Our bodies remember & they keep the score
“Our bodies contain our histories, every chapter, line, and verse of every event and relationship in our lives”
– Caroline Myss
These opening statements I made sound very poetic, so let me tell you a little bit more about what I mean when I say it.
As we go through our lives we experience love, heartbreaks, hurt, pain, joy, happiness, success and failure. We experience all these and much more on a mental, emotional and physical level. We all know that our experiences shape our mentality and the way we view the world. What’s often unacknowledged is that the same experiences also impact our bodies.
Practical examples:
- Consider the last time you felt heartbroken. Where did you feel this heartbreak if not in the center of your chest?
- What about the last time you were going on a first date – do you remember feeling butterflies in your stomach?
- Have you ever experienced a headache or a neck pain after a stressful day of work?
All these are very obvious examples of how our bodies respond to what’s happening around us.
The Body Remembers When The Mind Forgets
When we react to situations, we react to them on a physical level. For example: we might hinge our shoulders forward when we’re being criticised or we might tense our quads when we feel stressed. As we repeat certain movements in our bodies, these movements start being reflected in our bodies. This process begins the day we’re born.
This is why the shape of our bones, flexibility of our muscles, our posture – all these and many other aspects of our physical being reflect our inner world and are influenced by our past experiences. Our bodies are shaped by emotions and memories that sometimes are not accessible to us on a mental level.
How our bodies speak
Sometimes, some of these emotions or memories may become “stuck” in our bodies.
One way to look at it is through the theory that everything is energy. Every thought and feeling has an energetic charge. The energy needs to flow freely through our bodies. Sometimes though, the energy may become stuck.
For example,
when we’re stresed, our muscles may automatically tense up. When the threat is gone, the energy of fear that generated this physical reaction needs to be released. If we don’t release it, it remains in the body. If that happens, the emotion or energy of the scary event becomes locked in the part of the body that initially reacted to the event. On a physical level, a person that often experiences stress, may develop chronic muscular tightness in the part of the body that tenses up in respons to stress.
Your Body’s Wisdom
The state of energetic stagnation that I described above is not natural to our body. We intuitively want our energy to flow freely. The stagnation therefore will slowly start becoming more and more uncomfortable. Think about it as a congestion: if it’s not removed, it will continue growing.
If we don’t address our stress, unprocessed grief, suppressed anger, sadness, guilt or shame, unexpressed creativity – these will continue generating congestions inside of your body. We can experience it as muscular tightness, pain, or even physical illness.
However, our bodies store positive feelings and memories too. This is what our inner knowing is – our bodies naturally and intuitively know what they need to heal and to thrive.
How to listen to your body?
A good place to start is to acknowledge and meet your physical needs. That can look like:
- Sleeping as much as we need
- Eating when we’re hungry
- Crying when we’re sad
- Expressing our anger freely and without self-judgment
- Resting when we’re tired
- Having fun regardless of what it looks like
- Working in the state of flow
Release & Heal
Our physical, emotional and energetic layers of being are interconnected. They are constantly communicating. When we move our bodies we can release whatever is stuck within us on a physical level. We can do the same when we express our truths or when we speak out loud about our wounds.
When we cry, speak and move – we release and heal.