Lately, the hurt lives more in my body than my mind. I suffer through sleepless nights in a row, writhing with headaches that resist every remedy. More mornings than not I wake with a stiff neck and a clenched jaw. My back insists it needs stretching and cracking, but nothing softens the knots over my spine. I walk through my days with shoulders rounding under the weight of grief, loss, and regret. My pulse races and skips. My body rides a rollercoaster of lethargy and hypervigilance.
Sleep is never enough to ease my exhaustion or soothe my swollen eyes. There is no position I can shift into that calms the ache between my bones. On the worst days, my skin pricks, my extremities tingle, threatening to go numb. My right eye twitches incessantly, fraying my nerves. Too often, my chest tightens at a memory or word that cuts too deep. Tears flow more freely, and guttural cries rise from parts of me I’m not yet familiar with.
I blame my workload. I blame politics and the economy. I blame my age. I wonder if I’m getting sick or if I should have my hormones checked. Is it my thyroid? Is it something worse? Winter is on the way, and I wonder if it’s the clouds and the cold mountain air getting to me. None of this feel quite true.
Deep down, I know. Deep down, I don’t want to admit it. My body is trying to tell me something I’ve been too distracted, too afraid, too proud to hear.
These confounding symptoms are how, slowly, but growing more insistent, the body speaks up. Its language is somatic. It whispers through the skin, the gut, the heart, the lungs. It screams through tension, aches, pressures, and ultimately illness.
For more than half a year my mind has tended to itself, mending from the aftermath of a bomb—lit, admittedly, by my own hand—that leveled everything I thought I knew. I’ve been like a patient waking up from a coma, recovering memories, relearning speech, trying to name and place the things and people I once knew but no longer recognize. I have been busy rebuilding a broken self and learning how to live among my wreckage.
While my mind worked through the ruins, my body absorbed what it could not yet bear. It took the shock, the stress, the confusion, and held on while my mind fell apart. The hurt had to go somewhere, but the body is no place to process emotion alone. Instead, the pain is stored away. What you can’t feel tightens the chest. What you can’t say clenches the jaw. What you can’t face turns into fatigue. Your longing and grief become migraines and nausea.
This is not a flaw or weakness of character. Its a natural mechanism of human survival, a quiet testament to the silent strength of human endurance. When the illusion of the self is destroyed and the ego so humbled, a trauma is inflicted. We can’t find our footing. Our identity, in free fall, is severed from the physical world.
The body does this not out of betrayal, but out of love. For many of us, this is a coping mechanism refined over years of suffering. I spent much of my young life surviving this way until I felt safe and strong. Now, as my psyche suffers and my mind reaches the limits of resilience once again, my body steps in behind my consciousness to take what it can and temper the pain. It holds and protects me until I’m ready to feel.
We rarely give our bodies credit for this care. We readily abandon the very part of ourselves that saves us, again and again. The mind is so prioritized and preoccupied that we forget to notice our own hunger, our thirst, our exhaustion. We deny our needs and neglect to bathe, to move, to seek connection.
And now that the mind has recovered enough to pause, I am beginning to learn how to listen—to feel the aches, the tension, the exhaustion—and understand what my body needs. This pain is not my body’s failure, but its memory. Resenting this physical release would only add to the already arduous journey ahead. This time, I want to give grace to the body that once gave it to me.
But it’s a hard thing to accept the damage that is done through prolonged neglect. When your mind lays shattered too long you may return to muscles that have lost their strength, posture collapsed under invisible weight, a body unrecognizable after weight waxes and wanes. We come back to the body but we can’t find our place in it. We can’t recognize it as part of ourselves.
There is sometimes shame in this estrangement. Not only are we held accountable for abandoning the body, but our suffering becomes visible and our neglect evident to the world. Yet, the change also confirms our hardship and our survival. Your pain is never “all in your head.” Hold onto that truth, even if you are the only one who knows it.
Slowly, as you learn who you are again, you can reconnect with what you are. It will take being brave enough to bridge your inner turmoil to the erratic, almost arbitrary bodily suffering you sense. Seeing your mental state manifest physically feels validating, almost comforting. It makes sense, you think, that the body should ache while the heart does.
And yet, the recognition won’t magically undo the pain. I know how easily one can slip from witnessing your suffering to sinking into an abyss of self-pity. Validation of the wound can deepen it if we aren’t careful. This perpetuation of pain is poison masquerading as a healing tonic. Let the pain be a way out, not a way in.
What the body needs is not so different from what heals the mind and heart: attention and acknowledgment—not judgment or intimidation. Take note of every discomfort and name it: tightness, twitching, heaviness, numbness, nausea, fatigue, sensitivity. Feel your pulse racing. Breathe with your panic. Caress your knotted muscles. Let the tears fall and hold your chest as you cry out.
With tolerance and tenderness, give yourself time and permission to feel fully these aches and pains while you witness what the body did to survive. Cultivate curiosity as you gently press against the edges of your resilience and awareness, exploring and encouraging growth. Begin by meeting your body’s basic needs: eat better, sleep better, move your body, and sit in the sun as often as you can. Start slow and respect your new limits. Rest mindfully, breathe deeply, laugh—at others, at yourself, at the absurd comedy of life.
Like all healing, it won’t be easy, and it won’t look like a linear process. You will not be rewarded for speed or perfection, but for your presence and patience. Forgive the way you misstep and stumble. Forgive the resistance you face and the failures when you push too hard and ask too much.
Let go of the need to control. Accept the long hours of rest you will need. Accept that the body has its own timeline. Accept that you can’t do it all and that you will need help. Tolerate the discomfort as your body labors in mending and changing. Soothe those aching places with tender touch, and be kind where you may have been cruel to yourself before.
When you feel frustrated, find gratitude. Take time to thank your body for bearing what you could not. Acknowledge the heavy burden of grief, anger, heartbreak, and self-hate you have been carrying. Promise yourself that from here you will lighten that load with love. The body has held what the mind could not. Now, it’s the mind’s turn to hold the body—with patience, presence, and love.
Here, it is the job of the mind to hold onto hope—a hope grounded in reality and open to a hard truth. A mind that has shattered, a heart that has broken, and a body that has wasted can’t return to what it once was. This is not a time of returning, but of reconciling and rebuilding. This is a time of slow negotiation between the mind that fled and the body that stayed. Grieve who you were and celebrate that you will heal stronger.
The journey will be a long one, and there are no shortcuts. The more you resist or force, the more you will have to heal. Tend to yourself daily, but only as much as you can— mentally, emotionally, and physically. Over time, you will begin to carry your grief differently. What was broken won’t be broken forever. What hurts won’t always hurt so much. The past is not your punishment; it is your teacher.
My own healing still lurches and lags from week to week, but already my shoulders seem a little less rounded. My chest isn’t quite so tight. The weight is beginning to be easier to bear. This new self emerging in me grows clearer, more solid, and strong each day. I’m committed to the work it will take to become her, bit by bit. One day, I will wake up and I’ll know who and what I am again, for a while.
As the Buddhists say, “Life is suffering.” The truth is, each of us will endure continual cycles of hurting, surviving, and healing. But if the nature of life is suffering, then the nature of humanity is certainly not. Perhaps you already know this. Perhaps you’re learning it now too, in your own body, through its own somatic language.
Day by day, and between each heartbreak, failure, and devastating loss—if you’re lucky—you learn what it means to inhabit the body and mind both with compassion. You discover what it means to be wholly human—to endure, not despite the suffering, but through it.
Lisa Marie Blair 