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How Suppressed Emotions Become Physical Symptoms · The Body Rhythm: Nervous System Health, Digestion & Daily Rhythms for Women

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine a lifetime of just burying things down.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we suppress that anger and fear and grief and overwhelm and exhaustion, right?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we push through and we push through and we bury and we bury and we bury until we can't anymore.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And those things that we bury, they don't evaporate.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're just kind of in this void, this black hole, until they begin to pop up again.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast, the podcast for women who are ready to stop pushing through and start feeling like themselves again.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm CJ, Ayurvedic Wellness Guide, helping women reconnect to the natural rhythm their bodies have been craving.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't that long ago that I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix, floated no matter what I ate, and lying awake at 3 a.m.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: with my mind already running tomorrow's to-do list.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I just needed to be more consistent, more disciplined.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize that my body wasn't feeling me.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was completely overwhelmed because you're not broken.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: You've just been living outside your natural rhythm for a long time.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Body Rhythm.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Chelsea, and I am so happy to have you here.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I am very excited about today's episode because it is about suppressed emotions, our gut health, our bones, our daily routines, and how they're all interconnected.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So imagine this.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that is keeping you or waking you up in the morning at 2 a.m.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's not insomnia, it's an emotion.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: An emotion that's been waiting all day for somewhere to go.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And a student came up to me after class recently, and she said something that has stuck with me ever since.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And she said she was learning to feel her emotions again.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And she wasn't learning new emotions, she wasn't learning to manage her emotions, she was learning to feel them again.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And she was at this point of retirement where work responsibilities especially had been lifted off of her plate, and it was creating more space in her life, more opportunity to feel what she had been suppressing for years and years and years.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And she told me that she had suppressed down her feelings for so long, and she couldn't tell you when it began, it just became a habit of her life.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the suppression began showing up in other areas, in pain in her body that would move from location to location, in digestive issues that came and went, not really knowing what was gonna bring on the next digestive problem, in nights where she just couldn't find a peaceful and restful sleep.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so she had recently started going to a somatic breathing class.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And during this class, she was doing more work getting in touch with her body, not just her mind.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what she said was doing these somatic breathing practices, she began to feel her emotions for the first time in decades.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: After years of not being able to feel them, and most importantly, not realizing how much she had been pushing them down and how much it was affecting her daily life.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: She knew something was off, she knew something wasn't right, she knew she didn't feel good in her body.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And yet it wasn't until she was about to retire that she could name it and actually began to get in touch with those feelings again.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what she is describing actually impacts a lot of us.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And for a lot of us, we just don't have the vocabulary, the words, the language to express what's happening.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we are unable to suppress the emotion, right?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: We push it down.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Ayurveda says that these unprocessed emotions get into the cellular level and they stay there, but they usually begin to surface back up at some point, right?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because the body holds what the mind can't process.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then when the body becomes too overle overwhelmed, when the cells become too overwhelmed, you know, imagine a lifetime of just burying things down.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we suppress that anger and fear and grief and overwhelm and exhaustion, right?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we push through and we push through and we bury and we bury and we bury until we can't anymore.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And those things that we bury, they don't evaporate.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're just kind of in this void, this black hole, until they begin to pop up again.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: They get stored into our tissues, into the cellular level, into our nervous system, and into our bones.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: We might think that the bones are this dense thing, right?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: But actually they're very porous.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: They can hold a lot.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in Ayurveda, the bone tissue is considered one of the deepest layers of the body.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the seven essential tissues.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's spacious, it's porous, it's stable, right?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's the structure that everything else is built around, right?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The muscles can connect to it, the fascia connects to it.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: All of these delicate structures connect to the bones that are holding us up, encapsulating our mind.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And our bones, our skeleton is also where the oldest material lives.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not just the stress from the week, the stress from this year or this decade, or sometimes even the patterns that go back to childhood.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in some traditions, it goes even farther back than that.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: They say that the bones can hold the patterns that were passed down to us from our ancestors.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Generational patterns, things that were happening in our family lineages before we were even born.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: These things can be held in the body, the way that the body holds everything quietly until there's space where it can no longer hold anything else.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is such a subtle energy.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's part of our subtle body.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's why we can sometimes be eating perfectly or doing all of the right things and still have pain or still have digestive issues that don't make sense or still not sleep.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's because the body isn't only reacting to what is happening today, to what is happening to today's lunch, to what is happening to today's argument or to the relationship stressor that happened today.