The Body Knows is where we say the quiet parts out loud about healing, somatics and embodiment, and why trying to “fix yourself” never really works.
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(This post is written entirely from the perspective of Ana Ally. Leona Waller has been honored to be her editor.)
I started having IBS symptoms in my teens. Constipation and diarrhea playing ping pong with each other between waves of indigestion. I went to a gastroenterologist and explained it. After listening attentively, he called me a tricky case. Then he said, “We can treat one, but the medication could exacerbate the other. Which one would you prefer to treat?”
I remember looking at him thinking, I don’t want to choose which dysfunction to continue living with! I want to know why this is happening and fix it! But the framework was symptom management, not root cause. I walked out of that office without his pills.
A few years later, at twenty-three, my body crashed in a way that made that earlier IBS feel like the good ol’ days. My joints were inflamed and arthritic, tendons screaming, nerve pain stabbing, hands shaking like I had Parkinson’s. My gut was so inflamed that anything with a waistband hurt to wear. My hair was falling out, gums were bleeding, and I was sleeping fifteen hours a day and still exhausted.
Eventually I was diagnosed with Lyme disease.
I went through six months and five different kinds of intensive antibiotics. And when that didn’t resolve it, I was essentially told I had a chronic and degenerative condition. That we could manage symptoms as they progressed.
Degenerative.
That word rearranges your imagination. It plants images you didn’t ask for. It asks: Who will you be if your body keeps breaking down? Who will want you in their life? How much more will I lose?
I had this image of myself dissolving into frailty. Shaking hands, shrinking capacity, slowly losing access to the mountains and movement and vitality that had defined me for so many years. I was on track for developing MS or Parkinson’s-like symptoms. Not only did my body feel like a burden to me, but I felt like a burden to everyone around me. There was a lot of grief there. And so much fear.
But there was also something else.
I had just graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in mathematics. My brain had been trained to analyze systems, to trace cause and effect. So when I was told, essentially, we don’t know why this is happening but we can manage your decline, that just didn’t compute. If you don’t know why, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution. It means you haven’t figured it out yet.
So I turned that analytical approach inward, treating my whole experience as a complex, multi-variate system to solve.
Decoding the Body
My doctor mentioned that some of his patients had experienced unpredictable degrees of relief by changing their diets. So I started tracking everything. This was before biohacking was cool or streamlined, so it was just me and my ratty notebook, which soon became a staple in my back pocket.
Food in, symptoms out, patterns, correlations, all of it. Remove dairy and watch what happens. Remove gluten and observe the shift. Add it back in and catalog the response. Repeat.
I began to notice that certain foods triggered very specific patterns, sometimes up to a week later. Dairy led to tonsillitis and sinus infections. Gluten caused intense inflammation, heart palpitations, and a random racing pulse at rest. It was like my body had its own language, and I was slowly learning to decode it.
But I kept plateauing. I would feel better, but not well. I was way more functional, but I wasn’t free.
Around that time, I found acupuncture. I remember thinking, this is the woo-woo edge of the map. You’re going to put needles in my wrist and somehow affect my asthmatic lungs? That makes absolutely no sense. But I was desperate. And desperation can be humbling.
As it turns out, acupuncture helped. A lot. Which was deeply inconvenient for my very black-and-white engineer brain. Because now I had lived evidence that there was a lot more going on in my body than I had previously understood. Everything just got messier, with forces at play that I couldn’t reduce into a neat linear diagram of genetics, inflammation markers, and elimination diets.
But somewhere in that chaos, the story that my body was a broken machine in need of fixing began to crack. It wasn’t that simple. My body was reacting and responding to things that I hadn’t realized mattered, or perhaps even existed…
When I Stopped Trying to Escape the Pain
Then came a turning point I never saw coming: a ten-day, silent Vipassana meditation course.
At that point, I had spent years trying to outsmart my body. Track it, tweak it, remove inputs, optimize outputs. In reality, I was desperately fighting back against a body I believed had betrayed me, trying to force it back into submission.
So when I signed up for ten days of silence and ten hours a day of sitting still, it wasn’t because I thought it would cure anything. I actually had no idea that people with chronic illness went to these courses to heal. I just had some free time and a dear friend had been recommending it for years.
