I Left My Body A Long Time Ago
And honestly? I had very good reasons to.
I can meditate for hours. I can sit with someone in the middle of their deepest grief and not flinch. I can visualise, journey, channel — all of it comes naturally to me. The inner world has always felt like home.
But tell me to go for a walk? Ask me to exercise? The moment it’s about moving this physical body, something in me completely shuts down. My heart starts racing. A heavy, dull feeling sets in. And before I know it, I’m on the couch, watching Netflix, eating something, doing literally anything else.
For the longest time, I told myself it was laziness. Or that I just preferred the mental over the physical. But when I finally started doing the real work — the same kind I help others do — I found what was actually sitting underneath all of it.
Fear. Old fear. The kind your body holds onto for years without telling you.
“The body doesn’t forget. It doesn’t file things away neatly. It holds what the mind couldn’t handle —
and it holds on faithfully, for as long as it takes.”
When your body becomes the place that holds too much
Some things happen in life that are just too big to process in the moment. When that happens, the body steps in. It quietly tucks the pain away — in your shoulders, your chest, your stomach — and carries it forward without saying a word.
That happened to me when I was seven. Within a span of six to seven months, my entire world shifted — we moved, and then my father died. My small body had absolutely no idea what to do with all of that. So it stored it. Not as a clear memory, but as a feeling. A bracing. A low-level alarm that never fully switched off.
And then, in the years that followed, I found ways to cope. Some of those ways hurt me. The body held that too — not just the original grief, but the guilt and shame of everything that came after. Layer on layer, all of it pressed into this body I was supposed to call home.
Is it really a surprise that I disconnected?
Disconnecting with your body isn’t a weakness. It’s survival.
I want to be clear about this: dissociation — that feeling of floating slightly above your own life — is not a character flaw. It’s one of the smartest things a nervous system can do when it has no other option.
If you are not fully in your body, you can’t be fully hurt by what happens to it. You can still function. You can even build something beautiful. You just do it from a little bit of a distance — watching yourself, managing, staying just above the surface.
I built a whole life from that place. Meaningful work. Practices I love. A community of women I’m honoured to walk alongside. And yet every time I tried to really come back into my body — to feel solid, boundaried, present — something inside me would immediately say: no. We don’t go there. It’s not safe.
Every attempt to get physically fit would quietly fall apart. And now I understand why.
When you exercise, your heart rate goes up. Your breath shortens. You sweat. Your body goes into a heightened state. And for someone carrying old fear, that heightened state feels exactly like the original threat. Same physical sensations. My nervous system couldn’t tell the difference. So it did what it always did —
It told me to get out. Find something numbing. Stay there until the feeling passes.
“A body with clear edges means: this is where I end, and the world begins. That’s powerful. But it also means you’re real enough to be affected. Real enough to be hurt.”
What I found when I stopped running from the freeze
When I finally stopped fighting the freeze — stopped shaming myself for it, stopped trying to push through it — and just sat with it, I found something unexpected underneath.
I was afraid of having a boundary. Afraid of being fully present in a body that took up real space. Because a body with edges is a real body. And a real body can be reached. It can be hurt.
Somewhere along the way, I had completely written this body off. Decided it couldn’t be trusted. That it only led to pain and loss and shame. That I was better off staying vague, undefined, floating somewhere just above it all.
But here’s what slowly became clear to me — this body never actually left me. Even when I left it. It kept showing up. It carried me into every session, every workshop, every circle. This body that I had dismissed and abandoned had quietly been doing its job the whole time.
So how do you come back?
Slowly. And without forcing it.
I’m not going to tell you I have figured this out. I’m still in the middle of it.
But what I have learned is this: the way back isn’t through willpower or discipline or just pushing through the fear. A body that learned the world was unsafe will not respond to force. Force just confirms everything it was already afraid of.
The way back is through small, repeated moments of safety. Put your hand on your chest in the morning before you reach for your phone. Noticing three physical sensations — warmth, breath, the weight of the blanket — before the day begins. Not to fix anything. Just to say: I’m here. I know you’ve been holding a lot. I’m not going anywhere.
It’s unglamorous work, but it is also the most important and hardest work I have ever done.
Because now, when someone comes to me unable to inhabit their own body, I’m not guessing at what that feels like. I know. I know the freeze from the inside. I know what it costs to stay disconnected, and I know what courage it takes to even consider coming back.
If any of this sounds familiar — the freeze before movement, the bingeing, the ease in the mental and the dread in the physical — I want you to hear this:
You didn’t fail your body. You survived with what you had. And whenever you’re ready, your body will still be here. Waiting. Patient in the way only bodies know how to be.
The question isn’t how to make yourself exercise.
The question is: what is your body still holding that made leaving feel necessary?
Start there. Everything else follows.