The boundary my body held long before I could speak it.

How body tension can become a map back to agency, safety and the self we abandoned

I revisited a client Zoom recording earlier this year and was surprised to realise that my head was tilted left for much of the time. It happens in almost every recording now that I know to look for it. It might simply sound like a quirk, but it wasn’t.. it was a protective reflex that formed before I even had words for what felt unsafe. The shift came when I finally stayed with the sensation instead of trying to correct it. That’s when the holding pattern started to unwind.

What is a holding pattern?

A holding pattern is an embodied response that forms when something in our past felt too overwhelming to fully process. In response the body contracts, braces, pulls away, freezes or ‘holds’ a certain posture in an attempt to protect us from what once felt like a threat.

Think tight shoulders, pecs, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched forward, tightness in the hips, contractions or tightness in the belly, facial distortions etc.

Holding patterns are unconscious and automatic adaptations to threat.

Protective shapes and patterns of movement and holding the body has slowly shaped itself into to help us cope, survive or stay connected when we didn’t have the capacity, support or safety to respond differently. Though there may be an acute incident at the core, generally they are developed over time, with exposure to repeated experiences.

Physically they can show up as tension, bracing, gripping, contraction and manifest in tightness in muscles and postural shifts. They can affect all aspects of our health and lead to many different illness or disease states.

A holding pattern is essentially the body saying ‘this is how I learned to stay safe’.

So what was my holding pattern?

My body would subtly pull to the left. My head in particular would tilt to the left and when I tuned in I would feel this subtle pull, almost like it was trying to lean away from something I didn’t want to feel. When I followed the thread, I realised it had been an old, instinctive response to someone in my early childhood who carried a kind of sticky, needy energy… an energy that felt invasive, and deeply unsafe to my system.

The moment I tuned into it, I could sense exactly where it lived in my body. Living like a heavy shadow through my left side. A kind of ickiness under the skin and an urge to recoil. The emotion underneath was unmistakable: disgust. A feeling of my body saying, ‘That’s too close. That’s not safe for me’.

For years, I didn’t realise I was carrying this pattern. I didn’t know that every time I entered a similar dynamic, where someone ‘needed’ something from me I didn’t have the capacity or consent to give, my body and in particular my head would subtly shift left, bracing and pulling away. It was my system trying to protect me, trying to create space where my voice wasn’t yet strong enough to set a boundary.

Often we go to the physio, chiropractor, massage therapist etc. to try and release the tension, but when we look at them through this lens, they are actually embodied stories, not ‘just’ tension in the body. Forming in the moments when we don’t have language, permission or the safety to respond in the way we needed to.

So the body responds for us. It holds and tightens, doing whatever it must to keep us safe.

What changed my experience was meeting this pattern with presence rather than judgement or the need to fix or change it. Meeting it with curiosity and openness. Slowly tracking the sensations, feeling the pull, letting myself fully feel the truth of the disgust.

I stayed with the part of me that desperately needed space and distance. When I allowed all of that to be true, without overriding it or trying to be more evolved or compassionate than I actually felt, something shifted.

So often we don’t let ourselves feel the truth of our emotions, we cast so much judgment on what we call ‘negative’ feelings, but all emotions are valid and valuable, communicating to us all of the time.

There was a lot that happened in this experience that would take too long to share in detail, but the end result was that something in my body let go. The left-side pull dissolved and I felt myself come back to centre, and along with that came a sense of agency, power and ability to hold a boundary that I didn’t have before.

This was the part that touched me the most: the moment I reclaimed the boundary I couldn’t set back then, my body stopped bracing. The tension eased in a way no amount of stretching or manipulation ever touched. It softened because it finally felt me taking my own side.

This is something I see in clients all the time too. When we step into the agency we didn’t have as children.. even if that is quietly, internally.. the body recognises the shift. It realises it no longer needs to perform the old protective posture. And the system relaxes, because the boundary it was holding for us is now being held by us.

This is the power of awareness. When we stop abandoning ourselves and instead honour our embodied truth, even the oldest patterns can unwind. The body feels our honesty and the safety of being met without agenda and without any intervention it begins to release what it no longer needs to hold. We just have to learn to listen to it and follow its lead.

A key principle from the book ‘The Body Says No’ is that illness, tension and chronic symptoms often reflect the cost of self-abandonment in the ways we were conditioned to suppress our needs, silence our voice or be who others required us to be.

A holding pattern is a micro-version of that same survival strategy. It’s the body carrying the unspoken truth on your behalf.

Ultimately there is nothing wrong with the ways we protect ourselves. These patterns don’t mean we’re broken or damaged in any way, they are actually super intelligent responses we developed to survive. So we meet them with respect. And when the time is right, when the safety is there and the inner ground is strong, what was once protection can become liberation.

Boundaries are what create that inner ground.

They tell the body, ‘You’re not alone anymore. I’m here now. I can speak. I can choose. I can step back or step away.’

When the body trusts that your present-day self can hold the boundary that your younger self couldn’t, something profound happens.. the guarding loosens. The survival pattern no longer needs to keep repeating and the body finally gets to rest.

When we look at tension through this lens, it becomes less of an enemy and more of an invitation. The body isn’t trying to sabotage us. It’s trying to communicate with us all the time. Every contraction and tightness is a doorway into something that once felt too much to hold. And when we learn to slow down and meet these patterns with presence, the body begins to trust that we’re finally here with it. This is where real healing happens… at the pace of the body, not the mind.

Nothing needs to be forced or pushed. Your body already knows the way. All it’s asking for is your willingness to listen.

Do you have holding patterns? Ways your body has shaped itself?

Here’s a few questions for you if you’re willing to inquire.

• Where in your body do you notice the subtle pulls, contractions or tightness that seem to appear without a clear reason?

• If you slow down and stay with that sensation, what emotion sits underneath it.. even if it’s faint or inconvenient to feel?

• What part of you might that sensation be protecting?

• What situation, dynamic or person does this shape in your body remind you of?

And if you’d like to know more about what I do and how I can support you, please reach out - I offer a complimentary 20-30 minute casual chat where you can ask any questions and get a feel for me and how I work.

Maraya xx