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's reacting to not only today, but everything that happened before it.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: For a long time before it.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that even happened before we were even here on this earth, but happened to our great-grandmothers and our great-great-great-grandmothers.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so in Ayurveda, there is this concept called Agni.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Agni is the digestive fire.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And this Agni, this digestive fire is the ability to break down and transform that which we need and able to let everything else go.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: We can think about this in terms of food, in terms of metabolism.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Our Agni breaks down everything that we ingest and it transforms it and sends it where it needs to go, the different body systems, and then that which we don't need gets released.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: But we can also think of Agni in terms of our life experience, in terms of our experiences, emotions, grief, stress.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: All of it moves through the same basic process of taking something in and experiencing, breaking it down, learning from it, taking what's useful, and then releasing what isn't so that it doesn't get stuck into the deepest layers in our body.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when Agni is weak, and there's many ways that Agni can become weak, but when it is, when there's too much coming in and not enough metabolism, not enough ire to actually transform what's coming in, to process what's coming in, then we stop moving through and letting go what needs to be let go, and we kind of hold on to it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: We board it and it gets stored instead of digested.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you think about it this way, it's no longer a coincidence that so many of us experience emotional suppression and digestive issues together because they're not separate problems, they're connected, and it might be the same problem showing up in different places.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because the body isn't random, it is built on patterns, and those patterns tell a story.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can tell a story of a life, of a year, of an experience.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Modern medicine and the way that most of us have been taught to treat ourselves have gotten this way: that everything is a separate system.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: We treat the bloating independently, and we treat the gas independently than the neck pain, and we treat the insomnia differently than the bloating and the neck pain, as if they're all separate issues.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: But Ayurveda would have us look at them, yoga would have us look at them as they're all connected within the same body, because the body is the temple for everything.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is not only the physical structures, the skeleton, the bones, the muscles, the fascia, the organs, but it's also the mind and the emotions and your breath and your spirit, your soul, your energy.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: All these things are connected.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when one is affected, it affects the other.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And usually our patterns that we're in, usually we're in them for long amounts of time if we don't change anything.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then those patterns lead to the symptoms that we have.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the symptoms that we have aren't at random, they're just based on a root pattern.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the symptoms that we have are at random, they're just patterns showing up.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's information.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Information that's showing us what's there, but we haven't been taught how to read.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So if suppressing things down doesn't make them disappear, where does all of the experience, the emotion go?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And here is what I've seen over my work.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I have learned is that when someone finally feels safe enough and supported, when they feel safe in their body, in their environment, in their soul, something begins to shift.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: In intake sessions, for example, it often looks like this.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Someone will begin to talk, I'll ask some questions, and then partway through our discussion, and it happens almost every time crying happens.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Tears begin to fall.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what are tears?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's emotional movement.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then the client apologizes, but there's no apology needed because nothing is wrong.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: The client just begins to feel safe enough to let the emotion begin to rise and flow and move through the body, release what has been there, what's been buried.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing happens when I teach restorative yoga, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Where in these poses for long amounts of time where the body feels safe and supported, when the body is held, then I see students just begin to cry.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because I'm this fabulous teacher or the pose is just so amazing, right?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Although the poses can be amazing, but it's that the body is finally experiencing a state of safety and support where it can begin to let all that's been buried come up to the surface and be let go.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: We can only process that which we allow to come up.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if we never let anything come up during the day, if every hour is full or managed or we're scrolling or we're being productive, then there's only one window left for it to come up.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that's usually during the night when we're not doing anything.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Usually the night, you know, is when we the body repairs itself, it detoxifies itself.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so the body isn't doing its detoxification repair processes.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's usually us trying to manage that which we haven't been able to manage during the day, emotionally speaking.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the anxiety, the overwhelm, the worry.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so I actually recorded a previous episode, episode 21, exactly about this, about what is happening in the body.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you haven't listened to that one yet, go back and listen to it.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because I get more into what's coming up when you wake up at 2 or 3 a.m.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because the body has been waiting all day for a moment of stillness, and finally at 2 a.m., 3 a.m., it gets it and it uses it.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it's usually not restorative to us, it's usually disruptive, right?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Stillness and rest and space and a moment of pause is where we begin to connect to something bigger than our to-do list.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: We can connect to our soul, to our purpose, to what actually brings us joy and peace.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not what we think we should be doing or could be doing, right?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: When every waking hour is full, when there is no space to enjoy the flower, to enjoy connection with one another, then that is what we need to begin to dress.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: So our daily routine in Ayurveda, this is called dhinacharya.