We’ve talked about the impossible load women are carrying.

The invisible labor. The lost village. The myth of doing it all alone.

But there’s something underneath that I haven’t said yet.

Something I see in my clinic every week, in bodies on the table, in the way stress lives inside women who have been holding it together for so long they’ve forgotten what it feels like not to.

Your body knows how to unwind stress.

It has always known.

The problem isn’t that you’re broken.

The problem is that no one ever taught you to listen — and everything you were taught actively got in the way.

We Were Taught to Tame the Surface

From a young age, we learn to manage what shows.

Don’t cry in public. Don’t raise your voice. Hold it together. Keep it professional. Look pretty. Make people comfortable.

And most of us got pretty good at it.

But here’s what’s underneath that training:

We never learned to go deeper.

We learned to suppress the obvious impulses — the ones on the surface. But the body has layers. And underneath the urge to cry, underneath the urge to yell, there are more primal impulses we never even got close to.

Impulses the body uses to move stress through.

Impulses that, when they’re never honored, keep the stress stored.

What Moving Through Actually Looks Like

Here’s where I ask you to stay with me.

Because what I’m about to describe doesn’t look like what we’ve been taught healing looks like.

It doesn’t look like what you think regulation looks like. It doesn’t look like composure. It doesn’t look like calm. It doesn’t look pretty.

The way our bodies naturally move stress through is physical. Instinctual. What our culture would call primal.

It looks like:

Shaking — but that’s just one of the ways. Tightening and stretching. Moving as if through water, slow and without intention. Crying — not politely, but deeply. Vocalizing. Panting. Moaning. Sounds that come from somewhere below language. Movements you didn’t plan — that feel like your body is moving itself instead of you. Because it is.

I know. I know how that sounds.

But watch a bird after it flies into a window.

It drops. And before it gets back up, it shakes — its whole body, every feather — like it’s shaking the experience off. Because it is.

That’s not a quirk. That’s the nervous system doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

We have that same capacity.

But in our society, we suppress it. Most of us don’t even know how to feel that impulse anymore — unless we’re giving birth, or in a traumatic accident. And then? The hospitals give us medication to tame the shaking.

And what happens when our bodies don’t have the opportunity to express themselves? (Literally, “press out,” which the body does through movement.)

PTSD. Stored trauma. Stress that has nowhere to go.

Watch a baby when it’s overwhelmed. It doesn’t suppress. It doesn’t stay polite or pretty. It moves through — and comes out the other side.

We used to do this too.

We still can.

The Body Is Not Wrong. We’ve Just Forgotten.

I think of it like a flower blooming, if you watch a time-lapse.

It contracts. Then expands. Then contracts again. Then expands further.

That rhythm — pressure and release, tightening and opening — is life. It’s not a problem to fix. It’s how things grow.

Stress isn’t meant to be eliminated.

Stress is meant to move.

Yin and yang. Expansion and contraction. Flow and pressure. Both necessary. Both part of the same cycle.

The problem isn’t that we experience stress.

The problem is when it stops moving.

When the contraction never gets to release.

When we power through with constant activity instead of balancing it with real, quiet recovery — not zoning out on your phone, not binge-watching Netflix, but actual stillness that lets the nervous system exhale.

When the impulse to shake gets overridden.

When the sound stays swallowed.

When the pressure builds behind a dam that was never supposed to be permanent.

That’s when symptoms start.

Not as a failure. As a signal.

What I See in Clinic

I’ll be honest — I wouldn’t have believed any of this if I hadn’t experienced it myself first.

I was required to take qigong throughout grad school. I didn’t expect much. But what happened in those classes was so unexpectedly powerful that I kept going after the requirement ended — signing up for an advanced medical qigong course with my teacher Dr. Tamara Staudt, where I learned the intuitive movement work that’s now central to what I do. And simultaneously, the hands-on bodywork I was learning with Dr. Sheila Murphy. Something started to click that I couldn’t unfeel.

For years I tried to bring these methods into my work, but struggled to find how within the structure of a standard acupuncture treatment. Over the past year it’s solidified into a real method — and the results have been, honestly, sometimes miraculous.

I can read it when a woman walks in.

In how she holds her shoulders. In the quality of her breath. In where the tension lives, and how long it’s been living there.

When she’s on the table, I find the places that are tight — the lines of tension that have been holding something in place for months, often years.

And the most powerful thing I do isn’t what I do with my hands.

It’s verbally guiding women to feel into their own bodies. Their cells. Their tissues. The energy and tension stored there. To notice what’s been living underneath the surface — maybe for the first time.

And what happens when a woman finally gets that kind of space and guidance?

Sometimes she falls asleep on the table. Sometimes she just relaxes deeply. That’s real, and it’s helpful — the body needs that too.

But relaxation alone can only do so much when there’s pressure that’s been building for years. When stress hasn’t had a chance to move through, it accumulates. It stores. And at some point, the body needs more than a chance to rest on top of it — it needs a way to unwind what’s underneath.

Most women who come in need both. The relaxation is the entry point. The unwinding is what actually restores.

More often than not, there are tears. Not because I did something. Because she finally could.

Women get off the table, over and over again, asking “what was that?” Saying “I feel lighter.” “That’s nothing like I expected.” “This is so much more than acupuncture.”

And they’re right. It is.

Acupuncture is a tool we use. I don’t even think it’s the most important one, if I’m being honest. It’s the nervous system finally being given permission to unwind — that’s what changes things.

You Were Never Taught This. That’s Not Your Fault.

We weren’t taught to hear our bodies at this level.

We were taught to perform. To manage. To track and optimize. To hold it together.

We were never taught that the body has its own intelligence. That it has been waiting, patiently, to do what it knows how to do — if we could just stop overriding it long enough to let it.

The good news: it’s not lost. That capacity is still there.

It just needs permission. And sometimes, a little guidance and support to find its way back.

If this resonates — if something in you recognized itself reading this — I’d love to talk. Book a free consultation and let’s see what your body might be ready to unwind.

Or start here: Take the Stress Level Quiz and get a clearer picture of what your nervous system is actually carrying.