Episode 56: The Body Keeps the Score (and what that really means)

This episode is a deep dive into the fascinating truth that the body is the subconscious mind — and whatever emotions we don’t process, the body stores. Drawing on trauma psychology, polyvagal theory, somatics, and yoga philosophy, we explore how emotions are biological events rather than abstract thoughts, and how the vagus nerve shapes emotional memory and stress patterns throughout the system. We look at why unprocessed emotions can eventually express themselves as chronic tension, inflammation, digestive issues, fatigue, and other symptoms that feel physical but have emotional roots.

We explore how the body creates the “shape” of specific emotions through muscular patterns, how fascia holds emotional charge, and why certain emotions tend to live in certain areas of the body — fear in the hips, anger in the jaw, grief in the chest, shame in the belly, and anxiety in the gut. We also unravel what it truly means to complete an emotional cycle, and how the body naturally releases old emotional imprints through shaking, crying, breath, stretching, movement, and somatic awareness.

This episode offers a compassionate reframing: your symptoms aren’t personal failures — they’re your body protecting you. And when we create safety, presence, and space, the body has an extraordinary ability to unwind the emotional patterns it has held for years.

A gentle, powerful invitation to understand your emotional landscape through the wisdom of your own body.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Hello everybody. I am recording this episode solo today because on the day of recording this, it is actually Becky's birthday. So happy birthday to Becky. Another trip around the sun, and she is appropriately off this morning looking after herself as you should be on your birthday. So I'm going to be speaking today about something that every human experiences, but most of us were never really taught how to navigate it. So it's the way that the body holds unresolved emotions and how that stored tension can eventually show up as illness. So trauma researcher Bessel van der Koek famously said that the body keeps the score, and that is something that we mention a lot on this podcast. And it's an important phrase that's kind of thrown around a lot, especially when we're talking about yoga teacher trainings and yoga, etc. So in Yoga and I Evader, this has been understood for thousands of years that the body is the subconscious mind, and whatever we don't process gets stored somewhere. So it's this idea that emotions are a really real thing. They're not just something fluffy, but they have a real impact on us physically. It doesn't mean that emotions are bad or that illness is your fault in any way. It just means that the body is actually always trying to help us. So if we can't process something in the moment, the body holds onto it until we have the capacity to feel, release, and integrate it. And often that happens when we're feeling safe. So if we don't feel safe enough to process emotions, then it gets stored somewhere. And that's where the phrase the body keeps the score kind of comes from. So the body is sort of our keeper of emotional history. So I guess the first thing to understand is that like the body is not separate from our emotions. So emotions aren't abstract mental experiences, they are chemical and physical events. So when something overwhelming happens, when we're scared, ashamed, grieving, angry, or just overstimulated, the body prepares itself to respond appropriately to keep us safe. So it holds breath, it contracts muscles, it speeds up or slows down the heart as it needs to. And if we can't fully process in that moment, maybe we don't feel safe enough, maybe we've been conditioned to stay strong, or maybe our system just doesn't have the capacity in that moment, then the body holds on to those patterns. So that becomes like a story or the score, if you like. It's like a holding, it holds on somewhere in your body. And so that is what Bessel van der Koek meant when he said the body keeps the score. So in yogic philosophy, we've known this for thousands of years. Whatever we can't feel, express, or integrate gets stored somewhere. And not because we're broken, but because the body is actually trying to keep us alive and keep us safe. So why do we suppress emotions? We don't suppress emotions because we're weak. We suppress them because at some point it was safer not to feel. So maybe you grew up in a home where crying wasn't allowed or anger was dangerous, or maybe you were just praised for being the good girl or the calm one or the one who never made a fuss. Maybe life through you more than your nervous system could handle at some stage. So the body developed ways to cope. It tensed the jaw, it armoured the shoulders, did shallow breathing, disconnected from sensation, overworking, became a coping mechanism like distraction, people pleasing, or going numb. So these aren't flaws, these are just survival strategies. And so this is how stored emotions then become physical symptoms within the body. So storing emotions is not mystical, it's actually biological. So emotions