A central point of Tara Healey’s teaching is that ignoring an emotion doesn’t make it go away — it just relocates it into the body, where it’s held silently. The anger you don’t want to feel ends up in your shoulders; the grief you cut off sits in your heart. Whether or not you point your attention at it, the body keeps it.
“Even if we don’t go and listen to it, the body’s holding on to it. So, our shoulders then if there’s some anger that we don’t like or want to feel, our shoulders are holding on to it. So, it’s there whether we put our attention on it or not.”
This is why so many of us live in our heads: the body doesn’t feel good precisely because it’s carrying what we declined to feel. Tara is gentle about this — she says the head is a perfectly valid refuge, and you’re allowed to come back up when the body’s contents are unwelcome. But the contents remain until they’re felt.
When she finally turned toward what she had cut off, the backlog came up dramatically: she cried for ten days straight at a Vipassana retreat. The body had been holding decades of grief, waiting. The same mechanism that stores unfelt emotion also allows it to “sequence” and finish once attention and breath are offered — sometimes in a matter of seconds, so it isn’t carried all day.
“I started doing this just exploring the body through awareness and all I could do was cry. I cried for 10 days nonstop.”
Related Concepts
- Somatic awareness is a key to presence and to the wisdom of emotions
- Balance time spent with grief one-to-one with self-care
- Attuning to your heart surfaces unprocessed grief
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses them all
- Tears don’t disturb the inner quiet—they help the body
- Shame about grief shuts down all emotions