Your Body Knows Something You Don't (And It's Been Trying to Tell You)
Your shoulders live at your ears. Your stomach knots before meetings. You've tried understanding why—but your body won't release what thinking can't reach.
Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget. Tension, digestive chaos, unexplained pain—all of these are your body's way of carrying what needs attention.
Doctors call this psychosomatic. Others dismiss it as drama. But it's your body holding what your mind had no room for. Movement and stillness can take on what thinking and talking alone cannot.
The Symptoms You Can't Explain
Your shoulders live at your ears. Your jaw clenches without reason. Your stomach knots before meetings that shouldn't scare you.
You've tried thinking through it. Talking it out. Understanding the why.
But your body won't release.
You're not broken. Your body is holding what your mind has no room for. The tension, the exhaustion, the aches that make no sense—your body carries what your mind won't acknowledge.
What Your Body Remembers
Your body remembers everything.
Every moment you swallowed your words. Every time you smiled when you wanted to scream. Every situation where you couldn't fight or flee, so you froze.
The mind forgets to protect you. The body remembers to warn you.
Those tight shoulders are braced for impact that already happened. That clenched jaw holds back years of unsaid words. Your chronic exhaustion carries the weight of constant vigilance.
Your body is a living archive of every experience your mind couldn't fully process.
Why Western Medicine Just Caught Up
Indigenous communities worldwide have always known: healing happens through the body, not just around it.
Many African healing traditions involve movement, rhythm, community witness—because they understood that some wounds need to be danced out, not talked through. Buddhist practices in South Asia knew this. Indigenous Australian ceremonies knew this. The body and mind were never separate.
These communities understood something essential: emotional wounds lodge as deeply as physical ones. Grief that needs to move. Fear that needs to be shaken out. Joy that needs to be danced.
Now Western psychology calls it "somatic therapy" and acts like they discovered something new. What they're really doing is finally accepting what Indigenous and Eastern communities practiced for millennia.
Why You Can't Think Your Way Out
You've tried reasoning with your anxiety. Understanding your patterns.
But logic reaches the thinking brain. What you're carrying lives deeper.
When difficult experiences happen, they lodge in the ancient parts of your brain that developed before language. The parts that only understand movement, breath, rhythm, touch.
You can't access these places through thinking because thinking happens floors above where the wound lives.
Your body needs something different than another conversation about your feelings.
The Language Your Body Speaks
Movement is language.
A walk around the block when your thoughts spiral. Your breath deepening to tell your nervous system the danger passed.
Dance badly in your kitchen for five minutes. Go to the gym not to punish your body but to let it speak. Take that yoga class not for flexibility but for conversation.
Movement shifts what thinking can't reach.
Stillness is language too.
Those 30 seconds of pause aren't empty. Close your eyes at your desk. Feel where you're holding tension. Don't fix it, just notice it.
Your body has been trying to communicate over the noise. Stillness lets you finally hear.
How to Start Listening
You don't need a healing journey or a somatic therapist (though both can help).
You need to start treating your body as if it knows something.
When anxiety rises: Move. Shake the way animals do after escape. Let your body release what your mind keeps holding.
When thoughts spiral: Ground. Feel your feet on floor, your back against chair. Your body knows you're here, safe, now—even when your mind is somewhere else.
When emotions overwhelm: Breathe. Not the shallow chest breath of survival, but the deep belly breath of safety.
Start small if reconnecting feels foreign. Years of suppressing emotions, living in survival mode, rationalizing everything—your body might feel like stranger territory now.
Show your body you're there for it, just as it's been there for you.
The Conversation That's Been Waiting
Learning to sink into sensation instead of thinking your way out feels scary at first.
But staying present with discomfort teaches you something thinking never could. Making peace with what you're feeling changes more than fighting it ever did.
Movement and stillness do more than provide daily relief. They ground you in the present. They release what weighs on you. They access healing that years of talking never touched.
Your mind doesn't need to be in conflict with your body.
It just needs to listen.
The Recognition
Think about the last time you felt truly better.
Not convinced yourself you were fine, but actually felt the shift.
Chances are it wasn't after another analysis of your problems.
It was after crying finally broke through. After that walk somehow untangled what hours of thinking couldn't. After dancing shook loose what felt stuck forever. After stretching released more than muscle tension.
Your body has been trying to have this conversation with you.
The presentation nerves, the chronic tension, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix—these aren't weaknesses to overcome. They're invitations to listen.
Your body has picked up what your mind set aside. It's been holding what you had no room for.
The question is whether you're ready to hear it.
What to listen for:
Tension headaches that thinking doesn't relieve.
Digestive issues doctors can't explain.
Sleep troubles despite exhaustion.
Chronic pain without clear cause.
Breathing that stays shallow even when safe.
Startle responses to non-threats.
These are your body trying to have a conversation with you.
Start listening. Start small. Start now.
