The Body Keeps the Score: Why I Could No Longer Live From the Neck Up

For years, I lived solely from the neck up.

The mind led my life.

And the mind is beautiful. It is analytical. Creative. Protective. Intelligent.

But when I first discovered conditioning, everything inside me shifted.

I realized that many of the thoughts I believed were my own were shaped by the environment I grew up in.

The culture around me. The fears passed down. The unspoken tension. The expectations. The pressure. The voices of others.

And I was shocked.

I remember feeling deep rage.

Because suddenly, I could see how many of my choices were influenced by beliefs I never consciously chose.

What was acceptable. What was safe. What was permitted. What made me lovable. What made me worthy.

I had absorbed it all. And my body absorbed it too.

For decades, I lived in urgency. Rushing. Overthinking. Pushing. Perfecting.

I had stomach issues for years. Stress vomiting. Tension. Exhaustion. Pressure.

My body was speaking to me long before I knew how to listen.

It took me three decades to finally slow down enough to hear it.

And when I did, I discovered something profound:

Dr. Van der Kolk wrote about The Body Keeps the Score, and mine did just that. 

The body holds what the mind cannot explain.

The body holds unprocessed emotions that your thoughts cannot make sense of. The body stores emotions left unfelt. The body remembers it all.

My body showed me where my inner blocks were. And strangely enough, my body also helped free me from them. 

It changed the way I treated myself. The way I understood my mind. The way I relate to emotions. The way I moved through my day-to-day life. 

And slowly, I began returning to myself. I rebuilt the relationship with myself, and that relationship with the self is the foundation for every other relationship out there.

That is where the phrase Return to Yourself came from.

The journey became less about becoming someone else and more about removing the layers that were never truly mine.

The conditioning. The fear. The inherited patterns. The self-abandonment.

One layer at a time.

I deeply believe we are born whole. And somewhere along the way, life and circumstances teach us to disconnect from that wholeness.

I truly believe that this body is an extremely intelligent body, and it does really well at keeping us safe. 

So healing became a process of returning after disconnection. Because we are not supposed to disconnect for decades. We are supposed to disconnect when the event happens and return; instead, we stay disconnected for far too long. 

And when we reconnect to the body, something changes.

We stop reacting to life from survival. We start responding from awareness. There is a pause between reacting and responding. That is usually the conscious choice. 

Reconnecting to the body also gives us the skills to hold more emotions: grief, love, loss and joy.

We stop living only from the neck up.

We begin living as a whole human being. Mind and body together.

And that changed everything for me.

That is exactly why I do this work.

With heart, Manar

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