interesting story. Thanks. I had a friend in college who learned to manage his Tourette's Syndrome with meditation. With regard to your questions. The first two are empirical and we don't really have sufficient evidence for either. In the 1940's Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor attempted to make orphans stutter in a now infamous study rightly called "the monster study" Results are difficult to interpret because the research protocol was not consistent between subjects. So, it's unclear if we can make fluent children stutter. That being said, we can make typically fluent adults "stutter." if a fluent speaker speaks but gets acoustic feedback at a delay (100-300ms) they are likely to be disfluent. (but not necessarily in the same way that stutterers are disfluent). Body language is a rather broad category. However, my guess is upper limb gesture is a good substitute. I did a brief lit search (only reading abstracts) and it appears that during moments of stuttering gestures stall until fluent speech resumes. This leads me to think that, no, stutterers do not have clearer 'body language' Stuttering is absolutely, most definitely 100% behavior. Whether it's learned or not is another empirical question. That is--after you define what a learned behavior is. A developmentalist like myself believes there are exceedingly few unlearned (innate) behaviors. And I think I can make a pretty strong case for stuttering being 'learned' (in part). But that's for another post. (as an aside, I disagree with you that stuttering is psychological in nature, again, that's for another post). This forth question is, to me, the most interesting. And my thought is, no, our automatic behavior does not serve as a trigger. First problem--you have to define automatic behavior, heart beat? breathing? eye blinks? reflexes? twitches? digestion? -- what makes a behavior automatic? Second you have the problem that stuttering, while rule governed, is not consistent. So, in your example, most of the time your tongue worked fine (the majority of stutterers are disfluent on 10-30% of their syllables). So, the real question is what happens during that 10-30% of the time to cause your tongue to tense up? I believe you benefitted, and I'm willing to say that meditation increased the effectiveness of the treatment. But the treatment was the purposeful reduction in musculo-skeletal tension. It's similar to one of the techniques used in "fluency shaping" therapy. I'm not trying to poo-poo on your idea. I think meditation is fantastic. I know another stutterer (he's a SLP, too) who swears by meditation and he does it just about every day. I'm just trying to point out that there are confounds. Whatever you're doing is working, so keep it up!