Personal Reflection · Embodied Healing
For years I thought I had moved on. Then I realised my body had been carrying everything I never allowed myself to feel.
A few weeks ago, I sat with a version of myself I hadn’t visited in years.
Lately, I’ve been doing this work of going back. Sitting with my younger self. Feeling what I felt instead of rushing past it. Letting her know that she is safe now.
During one of these quiet visits, a memory surfaced that I wasn’t expecting.
It was the beginning of my marriage.
I’ve been married for ten years, and I love my husband deeply. But when I sat beside the woman who had just said I do, I met someone I had never really stopped to see.
She was scared.
Not because she had married the wrong person, but because everything she had ever known changed almost overnight. I had never lived away from home before. Suddenly I was building a new life, new routines, and a new version of adulthood all at once.
Everyone celebrates the wedding day.
Very few people talk about what comes after it. The quiet grief of leaving one life behind while learning to embrace another. The strange truth that joy and sadness can exist together.
At the time, I never recognised any of it.
I simply kept moving.
None of us are ever fully prepared for life’s biggest changes. We walk into them and trust we’ll find our way.
But when that memory surfaced, my chest tightened.
Not a little.
Completely.
For a moment, it felt like I couldn’t take a full breath.
A feeling that was ten years old arrived in my body as though it had happened that morning.
That surprised me.
So I kept going.
I travelled further back.
School.
University.
The choices I was disappointed in myself for making.
The heartbreak after a breakup.
The friendships that ended without a proper goodbye.
Every memory seemed to live somewhere different.
Not in my mind.
In my body.
For me, they gather around my heart.
A heaviness in my chest, as though something has been sitting there patiently all these years, waiting for me to notice it.
That was the moment something shifted.
I had heard people say that the body stores emotion.
I had read the books.
I understood the idea.
But understanding something with your mind is very different from experiencing it for yourself.
My life had moved on.
My body hadn’t.
We often imagine the moments that shape us are the obvious ones.
The heartbreak.
The loss.
The trauma.
The moments that divide our lives into before and after.
But lately, I’ve been wondering if we become who we are through something much quieter.
The accumulation.
One comment.
One disappointment.
One goodbye that never received the ending it deserved.
One sentence we swallowed because it felt safer than speaking it out loud.
On their own, they seem too small to matter.
Together, they quietly become part of us.
When I was in primary school, someone commented on how big my eyes were.
That was it.
One sentence from one child, decades ago.
I wore a fringe for years afterwards.
For the longest time, I never connected the two. I simply thought I preferred my hair that way.
Only now do I see what that little girl quietly decided about herself.
Your eyes are too much.
So she hid them.
I love my eyes now.
They are one of my favourite features.
But when I sit with that memory, my chest still feels sad.
Not for me now.
For her then.
Because one careless comment became a belief she carried for years.
It made me wonder how many other moments had quietly settled inside me without me ever noticing.
Curious about everything I had been noticing, I booked a session with a Body Code practitioner. I wasn’t looking for answers as much as I was looking for understanding.
It was my first session, so we spent the first half hour simply talking.
Which emotions seemed to surface more often than they should.
Where I felt them in my body.
What memories appeared alongside them.
Then we gently began tracing those emotions backwards.
Not to relive them.
Simply to acknowledge them.
What surprised me most wasn’t the modality itself.
It was realising how many moments I thought I had processed simply because I’d stopped thinking about them.
My mind had learned to live around those experiences.
My body was still carrying them.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about what the womb can hold, and at the time I thought I understood that our bodies remember.
This experience widened that understanding.
It wasn’t just one part of me carrying one kind of history.
It felt as though my whole body had become an archive.
Not of everything that had happened to me.
But of everything I had never allowed myself to fully feel.
As I sat with that thought, another question surfaced.
Why had my body carried these feelings for so long?
Then another thought came to me.
Maybe it wasn’t holding onto them at all.
Maybe it was holding them for me.
Carrying what I couldn’t carry at the time.
Protecting what I wasn’t yet ready to feel.
Waiting until I could sit beside that younger version of myself instead of moving on without her.
I don’t know if that’s true.
But it is the gentlest explanation I have found.
And somehow, it changed the way I see my body.
We worked through a lot in that session.
And I’ll tell you the truth, because that is what this space is for.
Healing is never finished.
It doesn’t arrive one morning with a neat little bow tied around it.
Something surfaces.
I meet it.
I sit with it.
I learn from it.
And then life has a way of revealing the next layer when I’m ready.
What I learnt that day was this.
Someone can hold space for you. They can gently guide you and ask the questions that help you see yourself more clearly.
But no one can feel your feelings for you.
No one can release what your heart is still holding.
That part belongs to us.
There comes a moment when we have to stop outrunning ourselves.
When we have to listen to the places within us that still ache, instead of pretending they don’t.
Not because we can change the past.
But because we no longer want to carry it in silence.
Some days I can do that.
Some days I still hold on a little longer.
Both have become part of my healing.
This experience has changed the way I speak to my body.
I ask her what she needs from me now.
Some mornings the answer is rest.
Some mornings it’s movement.
Some mornings it’s water.
And some mornings it’s simply to place a hand over my heart and listen.
I recently came across a quote that said, “Speak to every cell in your body.”
Not to criticise it.
Not to fix it.
But to speak love into it.
For years, I saw my body as little more than the vessel carrying me through life. I knew I should nourish it, care for it, and move it, but our relationship was practical rather than personal. I never thought to know my body, only to look after it.
Now I wonder if she has been my closest companion all along.
She was there for every goodbye, every disappointment, every swallowed sentence, and every frightened night.
While I was busy trying to move forward, she quietly carried what I left behind.
She held what I couldn’t emotionally carry until I was finally ready to come back for it.
Maybe healing isn’t asking our bodies to forget.
Maybe healing begins the moment we stop seeing our bodies as something to fight against...
...and start thanking them for carrying us through the moments we couldn’t carry on our own.