Your Body Isn't Holding On Because It's Broken - It's Waiting for The Perfect Safe Space
There's a moment most women reach, usually after years of trying, where they stop asking "why isn't this working?" and begin to question something quite heavier - "Is something fundamentally wrong with me?"
I've both sat with women in that place and been that woman.
To be explicitly clear, the answer, every-single-time, is a resounding '“no”
Nothing is wrong with you… But something has been misunderstood. Misunderstood about how the body works, about what healing actually requires, and about why everything you've tried so far has only ever taken you so far.
The body is not a collection of separate machines
We're taught, from a young age, that the body operates in departments. Your mind is over here. Your emotions are somewhere else. Your physical symptoms are a separate problem entirely, and each one completely unrelated. We end up with specialists who deal with X, Y, and Z, and none of them ever crossing-over.
We know that's not how any of this works, right? You are one integrated system, that means:
What happens in your nervous system affects your fascia.
What lives unprocessed in your emotional body shows up in your tissue.
What your mind has filed away or swept under that big old rug, your body is often still holding onto, in places where you stopped noticing long ago, because the tension became so bloody normal that it just started feeling like you.
Now then, this is physiology, and there are no metaphors here.
Myth: “You need a regulated nervous system for life”
When something overwhelming happens - whether that be grief, trauma, chronic stress, loss - your nervous system does exactly what it was designed to do - it protects you, and it takes what you cannot process in that moment & stores it (not for a rainy day!). It’s stored in the tissue, fascia, and the energy field, locked away with quite an extraordinary efficiency so that it keeps you functional & moving, until that day arrives when the conditions are safe enough to surface it, to process it, and eventually, to release it.
So when we hear wellness influencers raving about having regulated nervous systems, it’s quite far off the mark, because our nervous systems are rather often dysregulated, simply through doing their job and with breathtaking precision. This isn’t dysfunction and the problem isn't the storing of the emotions. No, the problem is that most of us are never even given the conditions to finish what the body started.
Truth: “You need a flexible nervous system that can bounce back”
Why talking therapies aren’t always enough
Here's where it gets important, and I say this as someone who has sat in therapy, valued it, believes in it enough to have started studying it, and also hit the ceiling of what it could give me.
Talking therapies work at the level of the conscious mind, giving you a language for what happened. They help you to build a narrative and develop strategies, reframe the story, all of which truly matters. But the subconscious and the body are different territories entirely. You can understand something - intellectually, emotionally, and narratively - and yet your body can still be holding the original charge of it in your tissue. The two processes are not the same thing.
This is why women come to me having done years of therapy, and self-development work. Years of genuinely trying, but their body is still carrying something that, quite frankly, none of it even touched, and that’s not because the work wasn't real, more so that it was working at a different level than where the ‘thing’ actually lives.
What the body has been waiting for
There’s a few reasons why my therapy room is soft tones, waterfall, warm, and inviting. One of those reasons is that the body doesn't release under pressure - it needs relaxation, due care and attention. Not because you've simply decided it's time, and it doesn't respond to willpower or strategy, nor the sheer force of wanting to be better. To be ‘fixed’.
It responds to safety, it responds to slowness. The innate sense that it is finally allowed to finish what it started.
Reiki, aroma, sound, crystal therapy, and yin yoga all work at this level, and it’s not by force or pushing through (which we get told enough by society, right). It’s also not by requiring you to articulate, analyse, or explain. These modalities work by creating the precise conditions that the nervous system has been waiting for, and when those conditions arrive, the body knows exactly what to do with them.
The body and it’s systems are intelligent without the conscious mind. The body has always known, it's been ready for some time, but it just needed the environment for it to let go.
You were never broken
So, maybe you've tried everything. Maybe it still feels like something is stuck.
You're not broken, you haven't failed, and talking therapies haven’t failed you either. You've simply been working at the surface of something that lives much deeper.
The body that has been holding on is not your enemy, it’s your ally, your confidant, and it has been protecting you with everything in its might, for as long as it needed to - waiting for the moment it was finally safe to let go.
That moment could be now.
If this has landed somewhere in you, I'd love to have a conversation. Discovery calls are free and there's never any pressure, it’s just a space to explore what your next step might be.
Book your free discovery call here
Ashleigh xx
