Musings
Your body hasn’t forgotten anything
There is a kind of knowledge that lives in the body, not the mind.
You’ve felt it. The tightening in your chest before you’ve even finished reading the message. The way your stomach drops when something is about to go wrong. The particular heaviness that settles in your shoulders when you’ve been carrying something for too long.
Your body knew before you did.
We spend a lot of energy learning to override that. The world rewards it, actually. Getting on with things. Showing up. Pushing through. There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from years of being very good at that, and it doesn’t respond to sleep. Not really.
This is where I want to begin.
The chakra system is often described as a map of energy centres in the body. Seven of them, running from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. Each one connected to a different layer of your experience, safety, creativity, confidence, love, expression, intuition, integration.
I know how that sounds. I’ve watched people’s faces when I say it.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand, after twenty years of practice and a lot of time in my own body: the chakras are not abstract. They are felt. They are the exact places where the body holds what the mind hasn’t processed yet.
The root chakra, at the base of the spine, connected to the adrenal glands, is where your nervous system registers threat. Where the body decides, many times a day, whether it is safe. You feel it as groundedness or its absence. As presence, or that floaty, slightly-outside-yourself feeling that comes when you’ve been under pressure too long.
The heart chakra, connected to the thymus gland, to immune function, to the felt sense of being loved or withheld, is where grief lives. Where the chest closes. Where something softens when you’re finally held.
These are not metaphors. They are the body’s actual geography.
What yoga gave me, real yoga, the kind that asks you to slow down and feel rather than stretch and perform, was a language for what was already happening in my body.
Not a way to fix it. A way to listen to it.
That distinction matters more than I can say.
The Chakra Embodied practice is built on that distinction. We move through poses not to achieve shapes but to create conversations. Tree Pose isn’t about balance, it’s about what happens in your nervous system when you ask it to stand on one leg and stay. Camel Pose isn’t about flexibility, it’s about what opens (or resists opening) in the front of your body when you lead with your heart.
Every pose is an inquiry. What’s here? What’s asking for attention? What has the body been holding, quietly, that it might now be ready to release?
I started writing this blog because I wanted somewhere to think out loud.
About the places where science and the ancient meet, where what the yogis described thousands of years ago turns out to map, with surprising precision, onto what we now understand about the endocrine system, the vagus nerve, the nervous system’s role in every single thing we feel.
About what it actually means to be embodied. Not performing wellness, not optimising your health, not achieving a state, but genuinely, humbly, curiously inhabiting the body you have.
About the strange, unglamorous, occasionally profound work of learning to listen to yourself.
These are my musings. They are not prescriptions. They are not a programme. They are what I’m thinking about, week by week, as I practise and teach and continue to be surprised by what the body knows.
I hope you find something useful here.
And if you’re curious where your own body is speaking loudest right now, the free quiz is a gentle place to start. Seven questions, seven energy centres, a snapshot of where you are today.
The body has been waiting to be heard. That’s usually where we begin.