Emotions in Motion: How the Body Holds What the Mind Avoids

Just one of the techniques I used to feel alive , dipping myself into freezing cold icy water. To shock my system into feeling something.

The Energy of Emotion

Our emotions are energy in motion, literally e-motions.
When that energy moves freely, we feel balanced, connected, and at ease.

But when we suppress or ignore what we feel, that energy doesn’t vanish. It becomes held within the body. Over time, those held emotions can show up as physical tightness, restlessness, or even pain.

Many of us have been taught to numb rather than move, to distract, scroll, eat, or overthink instead of feeling. Yet our bodies are constantly communicating with us, asking for release and regulation.
Understanding this connection between emotion, energy, and the body helps us learn how to listen again.

The Fascia–Emotion Connection

Fascia is the body’s connective tissue, an intricate web that wraps around and connects muscles, bones, organs, and nerves.

Once thought to be purely structural, fascia is now recognised as a living, sensory system that plays a vital role in how we feel.

Fascia is deeply connected to the nervous system, which means it responds to how we feel. When we experience stress, fear, or emotional overwhelm, the body naturally contracts as a protective response. If these states continue over time, the fascia can adapt to these patterns, creating areas of tightness, restriction, or holding.

Rather than “storing” emotion, fascia reflects the body’s history of tension, protection, and adaptation. This is why emotional experiences can sometimes surface during bodywork, movement, or gentle touch, the body is finally able to soften and let go of long-held patterns.

In holistic terms, fascia acts as a bridge between our emotional, energetic, and physical selves, carrying the patterns and protection the body has developed over time.

Fascia: a three-dimensional web of connective tissue that holds the body together and holds memory too. It’s the bridge between our physical form and our felt experience.

How Suppressed Emotion Becomes Stored Energy

Emotions are physical before they are mental. We feel first, then we interpret.

We feel grief in the chest, fear in the belly, anger in the jaw or shoulders. When these sensations aren’t expressed through movement, voice, tears, or breath, the body adapts by holding tension. Over time, these holding patterns can become familiar, shaping posture, breath, and movement.

That’s why someone may cry unexpectedly during a massage or yoga class. It’s not “out of nowhere.” It’s the body finally feeling safe enough to release. The body remembers through sensation, even when the mind has moved on.

Releasing these patterns often involves gentle, sustained movement or conscious touch, anything that reawakens the conversation between body and emotion.

My Story From Muscles to Energy

So why am I talking about all this, and how did it all come about?

It began with my own healing journey, one which took me on a rollercoaster of emotions.

I had to rediscover healthy ways to move all these “new” feelings that were coming to the surface. I’d reached a point in my life where I felt like I was going crazy, not because I was broken, but because I had finally opened the floodgates. For most of my life, I’d built walls so I didn’t have to feel. And when those walls came down, everything I’d been avoiding came rushing out, wave after wave.

At the same time, I began seeing the same patterns in my clients.
When I was working as a Reiki practitioner and massage therapist, I started to realise there was so much more happening beneath the surface than just tight muscles or poor posture.

I could feel the wave of the person’s emotions within their body. The grief, stress, tension, sadness, love, all of it sitting there, waiting to be witnessed and acknowledged.

By combining the energy work with physical hands-on massage, this allowed the fascia to soften and relax, and also allowed my clients to let memories, sensations, and waves of emotion come to the surface to be released. It soon became very clear to me that what people were carrying wasn’t just physical, it was emotional energy as well that had found a home in their body.

As a child, I was deeply sensitive to energy. I felt a lot. I could sense others’ emotions, but I didn’t understand it when I was younger. Sometimes the feelings were so loud that I’d put my headphones on, listen to music, and retreat into my own world just to find quiet. That sensitivity was a gift, but I didn’t know it then or how to manage it safely.

Like many of us, I also grew up in a time when children were told to stop crying, to be quiet, to be strong. I quickly learned it wasn’t safe to express what I was feeling. So I learned to disconnect.

