Have you ever noticed that you can feel completely fine about something until you remember the person or situation, and suddenly your body feels heavy again? You may feel angry, ashamed, fearful, or drained, stuck even though the situation happened a long time ago.

Sometimes I think difficult experiences are a little like eating something that made you sick.

We can spend a lot of time thinking about who cooked it, why they made it that way, what they put in it, and how unlucky we were to end up with that meal. We may have every reason to be upset with the chef, and maybe even with the food itself.

But while we’re busy thinking about the chef, our body is still the one dealing with the bad food – something that disturbs us within.

When something is physically wrong with us, we usually know to slow down and take care of the body. But when something is emotional, we can easily underestimate it.

We can become so focused on what someone did to us that we don’t notice what is still happening inside.

Sometimes we think that because we calmed down and moved on, the experience disappeared. I want to put more emphasis on the distinction between moving on and moving through. To me, moving on means that life has continued and the situation may no longer feel as intense, while moving through means giving ourselves the space to recognize, understand, and allow what the experience left in us to move.

When we don’t have that space to recognize, listen and process what happened, it may continue taking up space in us, a little like an old file sitting on a hard drive, no longer open on the screen, but still using space in the background.

Maybe we never really learned to trust the messages from our body, to recognize them, give them space, and allow them to move.

Sometimes it’s actually very simple things that were hard to say:

I’m not okay with this. I don’t agree with this. That hurt me. I felt ashamed. I feel frozen. I was angry. This broke my heart. I didn’t feel safe with the way you showed up…

The intention isn’t to make these feelings bigger, to stay stuck in them, or to keep fighting against the feeling.

It is just to finally notice what was there.

Sometimes caring for ourselves means turning our attention away from the “chef and food” and toward the part of us that is still having a hard time, the part that never really had the space to understand what was happening inside when life showed up that way.

We don’t have to forgive what happened. We don’t have to forget it.

Sometimes we just need to give ourselves enough space to recognize what our body has been carrying, understand what it was trying to tell us, and allow it to move.

The chef may have cooked the food badly. The chef may have been wrong, too.

But our body is the one that has to digest it, process it, and eventually let it go.

If you want to explore this for yourself, you could make a simple list of the experiences that challenged you. For each one, instead of only writing down what happened, notice what was happening in you while it was happening.

What feelings were there? What did you need? What were you thinking? What did you want to say or do? What reactions did you notice? What stopped you to express? How was your feelings/thoughts about you?

Then you may observe: How much of that was actually accessible to me at the time?

Maybe some of it was clear. But maybe some of it was only felt as tension, heaviness, discomfort, numbness, or an urge to get away, something your body was experiencing before you had the words or space to understand it.

You don’t have to force anything to come up. Just notice what you can notice now.

Sometimes giving that part of you a little space to be seen is enough for it to no longer have to stay in the background.