What you repress emotionally will eventually express physically.
The Jaw and Mouth: The Unspoken Truth
Jaw clenching, teeth grinding, TMJ issues—these are often about unspoken truth. People who didn’t get to set boundaries. People who didn’t get to speak their no. They bit down on their truth in order to stay safe. Those trapped words become tension in the jaw. This is also often about control.
Shoulders: The Weight of the World
Shoulder pain is often about feeling like you are carrying the weight of the world. We use that expression for a reason. It’s about feeling overburdened by life—financially, with family, and in relationships.
Throat and Neck: Being Heard and Seen
Throat issues can be about self-expression. About worth. When is it my turn? When do I get to be heard? This is a way of guarding vulnerability—the fear of being seen and heard fully in this life. A tense neck often mirrors a tense mind, holding back words you were never allowed to say.
Lungs: Unprocessed Grief
Anything around the lungs—tightness, heaviness, breathlessness—is where we hold unprocessed grief. It can feel like it’s hard to breathe fully when you’re holding grief in your lungs. This is also where we store sadness we never got to release, mourning we never got to express, loss we never fully allowed ourselves to feel.
Heart: Love, Loss, and Betrayal
Heart pain—physical heart issues—is where we hold love and loss and betrayal. We literally talk about dying of a broken heart. This is also about a lack of power, powerlessness in relationships, and the lingering pain of being let down by someone you trusted.
Stomach and Digestive Issues: What You’re Not Digesting
Stomach issues, ulcers, tightness, digestive problems—are about shame, power, and sexuality. Think about what the belly does: it digests. That includes emotional experience. If you are not digesting the things that happened to you, if you’re swallowing pain instead of processing it, this is where a lot of people who have experienced trauma start to get autoimmune issues and digestive problems. You’re not able to break down what life has handed you, so your body breaks down instead.
Pelvis: Pleasure, Safety, and Creativity
The pelvis is all about pleasure and safety and creativity. Pelvic floor issues or pelvic pain often point to a history of not feeling safe in your own pleasure or your own sexuality. A history of bracing, of tensing up to avoid being hurt or exposed. A body that learned to lock up instead of let go.
Hips: Frozen Survival Energy
You’ll often hear people say in yoga that we hold a lot of trauma in the hips. The hips hold any time you’ve had to brace. Any time you didn’t get to enact a fight or flight response that your body needed to—that it didn’t get to enact at the time of the event. Your hips hold that survival energy. If you start to free your hips, you will start to release a lot of that stored history.
Lower Back: Unsupported and Overburdened
Lower back pain is often people who felt unsupported in the world—carrying the weight of the world by themselves. This is also where we can hold ancestral pain and ancestral trauma: the unprocessed pain of your parents, your grandparents, generations before you. This is also where we hold the weight of expectations placed on us that were never ours to carry—the pressure to be the one who holds everything together.
Hands: Grasping and Agency
Cold hands, shaky hands, numb hands, hand injuries—it’s about grasping. Where are you afraid to actually reach for what you want in your life? Where do you believe that you don’t have agency to have, to bring in the things that you want, to create, to write the life that you’re dreaming of?
Feet: Grounding and Forward Motion
Our feet are about grounding, ancestry, and belonging. Issues with feet can reveal fear about taking the next step in your life. Where are you keeping yourself stuck? Is there a fear of forward momentum, of moving into the unknown, of leaving behind what you’ve always known—even if it wasn’t good for you?
Skin: Boundaries and Protection
Skin issues—rashes, itching, tingling, burning—are quite literally boundaries. Skin issues are boundary issues. Where are your boundaries crossed? Where did you not learn to say no? Your skin is asking for things to be softened and for your system to actually find softness—while still knowing dignity and boundaries in your life. It’s the boundary between you and the world, and when that boundary is constantly being tested or broken through, your skin will let you know.
The Body Holds the Key
All symptomology is expressing something that needs your attention. The body always tells the truth.
