived commitment.
To notice the chest. To hear the whisper. To breathe. To return.
Because fear doesn’t need to be eliminated. It needs to be met.
And Now, This Day
Today, I sabotaged myself.
I saw the signs. I knew what to do. But I didn’t act. Or I acted against the signal. And now, hours later, I can see it so clearly. The market was readable. The setup was honest. My system was right. But I was not.
And yet—this is not defeat. This is data.
This is what it looks like when an old layer of fear shows up just as I begin to build consistency.
This is what it feels like when the body remembers before the mind does.
This is what it means to walk through transformation honestly—not as a straight line, but as a spiral.
So, I name it. I see it. And I move forward.
Fear still lives in me, but now I meet it—at the door, before it speaks for me.
This is the work.
Anchor
When fear lives in the chest, interrupt the cycle with this reset:
Speak aloud: “My fear does not protect me. It limits me.”
Act: One walk. One moment of full silence.
One physical gesture: hand on chest, eyes closed, slow breath.
Breathe: Inhale 4 seconds. Exhale 8 seconds. Repeat six times.
Close with:
“I no longer break under pressure. I execute from presence, even with fear in my chest.”