YogiWrites

Ever wonder why heartbreak literally hurts your chest? Or why anxiety feels like someone’s doing jumping jacks in your stomach?

I’m sitting in my old gym yesterday, watching this uncle do bicep curls with the intensity of someone trying to lift his entire past. His face is scrunched up, jaw clenched, shoulders rigid as a traffic cop in peak hour Pune.

“Bhai, relax your face,” I tell him. “You’re lifting weights, not carrying your mother-in-law’s complaints.”

He laughs, drops his shoulders, and suddenly his form improves. The weight feels lighter.

That’s when it hit me—again, like it does every few months when life decides to be my guru.

The Body Keeps Score (And It’s Not Good at Math)

Your body doesn’t know the difference between lifting 20 kg dumbbells and carrying 20 years of resentment. Both feel heavy. Both make you breathe funny. Both leave you exhausted.

I learned this the hard way during my corporate days. Every morning, I’d wake up with this invisible weight on my chest. Not the good kind from yesterday’s bench press—this was different. This was my soul doing push-ups while my mind was still figuring out why I hated Monday mornings.

The crazy part? I thought it was just “stress.” Like stress is some abstract concept floating around in your head, bothering your thoughts like a mosquito at 2 AM.

But here’s what nobody tells you: Your thoughts live in your muscles. Your emotions rent space in your organs. And your past? That squatter has been camping in your nervous system for years without paying rent.

The Geography of Feelings

Think about it. Where do you feel anger? In your fists, your jaw, your neck—right?

Where does sadness live? Heavy in your chest, sometimes dropping down to your stomach like a stone in still water.

Anxiety? That restless energy bouncing around your ribcage like a cricket in a matchbox.

Fear? Cold. Sharp. Usually somewhere between your throat and your belly, making everything feel smaller.

I remember this one time, after a particularly brutal breakup (the kind where you question not just the relationship but your entire ability to be human), I went to the gym. Not to feel better—just to feel something else.

But every time I tried to bench press, my chest would tighten. Not from the weight. From the weight of everything I wasn’t saying, wasn’t processing, wasn’t letting go.

My body was literally holding onto what my mind was trying to forget.

The Muscle Memory of Trauma

Here’s where it gets interesting. Your body remembers everything your mind tries to forget. Every harsh word from childhood sits somewhere in your shoulders. Every time you swallowed your truth, your throat remembers. Every moment you felt powerless, your core still braces for impact.

I used to think meditation was about clearing your mind. Turns out, it’s about feeling your body. Really feeling it. Not just the obvious stuff—the back pain, the tight hamstrings, the clicking knee.

The subtle stuff. The way your breath changes when you think about that conversation with your father. The way your jaw tightens when someone mentions your ex. The way your heart rate picks up when you’re scrolling through job postings at 11 PM.

The Beautiful Mess of Being Human

But here’s the thing—and this is where it gets beautiful instead of just heavy—your body is also where healing happens.

Every deep breath you take is a small rebellion against anxiety. Every time you relax your shoulders, you’re literally letting go. Every workout where you move through the discomfort, you’re teaching your nervous system that it’s safe to feel and keep going.

Your body isn’t just storing your pain. It’s also your path out of it.

I see this in the gym all the time. People come in carrying invisible weights. They leave lighter, not just because they burned calories, but because they moved the stuck energy. They breathed through the discomfort. They proved to themselves that they can handle hard things.

The Practice (Because Someone Always Asks)

So what do you do with all this? How do you work with a body that’s been moonlighting as your emotional storage unit?

Start small. Next time you feel something intense, don’t just think about it. Feel where it lives in your body. Get curious about it. Is it tight? Heavy? Hot? Cold? Moving or stuck?

Breathe into it. Not the shallow breathing you do when you’re trying to get through something. The deep, honest breathing you do when you’re trying to get through to something.

Move it. Walk. Stretch. Dance badly in your room. Do push-ups against your kitchen counter. Your body speaks the language of movement better than the language of analysis.

Be patient. Your body has been keeping score for years. It’s not going to trust you overnight just because you started paying attention.

The Point of All This

Your emotions aren’t just in your head. Your thoughts aren’t just mental events. You’re not a brain driving a meat vehicle.

You’re a whole system. An ecosystem. A walking, breathing, feeling integration of everything you’ve ever experienced.

And that’s not a problem to solve. That’s a miracle to work with.

The next time someone tells you to “just think positive,” remind them that your body has been voting on your thoughts for years. Maybe it’s time to listen to what it’s been trying to tell you.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go convince my shoulders that the workday is over and they can stop holding up the world.

What’s your body been trying to tell you? Mine’s been very vocal about my posture while writing this. Some conversations never end.