As a teenager, that looked like drinking or using substances to numb everything. As a young mum, it became magazines, eating, and later doom-scrolling and Netflix binges. None of those things made me bad, they were just ways I’d learned to cope when I didn’t have better tools. I still have those days now where I let myself get lost in a Netflix session, but now I do it consciously, with awareness of what my body is really asking for.

Add perimenopause into the mix and it became a whole new level of emotional intensity, mood swings, tears, laughter, rage, sometimes all in the same hour. I’d sit there laughing at myself while crying because I could see how wild it all was.

At this stage, I still didn’t have awareness that what I was feeling wasn’t all mine. I soon realised I couldn’t keep living like this. I had to start learning new, healthy ways to move through my feelings and allow myself to really feel it all, maybe for the first time in my life.

So I began exploring.

Journaling helped me get out of my head. I’m a big thinker and would often go over things again and again, so this helped immensely to get things off my chest. It was also a safe space where there was no judgement, just me, a pen, and some paper.

Breathwork allowed me to get out of my head and back into my body. This created space for emotions to release. At times I didn’t even know what was coming up, or why I was crying, it just felt good to release it.

Hot and cold therapy helped me feel something again after years of numbness. I became a little addicted to it. My body never felt more alive than when it hit the ice cold water. Some people jump out of planes for the adrenaline rush, I dove into the ice water. My body loved it.

Yoga, massage, acupuncture, chiropractic care, intuitive movement to music, meditation, and simply spending time in nature without distractions like phones.

Each practice taught me something new about how emotion moves, and how the body is always communicating, if we’re willing to listen.

Nowadays I don’t do all of these practices all the time. I do what my body needs at that moment. Some days it’s stretching, some days it’s slow dancing to let the tears come, another day it’s drawing, sometimes it’s laughter.

Through it all, I’ve learned that healing doesn’t mean never feeling discomfort. It means knowing how to meet it when it comes. It’s recognising when energy is stuck and finding ways to move it through to regulate my nervous system.

And that’s why I share this work. Because if we can learn to honour what we feel, we can free so much of the energy we’ve kept locked inside our bodies. Then we are truly free to be ourselves and meet ourselves and others from a more regulated state.

Creating Space to Feel Safely

This is also where my Illuminate mentorship comes in.
Because it’s not just about understanding emotions, it’s about creating a safe space for them to surface and move.

Through mentoring, energy work, and body-based practices, we gently create the conditions where the body no longer needs to hold everything in. When the nervous system feels safe, emotions naturally begin to rise, not in a chaotic way, but in a supported and regulated way.

This isn’t about forcing release. It’s about allowing what’s already there to soften and move.

We often forget that children naturally know how to regulate themselves. They cry, they stomp, they scream, they move, and then they return to calm. There’s no shame, no overthinking, no suppression. They release the energy and move on.

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught to stop doing that. To be quiet. To hold it in. To behave. And slowly, we lost the art of healthy emotional expression.

But we can relearn it.

Sometimes it’s as simple as:

• Anger, screaming into a pillow, or if you have space like me on a farm, going outside and letting it out safely

• Frustration, stomping your feet, shaking out your arms, or moving your body

• Sadness, allowing tears without trying to fix them

• Anxiety, slow breathing and placing a hand on your chest or belly

• Overwhelm, stepping outside, grounding your feet, and feeling the air on your skin

It’s not about having a tantrum in the shopping centre. Although sometimes we do see adults react that way when the pressure has built for too long. When we don’t release emotions in small, safe ways, they can eventually come out sideways, as reactivity, irritability, or shutdown.

When we learn to regulate ourselves, we create space between the feeling and the reaction. We are still human, we still feel everything, but we’re better able to respond rather than react.

This is the remembering.
Finding healthy ways to move emotion without hurting ourselves or others.
Listening to the body.
Allowing energy to flow again.

Because when emotions move, the body softens.
When the body softens, the nervous system settles.
And when we feel safe within ourselves, we can finally just be.

This is the space I hold in my sessions and within Illuminate, a place to safely feel, soften, and remember how to come back to yourself.

Illuminate — a journey of remembering. Click here to learn more