Years ago, during my own body scan practice, I noticed something I’d been carrying for a long time without naming it: a tension in my diaphragm, a shallowness of breath on my right side, sometimes even pain. It wasn’t new. It was a pattern, my pattern, the place I tense, hold my breath, and pull away from my body whenever I feel uncomfortable or stressed.
Everyone has a place like this. A headache. A tight stomach. A flutter in the chest. The specific spot is different for everyone, because the pattern started long ago — sometimes it’s even passed down, a parent’s stress response absorbed by a child who never consciously learned it, just felt it.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Moves Past
In my practice, I see this constantly: patients whose stress has stopped being a passing feeling and started living somewhere in their body. Tight shoulders that never fully release. A stomach that clenches under pressure and stays that way. Chronic tension that no amount of stretching seems to touch, because it was never just muscular to begin with.
This isn’t a metaphor. Fascia is the connective tissue that wraps around every muscle, organ, and structure in your body holds far more than physical strain. When we experience stress, especially stress we don’t fully process or release, the nervous system can leave an imprint in that tissue. The body essentially braces, and if the bracing never gets the signal to let go, it becomes the new normal. Not an event anymore a pattern.
I’ve watched this play out clinically for years. One case that has stayed with me: a patient who came to me with stomach pain that had persisted for three years. She’d been to her medical doctor. Everything tested fine. Imaging showed nothing. She still couldn’t eat comfortably. It was only once we started working with the tissue itself not just the digestive symptoms that the underlying pattern finally began to shift.
Why Bodywork Matters
This is a large part of why I incorporate bodywork into so many of my treatment plans including Bowen therapy, craniosacral therapy, visceral manipulation, and neural manipulation, depending on what a patient’s body is asking for. These aren’t relaxation add-ons. They’re a direct way of working with tissue that’s been holding a stress pattern, sometimes for years, and helping it finally complete the release it never got to finish.
The goal isn’t just physical relief, although that matters. It’s addressing both sides of the same coin — the physical tension and the emotional weight it’s often carrying, because in my experience, you rarely get to heal one without the other.
What You Can Do
A few ways to begin listening to what your body might be holding:
Notice where you brace. Shoulders, jaw, stomach, most people have a place they clench without realizing it. Awareness is the first step toward release.
Try extended-exhale breathing when tension spikes. Breathing out longer than you breathe in activates your parasympathetic nervous system directly, it’s one of the fastest, best-researched ways to signal to your body that the moment has passed.
Use your voice. Humming, chanting, or even sustained vocal sounds create vibration through the vagus nerve, which runs directly through your throat. Research on practices like humming and toning shows measurable shifts toward a calmer, more regulated nervous system.
Consider bodywork if tension has become chronic. If it’s been there for months or years, it’s unlikely to resolve with willpower or stretching alone. It may need the kind of direct, hands on work Bowen therapy, craniosacral therapy, visceral manipulation — that helps the tissue finally complete what it’s been holding onto.
The stress your body is holding doesn’t have to stay there. It’s waiting for the chance to be released.
If you’re carrying tension that hasn’t let go, I’d be glad to talk with you about what might be underneath it, and what release could look like for your body specifically.
