When I think about carrying around emotional baggage, I rarely think about storing it in my shoulders, hamstrings, or lower back. It’s our minds—and metaphorically, our hearts—that are usually credited with housing our feelings.
But maybe it’s not so simple. As we run through the week, sitting hunched in front of the computer screen, facing work and personal stressors, perhaps our minds don’t always have the capacity to adequately deal with emotional turmoil. If not, where do the feelings go?
The Feelings Get Physical
“We often block trauma with the mind but hold emotions in the body,” says Karol Ward, a licensed psychotherapist, seminar leader, and writer who focuses on the importance of the mind-body connection.
In other words, as the mind moves on, the body remembers.
This idea of “emotional armoring,” or holding emotions in the body, is based on work by the psychotherapist William Reich, who noted that he could see emotional release on his patients’ face. When people started to relax, they looked different.
This led him and others to look at the body, in conjunction with the mind, as a place where people store emotions.
Just as we can tap into parts of our psyche to address problems or concerns, we can also tap into our bodies to learn where we are storing emotions. This field of study, called body or somatic psychotherapy, focuses on movement, breath, and touch as a way of connecting ourselves to our bodies.
The results can be very powerful.
The Moves Might Soothe
Shortly after her boyfriend’s death, Amanda Coggin, a San Francisco-based writer, was in a small, intimate yoga class. While in the class, she listened to the teacher, who encouraged the participants to breathe deeply and try to clear their minds. As Amanda positioned herself in an asana, she felt an immense release. Suddenly, she said, “the tears just came.”
Unlike the emotional anxiety and knot-in-throat we normally feel before a big cry, Amanda said these tears were different; they felt more like a letting go than a working up.