are biological events which involve the nervous system, the vagus nerve, muscles, fascia, hormones, and the immune system and breath patterns. So when an emotion isn't fully processed, the physiological activation that the emotion created doesn't complete. And so the body holds on to unfinished activation patterns, like an app just constantly running in the background or like leaving the lights on. So they call this like an open loop, and we have to close those trauma loops to be able to process that emotion, to be able to remove it from the body so that we can come out of survival, otherwise, we tend to be stuck in survival. So the nervous system creates an emotional response. So every emotion starts as a nervous system activation. So there's like a trigger, like a stimulus. So maybe you feel fear or anger or sadness or shame or grief, and then the body prepares physiologically. So for example, if you feel fear, the heart rate increases, the breath speeds up, the muscles tighten, the gut slows down. And that is your autonomic nervous system in action. If you process that emotion by like speaking, expressing, crying, shaking, the activation completes in your body and it returns to baseline. So you've closed that loop. If not, the activation stays stuck, like on. And this shows up as chronic tension, eventually inflammation, and an altered physiology. And the vagus nerve is the main highway of that emotional memory. So your vagus nerve is the body-mind connector. So it's what connects the body and mind together. And it does three big things with emotion. So first it sends body signals to the brain. So 80% of the vagus nerve fibers go from body to brain. And that means that your brain learns how to feel from your body, not the other way around. And it also regulates stress. That's the second thing it does. This is a relaxation shift. So if an emotion isn't processed, the vagus nerve never gets to complete the cycle and return you to calm. So therefore, it keeps you in, fight, flight, or freeze. And this prevents digestion, immunity, and healing from functioning normally as the body should do, because we're sort of stuck with the lights on. We haven't closed the loop because we haven't processed the emotion. So the third thing it does is stores patterns of safety and threat. So if a certain emotion was unsafe to express in childhood, the vagus nerve will remember that and it will shut down. Or it will overactivate the body when that emotion arises in adulthood. So these are called emotional or somatic imprints. And muscles store the shape of emotion. So every emotion has a posture. So fear looks like a collapsed chest, tight psoas, anger looks like a clenched jaw, tight fists, grief would be rounded shoulders, shame, downward gaze or caved belly, stress, tight neck and upper back. If you repeatedly suppress an emotion, you repeatedly hold that posture, and over time it becomes chronic muscular tension. And that is how people end up with tight hips, maybe from long-term fear, jaw clenching from unexpressed anger, upper back tension from carrying responsibility, or gut issues from anxiety. So the muscle memory becomes emotional memory. And fascia also holds emotional charge. So fascia is like a web of connected tissue which wraps every organ, muscle, and bone. And it responds to stress hormones, breath patterns, and muscle tension. So unprocessed emotions create densification in the fascia. Think of it like drying, like tissue drying or thickening, it becomes less elastic. So it becomes really dense and kind of inflexible. And that's why hip opening yoga releases emotions, because you're holding in that fascia to release those suppressed emotions. People cry often in long-held stretches again because the emotion is being released. And shaking and movement can also release that trauma because it's kind of unsticking or unstucking that densified fascia, which is what holds the emotional charge. So another part of the body that's at play are hormones and the immune system, and they actually encode emotional patterns. So if the fascia holds the emotional charge, then the hormones in the immune system encode the emotional patterns. So chronic emotional suppression leads to chronic stress hormones. So the cortisol and adrenaline end up changing our digestion, our thyroid function, our reproductive hormones, our immune function, and our inflammation levels. And this is how emotional suppression can become IBS, autoimmune flare-ups, migraines, hormonal imbalance, or chronic fatigue. Because the body literally remembers what you couldn't express. So it's holding onto it, it's keeping the score, even if we're not willing to sort of verbalize it or face it ourselves consciously, subconsciously, the body is doing something with it. It has to. Why certain emotions show up in certain parts of the body? So it's not random, it's about physiology and protection. So fear in the hips, the psoas, and the lower back. So the psoas muscle is directly wired into the fight and flight system. So when the body prepares to run or freeze, the psoas contracts. So chronic fear leads to this chronic sort of contraction or tension in the psoas, which is that really the lowest