I arrived in pain. Deep, constant pain. My joints hurt, my back throbbed, my gut was tight and inflamed. Sitting still for that many hours seemed almost punishing. Every part of me wanted to adjust, fidget, escape into planning or analysis.
But the instruction was simple: feel what is here, now. Not change it, interpret it, or fix it. Just feel it.
At first, it was unbearable. When you stop distracting yourself, when you stop trying to override sensation, what you meet is the raw, painful edge of it. And then you’re face to face with the fear underneath the ache, and the grief underneath the fear. And the sadness, the rage, the despair. Normally, when those feelings tried to surface, I’d distract myself: research something, change my diet, adjust a supplement, watch Netflix. Do something, anything, to change the situation. But in that silent hall, those weren’t options. All I could do was be present with it.
That shift, from meeting my body with presence instead of avoidance, was the first real step toward understanding and then treating the root causes of my pain and illness.
Slowly, I began to notice what I’d never given myself enough stillness to experience: sensation is constantly changing. What I had been experiencing as permanent was actually dynamic. The pain would intensify, crest, soften, shift location, dissolve, and arise again. The tightness would pulse and release in tiny waves. Even the fear had textures: it would surge and quiet down, panic and resolve. And as I stopped bracing against what I felt, emotions I’d been holding for years started to move. Not as thoughts or insights, but as physical events. My body would tremble. Heat would flood my chest and then dissipate. My breath would catch and then deepen on its own. Tears came without a story attached to them.
I realized this was what my body had been trying to do all along. Not just during those ten days, but for years. Every time I’d felt a surge of grief or anger or fear, my body had wanted to shake, cry, breathe, and release. But I’d learned to clamp down on those impulses so early and so thoroughly that I didn’t even register them as impulses anymore.
Think about what happens when you stub your toe. Your body instinctively wants to yell, grab it, hop around, then check if you’re okay. Sound, movement, and contact help the nervous system complete the arc. They help the body register: that hurt, and now I’m okay. But most of us learned to override those impulses before we could talk. “Don’t be dramatic.” “You’re fine.” “Stop crying.” “Calm down.” We learned early that certain expressions aren’t socially acceptable. Anger is too much. Grief is inconvenient. Fear is weakness. Even joy can be excessive. So instead of yelling when we stub our toe, we swallow it. Instead of crying when we’re hurt, we stiffen. Instead of shaking when we’re afraid, we hold still. Instead of saying “that hurt,” we say “I’m fine.”
Meanwhile, the body stores what we won’t let it express. Unexpressed anger settles into a clenched jaw. Uncried tears lodge in the throat and chest. Unspoken boundaries knot in the gut. We become composed and high-functioning and socially acceptable, while our bodies become tight, restricted, and symptomatic.
In that meditation hall, I wasn’t just witnessing my pain with loving awareness. I was letting emotion and sensation complete their cycle: letting the body do what it was designed to do when something intense happens. Feel it, let it move, let it finish.
By the end of those ten days, a significant amount of my chronic pain had eased. An insane amount, actually. Not because I had figured out the right combination of inputs, but because I had stopped fighting the experience itself. I hadn’t cured myself or transcended anything. I had simply stopped abandoning myself. And something in my body responded to that in a big way. Not with perfection or instant healing, but with an almost bone-deep softening.
Why Turning Toward It Worked
It took me years to understand why those ten days made such a difference.
Here’s the short version: there is an aspect of the nervous system that evolved to protect us. When you hear a roar in the forest, your body doesn’t politely wait for your mind to decide if it’s dangerous — it acts. Heart rate spikes, breath shortens, muscles tighten, digestion slows. You’re ready to fight, run, or freeze. It’s a brilliant design that’s kept us alive for millennia.
But here’s what that response wasn’t designed for: never getting to stand down.
This aspect of our nervous system orients around three core needs: safety, belonging, and dignity. They’re the literal conditions your nervous system requires in order to settle, sort of like how a thermostat needs a certain temperature before it switches off. When those needs are met, the system downregulates. Breath deepens, muscles release, digestion resumes, sleep comes.
But when they’re chronically unmet, the system stays mobilized.
And, importantly, this response doesn’t distinguish neatly between a tiger and a dwindling bank account, between a physical infection and social exclusion. It just registers: something is threatening my safety, my belonging, or my dignity, and it organizes around survival.
