We often think emotions are something that happen in the mind.
But emotions live in the body — and when we don’t let them move, they don’t just disappear. They wait.
Sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly — as tension, pain, or fatigue — until we’re ready to listen.
This is what I learned when grief showed up not as tears, but as pain in my arm.
🌙 When my body spoke grief
When my father died, I started feeling pain in my left arm — a dull, stretching ache running from my shoulder to my fingertips. At first, I thought it must be my heart. My father had died of heart problems, so I went to my doctor, explained what had happened, and asked to be checked.
The doctor listened and said it sounded more like something physical — maybe my spine or posture. The EKG was perfectly normal. “It’s fine,” he said. But my body didn’t feel fine.
Even though I knew how to process emotions — I had trained in hypnotherapy and understood how important it was to allow feelings to flow — something in me was still holding on. The grief had found a home in my body.
Later, when I began learning energy healing, I realized that the pain in my arm was following the pathway of the lung meridian. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the lungs are associated with grief. When I started clearing that meridian — bringing awareness and breath into it — the pain slowly eased. Over time, it almost disappeared. Occasionally, it returns as a reminder: grief is still here, just softer now.
When it does, I don’t try to fix it.
I simply pause and acknowledge: I’m grieving.
And that awareness alone often brings release.
🌿 What science and lineage both tell us
Modern research is slowly catching up to what many traditions have known for centuries: the body holds what the mind avoids.
- Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, explains that trauma and strong emotion can change our physiology — the brain, the muscles, even the immune system adapt to keep us safe. The unexpressed becomes imprinted.
- Dr. Galit Atlas, in Emotional Inheritance, describes how unprocessed emotions can be passed down — children feeling the echoes of what their parents never spoke.
- Mark Wolynn, in It Didn’t Start with You, writes about inherited family trauma, showing how the body may carry unfinished emotional business from generations before.
- Thomas Hübl calls this “the collective field”: we are born into a world already carrying layers of fragmentation and pain. Healing, then, is not a quick act but a slow integration — melting the iceberg of personal and ancestral emotion, one layer at a time.
Together, their work echoes the same truth I see daily:
When we don’t feel, the body remembers for us.
🕊️ The body will always try to speak
When emotion isn’t expressed, it doesn’t vanish — it reroutes.
It becomes muscle tension, fatigue, digestive issues, back pain, eye strain, shallow breath, or numbness.
Sometimes we even lose connection with the body completely. We say, “I don’t know how I feel,” because we’re living from the neck up.
But the body keeps trying to speak in the only language it knows — sensation.
It weeps through skin rashes.
It tightens in the chest.
It trembles or shuts down.
And it’s not punishment — it’s communication.
As van der Kolk writes: “The body keeps the score. If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heart rate, and in the immune system, we have to find ways to work with these bodily responses.”
🌾 The first step: awareness
If you’ve been disconnected from your body, start small.
Don’t rush to “heal” — just reconnect.
Notice one part of your body:
your hand, your chest, your breath.
Ask quietly: What do I feel here?
If nothing comes — that’s okay. Try again tomorrow.
Awareness is like a muscle; it grows with gentle use.
Over time, you’ll start to feel.
And when you feel, you can listen.
And when you listen, the body no longer needs to shout.
🌱 The Body Knows™
This is the essence of my work — to help people learn to listen again.
To hear what their body is saying beneath the pain, the numbness, the rush.
To make space for the emotions that have waited patiently to be felt.
Because when we don’t feel our emotions, they don’t disappear.
They simply wait — in our breath, our cells, our stories — until we’re ready to return to ourselves. 🌿