part of your lower back. Anger is in the jaw, the neck, and the hands. So the anger prepares the body to fight. So we clench the jaw, we tighten the fists, we prepare the shoulders. If anger isn't expressed, then those muscles hold that charge. Grief is in the lungs and the chest and the heart. So crying requires a diaphragm movement. Grief that isn't cried creates contraction around the lungs, and people often describe grief as heaviness or tightness in the chest. Shame is often in the belly, the gut, and the pelvic floor. So shame triggers a freeze response, which is where the belly tightens, the pelvic muscles contract and digestion stops, which is why shame is often linked to gut issues. And anxiety is the gut and the nervous system. So 90% of our serotonin, which is almost like our happy hormone, is made in the gut. When the nervous system is on alert, the gut becomes hypersensitive. And so it's harder to make that sort of happy hormone, which is where you know some of the depression can also root from as well. Sadness in the throat, when we swallow tears or words, the throat muscle contracts. The lump in the throat is literally that emotional suppression reflex. And over responsibility or burdens are in the shoulders. So the trapezius muscles lift and guard when we feel overly responsible, like long-term caregiving is you know connected to tight shoulders, for example. So emotional energy wants to complete a cycle. It doesn't want to get stuck in the body. An emotion has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So the body wants to cry, it wants to shake, it wants to tremble and breathe deeply, it wants to sigh and shout and move. And those are actually completion signals. So if we interrupt that cycle by holding it in or distracting ourselves through working or whatever else we might do to distract ourselves, or being strong or shutting down, the emotion doesn't complete and it stays stuck in tension, pain, fatigue, disassociation, and eventually physical illness. So they say if you don't listen to the whisper, the body will have to shout. Completing the cycle is what somatic healing, yoga, meditation, and breath work all help with. And the freeze response. So this is this is often one of the most misunderstood responses is freeze. When something is too overwhelming, either too much, too fast, or too soon, the body has to hit pause. And you might, on the surface, look calm, you might carry on with your day, you might actually function extremely well. But on the inside, the body hasn't completed the cycle. The tears weren't cried, the anger wasn't expressed, the fear didn't get moved through, it wasn't processed. So the nervous system has to store it, waiting for a moment of safety when it can release. Which is often why you see people emotional in yoga classes, for example. This storage is what often becomes chronic tension, depression, fatigue, inflammation, and burnout. The amount of chronic fatigue in the autoimmune disease around at the moment is absolute madness. So as a yoga teacher, every time we start a yoga class, we always ask, are there any illnesses or injuries that I need to know about as a yoga teacher? And trust me, after 15 years of teaching yoga, you start to see patterns. And chronic fatigue and autoimmune disease is just like rife, along with obviously so many other injuries now. But chronic fatigue, this one that comes up so much, is not actually a problem of having no energy. What it is is your body's refusal to spend more energy. So it's actually your body trying to protect you from yourself. You're asking yourself to do too much, and your body's saying no, so it will zap your energy so that you can't do it, so that you have to rest. Being stuck in survival has a price. So the price is chronic symptoms. You won't just get tired, you'll get sick eventually. And this is this is your body is not sabotaging you or sabotaging success, it's trying to protect you from the pace that that success demands. So it puts the brakes on it, slows you down. And all of this, I believe, it comes from this belief that you're not enough, just as you are. If you don't believe you're enough just as you are, then your self-esteem will become connected to your success, and so you'll become a workaholic. Success has become your identity in that way. You have to do it to feel a sense of self-esteem. So, therefore, high achieving becomes a survival strategy for people who don't believe they're enough just as they are. But the irony of that is that the pressure of that constant working, almost that addiction, leads to burnout, and actually, success can't come from burnout. So we're constantly striving for something that we can't attain, and then we're stuck on a hamster wheel and eventually get sick. So, what we have to do is whatever practices we can to truly believe that we're enough as we are, and a lot of the time that means working through some of these limiting beliefs, some of these thought patterns that we have inherited either from somebody else or from a different culture or experience that has told us that we're not enough in some way, which is just not a truth. Peter Crohn does amazing work on this, and he says, if