Name: How to listen to your Body
Uploaded: 2025-08-02T18:05:44.000Z
Duration: 3 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

One of the most peculiar ideas of psychology is that emotional difficulties can end up in the body. We can understand that a difficult event might get lodged somewhere in the mind, but how and by what mechanism might a difficulty get remembered or stuck in our bodily selves?

Adverbs of degree

Can a kidney really remember a sorrow? Could a wrist or a femur hold on to the memory of a punitive parent or a painful divorce? But mind and body are not impermeable entities.

Modal verbs - B1

A lot of emotional traffic flows between them. When we are sad, some of the grief in our minds may well find a home in our shoulders. When we are terrified, some of the fear from our imaginations can grip onto our lower vertebrae. The difficulty is that our organs lack eloquence. They are not, by design, particularly well-suited to explaining how terrible a relationship is or how difficult it once was around our mother. Our brains, which have the immense advantage of being directly tied to our mouths, have trouble enough letting on what is going on inside them. Most of what we are remains deeply lodged in unconscious darkness. For their part, our bodily organs are even less well-suited to writing our psychological biographies.

Nevertheless, if we can put it this way, the body has a conscience. It won't let certain things go. If the pathway to self-expression has been blocked down the verbal route, then there may be no option but for certain messages to be redirected through our bodies. Bodily pain is hard to ignore. And that is the point. We suffer certain sorts of pain in our bodies when our minds become far too ingenious at overriding their own pulses of distress. We get into troubles because we are masters at looking past low-level depression or chronic anxiety. But when the deep self can't take our emotional negligence any longer, we may develop the sort of backache that makes it incontrovertible that something is very wrong.

Our stomach may well have to say what our minds are keeping quiet about. Our kidneys may have to give a voice, however ineloquent this may be, to troubles that have found no linguistic road out into the world. Our bodies are liable to end up showing far fewer symptoms of the sort that doctors can't get to the bottom of. The more we can consciously understand our background traumas, the more we can speak, the less we will need to symptomise through our bodies. A body can't ever really tell us more than that something is wrong. The next bit – the sifting, the recollecting, the mourning and the interpreting – has to be done by the mind. But we can say thank you to our bodies for keeping us, as it were, with great pain, honest about what we have gone through. They are mute historians, inarticulate historians, but historians nevertheless. And the more we can take the burden of memory off them, the less they may need to suffer in an effort to help us to remember.

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How to listen to your Body

anxiety

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chronic

stick