How Your Body Speaks Your Mind
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What a 5-year journey of healing Lyme disease taught me about the language of the body
At the age of 25, I made a life-changing decision to heal my body and address the joint and inflammatory issues I had struggled with for years. Over the next four years, I adopted a clean diet, healed my gut, integrated fitness and breathwork into my daily routine, and achieved a level of wellness I had never experienced before. As a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), I even helped clients heal their guts and boost their energy levels. Yet, despite my unwavering commitment to health, parts of my body felt perpetually tense no matter how much breathwork or relaxation I practiced. An unresolved question haunted me:
Why is there still so much tension and stress in my body, and how can I resolve it?
So I shifted my focus to understanding and alleviating the layers of stress that had accumulated in my body over the past two decades.
My journey began with a brain training program recommended by my doctor called the Dynamic Neural Retraining System (DNRS). This program helped me shift my mindset and gradually improve my responses to everyday stressors. As weeks turned into months, I noticed my stress levels decreasing and my confidence in managing life with ease growing.
However, certain tensions and stress behaviors in my body continued to baffle me. It wasn’t until my first session with a therapist that I truly understood how bizarre the relationship between body and mind can be.
Down the Rabbit Hole: When the Body Speaks the Mind
During one of our initial sessions, I was struggling with a cold and a stuffy nose. “Interesting,” my therapist remarked. “Just for fun, clear your mind and focus on your nose. Do you notice any sensations, words, visuals, or ideas associated with this blockage? If your nose could speak, what would it say to you?”
As I concentrated on my nose, a phrase suddenly popped into my head: “I don’t have room to breathe!” Flooded with images of rushing from place to place, meeting friends, and overcommitting myself, I realized I needed to slow down. I decided during the session to relax my schedule and enjoy spring at a more leisurely pace. Remarkably, within an hour, my nose was unblocked, and I could breathe again.
Each session with my therapist involved focusing on tensions in my body as a starting point to uncover unresolved conflicts and experiences. Some tensions were easy to identify and work through: a constant tension in my gut was directly linked to ongoing worries that we were able to reframe and dramatically improve.
Other tensions were more surprising. In one session, I focused on a persistent ball of tension near my right scapula that I had unsuccessfully tried to resolve for years through physical therapy and massage. As I described the sensations and color of this tension to my therapist, memories and a phrase emerged: “I can’t drop the ball!” By exploring what this phrase meant to me and what I needed to do to release it, the tension dissolved.
Soon after, I began dating a psychologist whose deep understanding of the mind-body connection further transformed my health. He helped me identify key behavior patterns that seemed to coincide with my health flare-ups:
When I repressed anger or resentment, arthritis flared up in my hands.
When I engaged in activities I didn’t want to do without expressing my feelings, I became ill.
As I traced these patterns back to my early life, I realized I had often suppressed my voice and anger, leaving my body as the last avenue for self-expression. As a child, I discovered that getting sick was a reliable way to avoid school, and I learned that expressing anger was unacceptable, blocking its release and sending tension down my arms instead.
A striking example of my body expressing early habits occurred while I was on vacation in Poland with my boyfriend. On our last day there, I put on a bright dress and high heels to celebrate and I felt people staring at us. Some faces were smiling, others were curious, and a few were outright aggressive. I tried to block out the overwhelming swirl of emotions and expressions by focusing on my boyfriend.
Later that evening, he casually asked, “How did you feel about getting so much attention for your looks?” I admitted I enjoyed it overall but left out the uncomfortable parts. “I saw how stressed you were from your skin. Soon after we went out, it got very red and inflamed, so I was wondering how you were feeling,” he shared.
His observation triggered a flashback to my teenage years, when I noticed that if I showed up to school feeling confidence and beautiful, it attracted similar looks of admiration, interest, and hostile aggression. Around that time, I developed red, blotchy skin. Maybe I was just teenage hormones, but I wonder if my body was responding to the belief that formed in my mind: “It’s not safe to be seen. It’s safer to be invisible.”
Strategies for Healing
Understanding my body’s stress patterns and the reasons behind them was the first step in my healing journey. The next step involved developing new strategies.
I began by acknowledging my anger and desires instead of suppressing them. I rehearsed new ways to respond to situations, teaching my body that it was okay to let energy move through it. Recently, I’ve been learning to accept and enjoy attention while staying vigilant for any real threats.
As I adopted new strategies and behaviors, my body relaxed. When I felt confident in setting boundaries and achieving my needs through my voice and actions, my body no longer needed to rely on tension and armoring as the first line of defense.
Working with Clients
In my practice as an NTP, I leave psychology to therapists and qualified professionals. However, I often encourage clients with health challenges to journal on a few of the questions that profoundly helped me:
Is there a pattern to when you experience health issues (e.g., paired with certain emotions, situations, or people)?
Do you get any payoff from the challenges in your body? Put another way, would resolving them completely create any problems or complications for you?
Do you remember the first time your health issues arose?
Are there any emotions you struggle to express or even don’t feel?
What I’m learning, and hope to share with clients, is a concept of healing that addresses the mind-body connection as a single system. I believe that caring for and listening to our bodies gives us the sensitivity, energy, and clarity to understand their messages. And when we look for their messages, we will find them everywhere - in our body language, skin, breathing, and tensions. I believe when we finally learn this language, we’ll make a major breakthrough in our understanding of both sickness and health.
