This morning I saw my myofascial release wizard and cried while she was working on getting my chest and shoulders to open up. “Raise your arms out from your side like you’re making a snow angel,” she said, “but stop when it hurts. Then go back and slowly stretch out like a telescope.” Y’all, I’m so used to push, push, pushing, forcing a stretch, but when I gradually telescoped my left arm, that’s when the release happened. My body shook and let go, and I cried and remembered a specific incident over ten years ago when I felt abandoned.

Ten years. Ten frickin’ years that emotion’s been hanging out, just waiting to be heard. And whereas my dad later pointed out that–thanks to all the different therapies I’ve been doing recently–I’ve been crying a lot lately, I think it’s fabulous. For one thing, getting an emotion out, or rather letting it move through you, is cathartic and healing and allows the past to finally be over. For another, sadness and grief and fear aren’t the only emotional responses that have been rising to the surface lately. So have anger, frustration, confusion, disgust, and joy. At times I’ve just laughed and laughed. Alas, at one point or another we’ve all stifled every reaction under the sun. And although we may have long forgotten them, our bodies haven’t.

This sucks, I know, especially when your stifled emotions show up in your shoulder.

Now, I’m not saying that any and every pain or problem you have is strictly emotional. What I am saying is that unacknowledged emotions are often part the pain equation. And whereas I know plenty of people just can’t “go there,” it makes sense to me. This morning thanks to the texts of a couple people, I realized I didn’t post a link to last night’s blog on Facebook. Rather, I posted a link to a website about EMDR, something I’ve briefly mentioned before and plan to discuss more in depth soon. Regardless, this morning I was terrified when I found out. I thought, I’ve made a mistake. My heart sped up. My breathing became shallow. I quickly calmed down, but my point is that we all experience the effect of our thoughts and emotions on our bodies on a daily basis. We get nervous and feel like we’re going to shit ourselves. We get angry and tense our shoulders, get a headache. So sure, I grant that releasing a decade-old emotion during a (for lack of a better term) massage is strange, but clearly you can’t separate your mind, emotions, and your body.

Sorry, but you this is the way you were made.

My myfascial release wizard says our bodies hold on to tension and emotions in order to keep us safe. They think, The last time I relaxed and honestly expressed myself, it didn’t go well. (I was in an accident, got hit, hurt or rejected, was made fun of, etc.) This is how our bodies become stuck in the past. Frozen in time. Thankfully, they can come back to the present. They can thaw out. However, this seems to require gentle coaxing. Gentle because–apparently–when a stretch or movement (or even an attitude) is forced upon the body–it fights back. Like, nope, not going there. But when it’s lightly encouraged, whispered to, not shouted at, the body gets the idea that it’s safe to let go, that things are different now than they were before.

That all the horrible things are over and that we can be free again.