Now, multiply this by decades. A stress response that lasts minutes is protective. A stress response that lasts months or years extracts a devastating cost. Elevated heart rate, chronically braced muscles, disrupted digestion, and thin sleep wears down the body under this weight of never getting to rest.
From that lens, my body didn’t look broken. It looked overwhelmed. Chronic Lyme infection was not a small stressor, it was a persistent signal that something was attacking me from the inside. Of course my body mobilized around that and my immune system went seemingly haywire after a decade of constant threat.
But that was only one layer.
I was raised as a girl in a culture that subtly and not so subtly tells us that female bodies are unsafe, objectified, and evaluated. I was living in a system that generates chronic uncertainty, competitiveness, and sensory overload. Add to that the constant hum of global instability, racism, genocide, and environmental collapse. In other words, my safety, dignity, and belonging were threatened from every direction.
Of course my body was tense, digestion faltering, inflammation rising, and sleep disrupted. Not because I was weak or had failed in some way. But because my body was doing exactly what it evolved to do in the face of perceived threat and danger.
Eventually, one final layer of the picture clicked into place, and it all made sense.
The Inner Critic as Threat
When I got sick at twenty-three, I was surrounded by my athletic, outdoorsy friends. People whose lives revolved around the mountains and movement that had once defined mine too. And the story I started telling myself was brutal. I’m going to be single for the rest of my life. Who would ever desire this? I don’t even belong in this community anymore. I can’t climb hard. I can’t hike a heavy pack. What am I even doing here?
But I never talked about it or admitted these things out loud. If I named it, the loss and failure would come even sooner. Best to hide and avoid the inevitable as long as possible.
I didn’t recognize it at the time, but that inner dialogue was its own source of threat. Every time I told myself I was a burden, my nervous system registered danger to my belonging. Every time I looked in the mirror and cataloged what was wrong with my body — gross, broken, too much, not enough — my system registered a threat to my dignity. Every time I told myself no one would want me like this, I was confirming to my own nervous system that I was fundamentally unsafe, unloved, and unworthy in the world.
And here’s the part that hit me like a ton of bricks: the self-criticism wasn’t just a symptom of being sick. It was feeding the cycle. My body was already mobilized against infection, already braced against the pain and fatigue and uncertainty. And then on top of all of that, my own inner voice was piling on more threat. More danger. More reasons to stay braced.
Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a tiger in the forest and your own voice saying you’re worthless. It just registers: my safety, my belonging, my dignity are under attack. And it responds accordingly: by tightening, bracing, inflaming, conserving. The very things that were making me sicker.
I think about how many women spend a lifetime doing exactly this. Every glance in the mirror becomes an inventory of everything wrong. Every social interaction becomes a calculation of whether you’re too much or not enough. And then an entire industry reinforces it — buy this, fix that, shrink here, smooth there — confirming over and over that you are not okay as you are. That’s not vanity or insecurity. That’s a nervous system being slowly, steadily taught that it is under threat from the inside.
Did you know that about 75% of autoimmune conditions are diagnosed in women? Autoimmune disease is, quite literally, the body attacking itself: the immune system scanning for danger, turning inward, and finding it in the cells of the body itself.
I’m not saying self-criticism causes autoimmune disease, biology is more complex than that. But when I look at a culture that systematically teaches women to judge, shame, and control their own bodies, and then I see those same bodies turning against themselves, I don’t think that’s a coincidence we can ignore.
The Wider Lens
When I widened my view beyond my own history, I saw the same pattern operating at scale. Chronic economic instability, structural racism, misogyny, environmental collapse, digital overstimulation, publicly shaming each other, endless marketing campaigns that point out where you’re not enough, the quiet pressure to optimize and perform at all times… these aren’t neutral background conditions. They are direct, ongoing threats to the safety, belonging, and dignity our nervous systems need in order to settle.
Add personal history to that: Childhood wounds that taught you to monitor yourself closely. Relational ruptures that made belonging feel conditional. Chronic infection or illness that never fully resolved. Internalized messages about worth, desirability, and productivity.
From the body’s perspective, that is a whole lot of tigers in the forest.