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's the practice of daily rhythm, brushing your teeth, washing your face.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's netipot, eating breakfast, doing a little bit of self-massage, it's transitioning through the day until lunchtime, eating away from screens, eating our biggest meals in the middle of the afternoon, transitioning into evening time, creating space for movement and churnaling and time away from screens.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Dinacharya is the rhythm that creates small openings of a rest and pause throughout the day.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Then everything being saved up for that 2 a.m.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: waking call.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so then Dinacharya, our daily rhythm, becomes our self-care routine.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that self-care routine becomes a way of how we see ourselves and how we see others.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we don't have time for ourselves, for our own self-care, how are we gonna have time for others?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then if we don't have time for ourselves, for the Dinacharya of everything gets stuffed down, it gets stuffed down into the bones.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the bones hold it because the bones are porous.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they hold it and they hold it and they hold it until they can't anymore.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so these small moments that you create throughout the day can be a few breaths before you get out of your car on your way to the office.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a pause between meetings, it can be a few breaths in the evening where nothing is required of you away from the screen.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's outside in the backyard, outside in the front yard, feeling the wind on the face.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's just being available in your body for one moment.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's the prayer before a meal.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: These aren't humongous practices where say, oh, I don't have any time to do it.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: There are 30 to 60 seconds that you can begin to build on and saying that, yes, my daily routine is how I want to show up for myself and it's how I want to show up for others.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I have thought about this in my own life as well, because the not too distant past, right?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've been caregiving for my dad through his cancer journey, and literally every day there was no space.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: There was hospitals, doctors, phone calls, logistics, insurance.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was holding everything together for everyone else and not myself.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a day off for years.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was driving all the time, and the only time I got to rest really was when I was sleeping.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't do that for too long.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: I did it for about two years.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: But my body got to a place where it mentally, physically, emotionally just like broke down.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: They just sat there dormant, building and building and building until I couldn't handle it anymore.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I've talked about it before, until I couldn't get up from bed, where all of my energy was directed towards getting up to go to the bathroom and get something to eat, because that's all I had left.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that might be true for a lot of us, maybe not to that extreme, and I I hope it's not, but the caregiving and the work and family and life.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And there just begins to become no acceptable moment to feel what you're feeling, to create the space, to create the small moment of pause.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so we bury it, we push it down into the void, we postpone and think we can get to it later.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then the later never comes.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so our Dinacharya, our daily routine, isn't about doing things perfect.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where so many people can get sort of um derailed, right?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Especially sometimes in Ayurveda, there's this model, you know, charya of what we should be doing every day.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think that that really works for a lot of us.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: We do what we can do, and then when we feel comfortable, we can add on or we can always take away.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: But our daily rhythm, our daily self-care, our daily routines are about building a life where feeling and emotion isn't postponed.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's where there's regular, small times of checking in with ourselves that the body can begin to trust.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Where the body says, I don't have to wait until everything falls apart.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have to wait until 2 a.m., 3 a.m.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: to process everything.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm getting small chances during the day.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if any of this is feeling familiar to you, right?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: The pain that moves around, maybe it's in the back and then maybe the shoulder and then the arm.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: If your digestion just doesn't make sense, if you have nights where you don't settle, you can't sleep, then I gently invite you to take the hidden stress pattern quiz that I've created.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: This quiz just begins to help you see which pattern you might be stuck in and how it might be showing up in your daily life.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's the 2 a.m.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: or 3 a.m.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: wake-up calls, if it's the bloating that never seems to go away, if it's the irritability, or maybe it's the lethargy and the feeling of feeling heavy, right?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things are connected because we're not trying to fix one symptom one by one.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're trying to build a rhythm that's sustainable, that the body can trust, that we can move through our life experience with more ease and feeling better, right?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: We want more space, more areas of pause where we're able to rest, where we're able to feel better in our body.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we live longer, right?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we feel better.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's areas in your life, or maybe it's a pattern where you've just been stuffing things down and you no longer want to do that anymore.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Send me an email, leave a comment, let me know.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to hear about it.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Email me at Chelsea at Chelseajohnsonyyurveda.com.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And let me know what might be coming up for you.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: What might be stored, suppressed so far down in your tissues, in the hidden layers, and how might that be arising for you in your day to day life?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again for joining me today.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Have a wonderful week.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: I will see you next week.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Be well and nourished.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for this edition of the body rhythm.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Be well and nourished.