I was to slice you down the middle, there'd be no label inside you that says you're not enough. It's just not a truth. It's something that we pick up and then we live by, and it creates these traps that we feel like you know we have to achieve to feel good enough, and then we get these addictions. But the root of it is that we don't feel enough as we are, and if we can practice feeling enough as we are, then a lot of those symptoms tend to subside. Carl Rogers does amazing work on this, and he talks about the core conditions which lead us to self-actualization, which I've mentioned on podcasts before. But it's these like a potato needing soil, water, air, and sunlight to grow. Humans need, he says, three core conditions, which are unconditional positive regard, so regarded positively, acceptance, so feeling accepted, and congruence, which is like transparency but also like authenticity. Are you being congruent to yourself? Honest, truth, a real deep truth and alignment to self. And if we have those core conditions, then we're able to self-actualise, we're able to feel safe, to feel that we're enough as we are. Those are the conditions that provide the environment to allow us to feel that we're enough, to accept ourselves and to process trauma or whatever it is that we've picked up along the way that has contributed to us not feeling enough. So if we can genuinely feel enough as we are, then a lot of these symptoms, like overworking, for example, will fall away because we get a real authentic sense that we can just be and that's okay, and then the body can rest. So a lot of it is about processing, it's about processing like what has led me to believe that I don't feel enough as I am, what happened, and those trauma loops are stored in the body. So emotional processing actually looks like healing not being about improvement or bettering. So it's it's ironic that the phrase is sort of get better, isn't it? Because it's not actually that we want to get better, it's actually just about listening. It's about listening to the body and being brave enough to slow down and to allow the body to process and finish what it started. It's about creating space for the body to actually tell its story to be heard, about recognizing that every symptom, every tension, every ache has a message. The body is a messenger if we can tune in, learn the language, and listen. The body doesn't punish, it's it's protecting. And the moment we feel safe enough to feel what we couldn't feel, the body starts to release those old scores that it's been keeping. So it's like one breath at a time, one sensation at a time, one layer at a time, we start listening. Real emotional processing is actually quite simple. It's just noticing what you feel, it's staying with it, not suppressing it, not abandoning yourself, being with it, letting the breath soften around it, giving the emotion permission to rise and fall like a wave. It will wash over you, it will come and it will go. Not being afraid of it, welcoming it. You don't need the full story, you don't need to analyse everything, you don't need to necessarily articulate all the details of it. You just need to feel into it and trust that the body does the rest. So there's a lovely somatic practice that you can take, which is about just taking a minute to experience what's going on inside your body. You might place a hand on your heart, one on your belly, and you can take a slow breath through the nose and let the exhale fall out through the mouth just gently. And then you're asking your body, what are you holding today? And you don't need an answer. This is working with the subconscious, so let go of it being super rational, just drop into feeling and just notice. So notice a sensation in your body, whether that's a tightness, a warmth, a buzzing, a numbness, a restlessness, whatever it is, just let it be there without fixing, judging, punishing, you're just observing, and then you breathe into that sensation, not to change it, but to meet it, to acknowledge it. And imagining softening by just one percent, and you just keep softening and allowing and welcoming, and that is enough. That is emotional processing, that is how the body unwinds its score. So the good news is that the body can always complete a cycle, even if an emotion is decades old, the body can release it, whether that's through crying, through breath, the long exhalations, through noticing it somatically, like we just spoke about. Yoga is amazing for processing this breath work, movement, connection. So our body is actually always trying to heal if we can get out of its way. So every single moment the body is trying to heal. It's what we put in the way of it that stops it from doing that. So I hope that's helped. That's obviously just kind of the tip of an iceberg when we look at how the body keeps the score. But I think it's an important message and a reminder and maybe useful to kind of explain why it does it, how it does it, where it's stored, and what you can do to help it. So if that's resonated, then please do share that with somebody who you feel might might need it. And remember that your body isn't broken, it's brilliant and it is always telling the truth.