Now bracing starts to make sense. Anxiety begins to look like vigilance toward systemic and ongoing harm. Disconnection looks like protection. Depression can be understood as conservation, the body’s attempt to preserve energy when it feels overwhelmed.
So let’s say it loud and let’s say it proud: Nervous system dysregulation is a systemic issue.
Because when we don’t name this clearly, we reduce systemic harm to individual symptoms. We tell people their anxiety is a chemical imbalance, their chronic pain is psychosomatic, their exhaustion is a time-management problem. We pathologize what is actually a sane response to insane conditions, and then we sell each other coping mechanisms, and do nothing about all the damn tigers.
Let’s shift the conversation from “what’s wrong with me?” to “what have I been living with?”
Creating the Conditions for Healing
Over time, I stopped thinking about health as the elimination of symptoms and started thinking about it as the creation of conditions.
My body wasn’t a malfunctioning machine. It was a compass: constantly orienting to the conditions around it and inside it, communicating through sensation and emotion about whether its needs were being met or not. So instead of asking what’s wrong and how do I fix it, I started living by what does my body need in order to feel safe, loved, and worthy?
Sometimes the answer was physical: real food, deep sleep, movement that wasn’t secretly a punishment, air that wasn’t recycled through an office building. Sometimes it was relational: being around people who didn’t need me to perform wellness, who could sit with me in the mess without trying to fix it. Sometimes it was environmental: driving out to the middle of nowhere where all I could see was land, and all I could hear was birds, so my nervous system could stop scanning for the next threat amongst all the noise, long enough to actually rest and heal.
And sometimes the answer was expression. Letting myself cry without needing a reason. Letting anger move through my body as sound and shaking and breath instead of clenching around it until it became a migraine. Saying “that hurt” out loud instead of “I’m fine.” All those emotions I’d spent a lifetime locking down, all those impulses my body had been trying to complete since childhood, I started letting them through.
Expression has been such a big piece for me because, personally, I needed to stop holding. I needed to prove to myself that I could be honest and upset and messy and the world wouldn’t fall apart. I could eat perfectly and sleep nine hours and meditate for 30 min, but if I was still swallowing my grief and clenching around my rage, my nervous system would still think it’s at war.
I think it’s fair to say that none of this looked like optimization. It looked like tending to a wild, intelligent creature that had been caged for a very long time… And it worked.
I’m 32 now, and help others find somatic relief in safety, dignity, and belonging. I also work as a hiking guide in Yosemite; I can cover 22 miles in a day. I live in my van, which I built out myself over the last year. I regularly head to Utah to climb giant red cracks hundreds of feet into open air. I have to be very aware of what I put in my body, and certain foods are definitely off the table (a crumb of gluten can bring me down for a week), but besides that, I’m doing really well. Lyme disease is not a term I say very often these days.
The Body Makes Sense
If you are living inside that quiet, accumulating despair, the kind that comes from not being believed, from feeling invisible in your own body, from wondering whether you really are just too sensitive, I want you to hear this:
Your body makes sense. And, it loves you.
It makes sense inside the conditions it has been living under. Inside the harm you have endured. Inside the ways you learned to survive. The bracing, the inflammation, the fatigue, the vigilance aren’t proof that you’re broken. They’re proof that your system has been trying, relentlessly, to protect you.
And when you begin to turn toward yourself with curiosity instead of contempt, when you start shaping your life around conditions that actually support you, enormous changes become possible.
I’m not going to tell you they happen overnight. Somatics isn’t magic. But as your body starts to trust that it is seen and loved and safe, the shifts are steady and they touch everything. Breath deepens. The jaw loosens. The gut settles. Your system slowly relearns that it doesn’t have to stay braced. It softens, reorganizes, and remembers how to rest.
That’s when healing stops being a battle. Not because you’ve finally won, but because you’ve realized you were never the enemy.
Work With Ana
If this resonates and you’re interested in 1:1 support, you can learn more at RoamAndRise.com.
Shaped by her own journey with healing chronic illness, Ana guides clients in embodying the changes they’ve been trying to make, so life feels steadier, more energized, and grounded in trust.
Her work weaves trauma-informed somatic practices with integrative health support, rooted in the belief that healing happens through relationship, not force. She is devoted to helping people return to a loving relationship with their bodies as the foundation for lasting health.
