Reflections & Writing
Unhurried explorations of somatic bodywork, jaw tension, and what it means to truly inhabit your physical form.
There is a feeling I know well. A tightness in the chest. A low hum of anxiety that arrives uninvited — in the supermarket, in the middle of the night, in a conversation that should feel fine but doesn’t.
For years I thought that feeling was me. That the anxiety was the truest thing about me. The most honest signal.
But I’ve come to understand something different now. That tightness? It isn’t me. It’s a child. A younger version of me, still living in the past, still bracing for something that happened a long time ago. She’s real, and she deserves compassion. But she is not my centre.
Because there is something else there too.
I know this because of the moments when I’ve felt it — that other thing. That steadiness. The clearest was when I gave birth. My mind didn’t know what to do. My mind was frightened. But my body — my body knew exactly what to do. It had always known. It moved, it breathed, it opened, it endured. There was something at my core that was completely unshaken. Steady in a way I had never consciously accessed before.
That was the self. Not the anxious child in my chest. The self — deeper, older, quieter than thought. She was there the whole time.
This is what I’ve spent years learning, and what I now believe to be one ofel and overlooked truths about identity: The self doesn’t live in the mind. It lives in the body.
We spend so much of midlife searching — reading books, journaling, asking who am I now? as though the answer is somewhere out there, in a new career or a better morning routine or the right therapist’s words. But the self isn’t missing. It was never missing. It’s been waiting, quietly, beneath the noise.
When I feel that tightness now, I’ve learned to get curious rather than afraid. I feel my feet on the floor. I let my breath drop down. I ask — is this now, or is this then? Almost always, it’s then.
That is the return to self. Not a reinvention. Not a transformation. A homecoming.
Read on Substack →I was lying on a physiotherapy table when someone first told me my ribs weren’t moving. After even the idea that ribs were supposed to move sank in, these words did not digest.
I understood them intellectually. I even recognised something true in them — the stiffness on my left side, the collar bones sitting unevenly, the way my breath always seemed to stop somewhere around my chest without ever really landing.
For a long time I thought that was a failure of body consciousness. That I simply wasn’t tuned in enough, wasn’t doing the right practices, or hadn’t found the right practitioner yet. But I understand it differently now. I couldn’t receive that information because I wasn’t yet safe enough inside myself to hear it.
The bracing in my rib cage, the held breath, the hypervigilance that had taken up residence in my thorax — these weren’t problems to be fixed. They were a system doing exactly what it was designed to do. Keeping me functional. Keeping me moving. Keeping me from feeling what was underneath.
The shift came at 45. Not because I found a better technique, but because something changed in my life when old identities started to release their grip. For the first time, I was stable enough to stop numbing.
This series is about the rib cage — what it holds, how it speaks, what happens when we finally learn to listen. But it’s really about something bigger than anatomy: what becomes possible when we’re finally safe enough to feel.
Read on Substack →We often treat the jaw as an isolated hinge—something that aches when we chew or clicks when we speak. But structurally, the jaw is intimately tied to the cranial base, the upper cervical spine, and the deep dural membranes surrounding the central nervous system.
When chronic stress or unresolved tension takes root, the body doesn't just store it in abstract emotional spaces; it anchors it in connective tissue. The masseter and pterygoid muscles are among the strongest pound-for-pound muscles in the human body. When they brace against the day, they pull directly on the temporal bones and the base of the skull.
This is why jaw tension so frequently manifests as morning headaches, disturbed sleep, neck tightness, and a persistent feeling that the nervous system cannot quite switch off. Unhurried, low-load myofascial work invites these holding patterns to soften, offering the body a chance to remember ease.