Experience Becomes Biology
“What happens to us emotionally happens to us physically, and vice versa.”
— Robin Karr-Morse, Scared Sick
This week I worked with a patient whose pulse had remained weak for weeks. In Chinese medicine, the pulse is a window into the body’s inner landscape, and despite regular acupuncture and carefully adjusted herbs, nothing seemed to shift in any noticeable way.
Then something new happened. After several weeks of gently peeling back the layers together, she began to recall significant experiences from her younger years. Things she believed she had long since moved past. She had made sense of them, rationalised them, even forgiven. Yet, as she spoke, she realised how deeply those experiences were still living in her body, quietly shaping the person she was today.
As she allowed herself to truly feel the hurt she had carried for so long, tears came, tears she felt almost embarrassed to still be crying. This is significant. As adults, we often think we shouldn’t still be affected by our past, that we should have already “moved on.”
Yet in that moment, we both recognised this was the missing piece. She finally felt safe enough to touch what had been frozen in time within the tissues of her body. And when there was safety, new capacity emerged. Her nervous system began to mobilise, allowing release where there was once holding.
She described feeling lighter, clearer, and more at ease in herself, more at home in her own body. Her pulses too had changed, reflecting a newfound coherence within.
Beyond Food and Lifestyle
We often think of health as something we can control purely from the outside. I often say, change your food, change your life. While this is true, there is so much more..
As Robin Karr-Morse writes, “Experience becomes biology.”
When you feel nervous or anxious, where do you feel it?
When you feel guilt or regret after saying something you wish you hadn’t, where do you feel that?
It’s so often a physical sensation: a tightening in the chest, a sinking in the belly, a tension in the throat.
The Intelligence of the Body
We’re now beginning to understand, through growing fields of research, what we’ve always known intuitively, that our biology is profoundly shaped by experience. But before science measures it, we feel it. This is the simple, though not always easy, intelligence of the body, the place where knowing lives beneath thought.
This woman, like so many, gave herself the space to feel it.
When we allow space to sense and release what has been stored, the body responds. The nervous system recalibrates. Energy, or Qi, or life force, however we describe it, begins to move again. Hormones and systems reorganise, shifting from incoherence to coherence.
An Invitation
If you sense there is more beneath the surface of your symptoms, something your body has been holding onto, perhaps it’s time we had a conversation.
With love,
Anny
