What I have learned in my decade and a half of practising various healing modalities for myself and supporting others is that healing is a choice. Are you healing? It requires constant work and reminders to oneself to break the old patterns, habits, and beliefs.
Personally, from my experience, healing cannot just happen with talk therapy or medicine. It’s about movement, breath, stillness, expression and, importantly, awareness.
Before the body begins shutting down gradually, it signals us to pause and reassess our lives. “Your body is your biography,” resonates with my experience and observations. The physical body carries the story of our lives. This idea has been explored and popularised by several modern thinkers, somatic psychologists, trauma researchers, and body-mind healers. It encompasses concepts rooted in body psychotherapy, trauma studies, and Eastern philosophies.
The body remembers what the mind forgets.
World-renowned trauma expert Dr Bessel van der Kolk, in his bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, laid it bare: “Trauma is not just an event that took place in the past. It is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.” He revealed how emotional wounds from childhood neglect to adult grief find a home in the nervous system, manifesting as chronic pain, autoimmune issues, and even posture patterns.
This isn’t just theory.
The body senses mental and emotional triggers before consciously recognising a dis-ease. Unexplained backaches, clenched jaws, or frozen shoulders may reveal anxiety, fear, or repressed grief. Sujata Malik, an energy healer and Reiki Master, states, “From my two decades of experience, I see the body as a tool that outwardly shows what our emotions and mind internally brew. Unexplained shoulder pain often occurs when someone feels burdened with responsibilities. Back pain is now common among young people, signalling a lack of support, fear, anxiety and issues related to financial uncertainty. Knee pain is a signal of fear of moving ahead and uncertainty.”
My first brush with the mind & body connection happened through the writings of Louise Hay. Her work, You Can Heal Your Life, explains that physical ailments are directly connected to emotional patterns. The body instantly catches on to the mental and emotional upheaval and reacts to it.
Eastern Wisdom, Western Science
Long before science caught up, yogic traditions recognised that the body is a living archive. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras mention samskaras, subtle imprints formed by every experience we undergo. In Ayurveda, disease is rarely purely physical; it is viewed as a disturbance in emotional and energetic harmony. Sadhguru echoes: “Your body is just an accumulation of food and impressions. You are the creator of your body.”
“These ‘impressions’ are what we now call somatic memories, emotional experiences stored physically. Increasingly, healers across traditions are turning to breathwork, meditation, Reiki, yoga, and movement therapy as tools to rewrite their body-biography,’’ adds Malik.
It’s when we, as individuals, are unable to say “No’ to recurring patterns we dislike or detest that our body begins to show signs. In Gabor Maté’s work, When the Body Says No, the main idea is that repressed emotions, particularly in people pleasers and caregivers, lead to chronic illnesses. He makes connections between autoimmune conditions, cancer, and long-term emotional suppression. “The body will start saying no when we don’t know how to.”
The Science of Stored Emotion
Modern neuroscience agrees. The vagus nerve, the highway between the brain and body, transmits emotions both ways. Stress, guilt, grief. They influence our hormones, muscle tone, and immune responses.
In short, pain bodies, trauma memories, unwanted patterns, and unresolved emotions (e-motion, energy in motion) are stored in our bodies. If not released, the past manifests as dis-ease.
Next time your body communicates, it may reveal something your mind has overlooked. You are more than your history, but your body retains those memories. Now, it’s time to help it rewrite your story through healing, truth, and liberation encoded in every cell. Creating self-love is the first step towards healing.