During a recent bodywork session I said to the woman I was tending to ‘our bodies hold our stories’. I didn’t think much of it as the words left my mouth, but something in her shifted, her body softened and eyes filled with tears. Not because I’d said something profound but because something in her recognised the truth of those particular words. In that moment, it wasn’t the words themselves that mattered, it was the recognition.
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Our bodies are holding so much more than we let ourselves acknowledge and it’s not always big or obvious. Often what has been held is from the quiet moments we moved past, maybe emotions we didn’t have time for, experiences we didn’t fully metabolise or the multiple times we said ‘I’m fine’ and kept going. The body stores everything that wasn’t allowed the space it deserved, maybe as a tightening in the chest, or a clenched jaw and these kind of things become a constant background tension that we learn to live with.
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More often than not becoming disconnected from our bodies doesn’t happen by accident, we just become very good at being someone. The woman whose needs go unmet, holds it all together, shows up for everyone else first, or the one who is consistent and disciplined, whilst simultaneously feeling exhausted. Beneath what is being ignored there are often layers of feeling that have never been touched and it isn’t because you don’t have depth, it is because the identity you’ve developed hasn’t given space to what is longing to be felt or expressed.
Slowing down can be very confronting because we start to feel what lies beneath, which, as well as our deepest desires, can include the part of us that doesn’t want to keep doing it this way. So it becomes easier to stay, not necessarily consciously, but because it feels safer to be the version of you that you know than to meet the parts of you that you don’t.
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That moment in the session wasn’t about me saying the right thing, it was about something in her finally having space to land and a moment where she didn’t have to be the version of herself she’s used to being.
I’m not here telling you overhaul your life or drop every identity you’ve built, but maybe see this an invitation to be curious and ask if there is anything that are you holding in your body right now that you haven’t let yourself feel?
