The Body Doesn’t Forget

“We must become acquainted with our emotional household: we must see our feelings as they actually are, not as we assume they are. This breaks their hypnotic and damaging hold on us”

-Vernon Howard

                Our society demands self-control; ‘perfection’ is our ultimate pursuit and we strive for it with our appearance, with our relationships and with our careers.  We join gyms to work our bodies in the pursuit of maintaining our shape and becoming more fit or beautiful, we run our children here and there in the hope that they will be happy and love us and we are busy at work or in our relationships because we think that time spent is time valued.  Showing emotions or feeling is something often associated with weakness; it shows a lack of control or a vulnerable side to us.  Strength is often depicted as being made of stone.   And when you think about it, the people whom we often admire for beings strong are those who have faced a traumatic event, put on a brave face and soldiered on!  The feeling and the pain isn’t there so, therefore, this must be strength!  When did being made of stone become so admirable???

                When we are young we are full of feelings.  We cry when we hurt, feel fear or pain and we “are sensitive and react immediately and directly to our social and physical environment” (“The World of Feelings and Emotions” – Walter Last).  However, it is very early that we are taught that this is unacceptable; parents are told that by letting a child cry through the night it will teach the child to sleep better.  Often what happens is that the lesson appears to be learnt; the crying stops, the sense of abandonment doesn’t.  When we feel abandoned and afraid we often hold our breath, contract our diaphragm and close through our chest.  A closed chest, contracted diaphragm and held breath are often associated with respiratory problems such as asthma.  We learn certain conditions due to how we train our muscles to respond.

We don’t often associate emotions with the body.  Even scientists would have us believe that they are in our head.  Yet there have been many yoga instructors, massage therapists and psychologists that have reported patients or subjects that, when they physically moved in certain positions, it brought fourth emotions and sometimes tears.  Paul Ingraham (BIO) writes of a lady who asked him why is when she tilts her head back she starts crying? (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham), while performing a shiatsu, a friend of mine pressed on the abdomen of a client and produced tears and many associates I know who teach yoga have been told to expect and respect crying during meditation.  Why is it that, despite not having expressed the emotion, we feel it when we are touched or positioned into a certain posture?

                When we expect pain, for instance, someone sticking a needle into us, our natural reaction is to tense our muscles and hold our breath.  Emotions often inspire pain, therefore, when we feel emotions, there is a physical reaction; we feel guilt and so our blood vessels constrict, our blood pressure drops as does our muscle tone (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham), we feel anger so our body temperature rises, our shoulders become tense and our skin becomes more coloured, when we feel nervous we feel our hands become cold and fidgety, we become cold, pail and nervous and we feel a nauseous or sinking feeling in our abdomen.  So what happens when we want to be ‘strong’ and suppress our emotions???  According to psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, our body stores this and our emotions become “carved in flesh” (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham).  Our anger gets stored in our shoulders, our nervousness gets stored in our gut and our guilt gets stored in our lower back.  Older adults talk about the aches and pains they feel in their body.  Perhaps this is where all the lost emotions went.

                                It has been proven that negative thoughts suppressed show themselves in other ways; unexpressed negativity has been proven to develop cancerous tumours and other health disorders (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham).   Findings show that cancer is frequently diagnosed about a year after a traumatic event such as losing a spouse, mental depression has proven to have many negative effects on our immune system, our digestive juices are inhabited when we are stressed and asthma attacks may be triggered by fear or apprehension (“The World of Feelings and Emotions”: - Walter Last). Our tendency to hold our emotions back, be everything for everyone and to be a soldier for whatever task is at hand can cause us bad health.  If there ever was anything to cause us weakness and not strength, it is to put our physical health at risk and lessen our chances at longevity. 

                When I consider the posture of successful men; Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch and see slumped shoulders and a protruding chin, I think “is this not the weight of the world on these men’s shoulders”???  The face still and tearless may tell us strength, but the body tells us more.  Take the late Kerry Packer for instance; over developed trapezius (neck) muscles probably due to stress, he suffered from as many as eight heart attacks in 1990 and was reported to have kidney issues in the year 2000’s until he eventually died of kidney failure in 2005 at age 68 (Wikipedia).  Despite us showing a brave face, our body responds to what we feel, and if we feel it over and over again our body distorts us into who we really are.  Oscar Wilde was right.  We can be beautiful and immaculate on the surface but our true-self, through our body, paints the portrait of who we really are.  Our Dorian Grey is ugly!  If we were what we felt, the picture would be beautiful.