Sybille Lindner
Have you ever felt your shoulders pull up when you got a fright or your belly pull tight when you thought you had forgotten something important? Have you ever felt a current of restlessness in your legs when you really wanted to do something fun, or your heart expanding with joy when you realised someone had thought of you for your birthday?
These experiences are so innately part of being human that we often forget that they are part of us every day. Our feelings and emotions are not just happening in our brains – they are felt physically in our bodies. Every thought and emotion we have creates a physical reaction, and so everything we feel becomes a body-wide sensory experience for us.
The mind-body connection is fascinating. Our emotions create chemicals in our brains that affect our physical bodies down to our cells. These chemicals affect the way cells function and what genes they express from our DNA. What is less known about our emotions is that they also create physical tension in our muscles. Joy, anger, or sadness, each have a specific pattern of muscle tension in our bodies that help us identify what we are feeling and what to do about it. Maybe we feel our jaw locking when we feel like we really want to say something we shouldn’t, or we feel a lump in our throat when we find something in our lives very difficult to swallow.
It’s no accident that our language reflects this – what we feel in our bodies helps us make sense of emotional experiences in our lives, and expressing what physical sensations we feel in our bodies can help us put words to emotions that can be difficult to explain. Our bodies help us process the world in this way. When our worlds become a little overwhelming, though, our bodies can get so blocked up with tension that our signals get confused and we struggle to untangle what we feel inside. For our bodies to give us good feedback about what’s going on inside, they need to be free to move.
Simple movement practices like stretching or shaking or bouncing or humming can help us unravel the tension that has built up over time and free our muscles from the load of our emotions. This is why it feels good to ‘walk off’ our anger or to ‘shake off’ our fear. For our bodies to help us work with our emotions, we must also be ready to listen. Modern lifestyles pull our attention away from our bodies by distracting us with external sensory experiences and making us believe our minds and bodies are separate. There is so much background noise in our daily lives that we struggle to find a moment of stillness to listen to what our bodies have to say. When we ignore our bodies for long enough, they start expressing our inner worlds in different ways: the anger you have been avoiding for three years comes out as a lower back pain that refuses to go away, and the sadness that’s been sitting on your chest for two months now feels like your throat pulls tight every time you take a deep breath.
Our bodies are wonderful allies in our lives. They hold what is too difficult for you to feel in that moment of overwhelm and store it for when life slows down a little and you are strong enough to face it. When we never make time to go inward and feel everything our body has been holding for us, it builds up and eventually turns into a chronic health issue.
Your body never tries to punish you with pain or illness – it simply shows you what you have been holding in for too long. When you allow yourself to open up to your body’s messages, you can start to free these old emotions and ease the load on your system.
There is no need to go on a month-long retreat into the mountains to do this work; you can simply start with five minutes a day. Your body appreciates every little bit of attention you give it, and simply listening to its messages will help ease the load. Little by little, you can scoop off tiny bits of that emotional ball that is tangled in your belly, or, one by one, gently pull out the wiggling worms making your calves feel like they want to run away. Simply allowing yourself to feel what is living within you helps so much to ease the tension in your body and creates more space for enjoying life.
Sometimes, it will be easier to have someone present while you do this, and sometimes, you can simply sit with your body alone and send it some love. Any practice that helps you feel into your physical body and that helps you feel your emotions will help rebuild your mind-body connection. Try this: place one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest. Close your eyes, and feel where in your body your breath is happening. Allow your belly to soften and gently move with your breath. Now let yourself relax the breath a little more, slowing it down a bit. Now notice what feelings come up naturally for you – any sensations or emotions in your body.
Do this for a few minutes, and allow them to move freely through you. Simple practices like this will do wonders for your body’s capacity to rebalance you in moments of stress, and the more you practice, the easier it will get. The more you learn to feel all your inner sensations and emotions in each moment, the more you will feel at home in your body again. It may feel turbulent within your emotions at first, but allowing yourself to feel them will help you feel more connected to your own aliveness, your life force. As you learn to navigate these inner waves and make peace with the fact that they will always be moving and that having inner waves of emotion is a normal part of being human, the more ease you will find in your inner landscape. Come home to your body, and build an inner sanctuary of peace that is always there for you, no matter what is happening around you. Your body is waiting for you to tune in!
*Sybille Lindner is a physiotherapist for Ombili Mental Health Clinic, Swakopmund.
