I'm a yoga and awareness teacher, and the founder of Verisage — a coaching practice for women rebuilding their lives after identity-shifting change. This piece is the second in a four-part series called The Body Knows, exploring the relationship between emotional healing and physical reconnection. You don't need to have read part one to be here.
There was a period when I was tired in a way I couldn't explain.
Not physically tired — I was sleeping. Not overworked, not unwell. Just carrying a weight that no amount of rest seemed to touch. I'd wake up already exhausted. I'd move through the day feeling like I was wading through something thick and invisible. And then, when the stillness became uncomfortable, I'd reach for whatever would fill it — my phone, another task, a glass of wine, anything to keep the quiet from getting too loud.
At the time, I told myself I was fine. I was functioning. I was getting things done. What I didn't understand yet — what it took years and a yoga mat and a lot of quiet to learn — is that my body was doing what bodies do when the mind refuses to feel something.
It was holding it for me.
If you recognise any of that — the bone-deep tiredness, the reflexive reaching, the sense of carrying something you can't quite name — this piece is for you. What follows is something I wish someone had offered me much earlier: a simple, honest explanation of what is actually happening in the body when we go through something hard, and why physical practice is not an add-on to healing, but one of its most essential pathways.
What the nervous system does when the mind can't cope
When we experience something overwhelming — grief, chronic stress, fear, sustained emotional pain — the nervous system responds before the mind has a chance to process it. This is not a flaw in our design. It is precisely how we survive difficult things.
The body activates. Muscles brace. Breath becomes shallow. The stress response floods the system with cortisol and adrenaline to help us cope. And when the overwhelm is sustained — when there is no safe moment to release — that activation doesn't fully resolve. It stays. Lodged in the tissue, in the breath pattern, in the set of the jaw and the height of the shoulders and the way we hold ourselves when we're not thinking about it.
In yoga, we call this samskara — the impressions left in the body by experience. Every significant thing that has happened to you has left a trace. Not just in memory. In the physical body itself.
This is why talk therapy, as valuable as it is, can only take us so far. We can understand something completely — name it, analyse it, make peace with it intellectually — and still feel it sitting in our chest every morning. Because understanding happens in the mind. And the body is not the mind.
The body releases through the body. Through breath. Through movement slow enough to be felt. Through the deliberate, patient practice of coming back into physical sensation and letting the nervous system complete what it started — the release it never got to finish.
What the exhaustion is actually telling you
I think about the tiredness I described at the beginning of this piece differently now. The exhaustion wasn't in my muscles. It was in my nervous system — the constant low-level effort of holding things that hadn't been processed, of bracing against feelings that were too big to let in all at once. That kind of tiredness doesn't respond to sleep. It responds to release.
And the reaching — the phone, the wine, the busyness — I understand that differently too. It wasn't weakness. It was a completely logical response to a nervous system that was overwhelmed and looking for regulation. We reach for things that change how we feel because something in us knows we need to feel different. The problem is that most of what we reach for only pauses the signal, rather than completing it.
This is what I mean when I say the body knows. Not in a mystical sense. In a deeply practical one. The body has been keeping an accurate record of everything you've carried. And it knows, on some level, exactly what it needs in order to put it down.
Your job is simply to start listening. Not to fix. Not to excavate everything at once. Just to turn toward the body with a little more curiosity and a little less override than you did yesterday.
That is enough. That, actually, is a great deal.
Where to begin
If this resonates and you're wondering what it actually looks like to begin — you don't need a yoga mat, a retreat, or a significant clearing in your schedule. You need five minutes and a willingness to arrive somewhere you've been avoiding.
Notice the reaching first. Not to judge it — just to get curious about what it's reaching away from. The next time you pick up your phone when the room gets quiet, pause for three breaths before you open anything. That pause is the practice beginning.
And if you want to go further — a gentle, structured way back into your body that asks nothing of you except to show up — I've put together a free guide and a seven-day practice designed exactly for this. Not exercise. Not performance. Just the quiet, accessible work of coming home.
Back in Your Body is a free guide and seven-day somatic practice for women who want to reconnect with their physical selves — gently, accessibly, without needing any prior experience.
Get the free guide →