This post is a personal reflection on how learning to listen to my body has shaped my knowledge & understanding of self-abandonment, healing, and authenticity. It’s not a method or a solution, it’s just an honest account of what I’ve discovered through years of yoga, Qigong, meditation, personal research, and body-based therapy. It’s a slow, ongoing exploration of what becomes possible when we meet ourselves with curiosity rather than force.
Why I Started Looking Inwards
For a long time, I carried a quiet but persistent question:
Is this really how we’re meant to live?
I saw it in myself and in others; a sense of pushing through, coping, numbing, or burning out. People powering on until the body said ‘no’, or soothing discomfort with alcohol, distraction, or sheer determination. I didn’t believe that constant struggle, anxiety, or disconnection was the baseline of being human, but thats how I & those close to me were living.
What I wanted felt simple, but not easy to embody: to feel happy, authentic, and at home in myself. To live with integrity. To feel like my inner experience and my outer life were aligned.
It was this desire, more than any lived crisis, that led me onto this path of self-exploration.
Discovering the Language of the Body
Yoga taught me a language I didn’t know I was missing — the language of sensation.
I didn’t set out to “heal trauma.” I found yoga more than fifteen years ago, and what began as a physical practice slowly became something else entirely. Yoga introduced me to a language I didn’t realise I was missing; the language of sensation.
In a posture (Asana), I would feel resistance, discomfort, impatience, ease, or relief. And at some point, a simple question appeared: Why does this feel like this?
Why do I hold my breath here?
Why do I want to escape this sensation?
Why does my body tense before my mind catches up?
Through yoga, and later Qigong and meditation, I began to understand that my body wasn’t an obstacle to overcome, but a communicator. Sensations weren’t random. They were information.
Curiosity Instead of Avoidance
One of the biggest gifts of a daily mind–body practice has been learning to stay curious rather than shy away from difficult feelings. Not forcing myself to “push through,” but also not immediately backing out.
Over time, checking in with myself became familiar:
- What am I feeling right now?
- Where do I feel it?
- Is this stress, fear, resistance, fatigue — or something else entirely?
Yoga postures became a safe training ground for this exploration. They revealed how quickly I wanted comfort, how fast my mind created stories, and how often I abandoned sensation to stay in control. Slowly, this awareness began to extend beyond the mat and into everyday life.
When the Body Holds What the Mind Can’t
The body remembers what the mind has rationalised, minimised, or forgotten.
As my understanding deepened, through personal research into somatic healing, neurology, the nervous system and the vagus nerve, something clicked: emotions don’t just live in the mind. They live in the body.
Stress, fear, overwhelm, and unprocessed experiences can become patterns of tension, numbness, hyper-alertness, or collapse. The body remembers what the mind may have rationalised, minimised, or forgotten.
What I once labelled as “overreacting,” “being awkward,” or “being too sensitive” began to make sense as intelligent responses shaped by past experiences, upbringing, and the wider culture we live in.
Meeting My Safety Mechanisms
More recently, guided psychotherapy and body-based trauma therapy helped me see these patterns with even more clarity. Especially one in particular built in safety mechanism: self-abandonment.
I noticed how, in certain environments or relationships, I had or would:
- Cross my own physical or emotional boundaries
- Override discomfort to stay connected
- Retreat inward or become numb
- Feel hyper-aware, twitchy, or on high alert
None of this was a flaw. These were safety mechanisms; strategies my nervous system learned to protect me, to help me belong, to keep me safe.
The challenge though came when those mechanisms no longer served the life I wanted to live.
The Slow Unravelling
Breaking down old safety strategies isn’t dramatic & defiantly not quick to fix. It’s subtle, repetitive, and often uncomfortable. It requires learning to stay with the sensation/discomfort, without force, but with choice. To notice the moment just before I abandon myself. To pause. To soften. To allow sensation without overriding it.
Mine isn’t a quick fix or a neat transformation story. It’s a daily practice. Some days feel spacious and connected; others feel contracted or confusing. But what’s changed is my relationship with those moments. I no longer see them as something to get rid of.
They’re signals. Invitations. Information, and incredibly interesting.
Reclaiming Authenticity, One Small Moment at a Time
Through meditation, yoga, Qigong, and therapeutic support, I’ve found a place to explore, rest, release stored energy, and slowly reclaim parts of myself that learned to hide, adapt, or disappear.
This isn’t about becoming a “better” version of myself. It’s about becoming more me. More honest. More embodied. More available to life as it actually is.
And while this is deeply personal, I share it because I don’t believe we’re meant to feel trapped in patterns that drain us. There are ways to move gently out of habits that no longer serve us — and they don’t have to start with anything big or overwhelming.
Sometimes they begin with a few minutes of breathing. A short movement practice. A moment of honest self-observation. A willingness to listen.
An Ongoing, Fascinating Journey
Healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken — it’s about learning to stay in relationship with yourself.
I’m still learning. Still noticing. Still unravelling. And I expect I always will be.
This work has taught me that healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken — it’s about building a relationship with ourselves that’s based on curiosity, compassion, and presence. One sensation, one breath, one moment at a time.
Not easy. Not quick.
What I’ve Learned (So Far)
What I’ve come to understand is that self-abandonment isn’t a flaw or a failure. It’s a survival strategy the body learned when connection, safety, or belonging once felt uncertain. At some point, my system learned that staying connected meant overriding my own bodily signals: my sensations, boundaries, or inner “no.”
Through a trauma-informed lens, I’ve learned that many of the ways we struggle in relationships, such as over-adapting, freezing, disconnecting, crossing our own boundaries, or disappearing internally, are not conscious choices. They are nervous-system responses, shaped through the vagus nerve and the body’s instinctive fight, flight, freeze, flop, and fawn strategies, learned long before we had words or options.
Seen this way, the body begins to make sense: the twitchiness of trapped energy, the numbness that protects, the flop or collapse when it’s all too much, the freeze of wanting both connection and distance at once. These responses aren’t wrong, they’re the body doing its best to manage overwhelming relational input.
I’ve also learned that healing isn’t about forcing myself to constantly “stay present” or pushing through discomfort. For some of us, presence once meant danger, so slowing down or feeling more can initially activate the very patterns we’re trying to heal. That doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong; it means the nervous system is protecting us.
What’s been most important is redefining what safety and presence actually mean:
- Staying with some sensation, not all
- Stopping early instead of pushing through
- Choosing less intensity, not more
- Letting numbness, retreat, or pause be allowed
I’ve learned that boundaries begin internally, often as the smallest bodily cues, such as a held breath, a subtle tightening, a quiet sense of “too much.” Noticing these moments gently, without forcing change, is already a form of healing.
Perhaps the most meaningful shift is this:
I can now see self-abandonment happening. And that means there is already more choice, more awareness, and a growing capacity to stay in relationship with myself.
I’m learning that healing, isn’t about fixing these responses.
It’s about slowly earning the body’s trust by showing up again and again with the message:
I’m listening. I won’t leave you anymore.
Get Curious. 