When Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Tries to Forget

Have you ever noticed how grief settles into your shoulders? How anxiety lives in your chest like a bird that won’t stop fluttering? Or how years of unspoken words seem to tighten around your throat?

If you’re nodding right now, you’re not imagining things. Your body has been listening to your life—every joy, every heartbreak, every moment you pushed through when you really needed to pause.

And now, perhaps in this quieter season of life after retirement, your body is finally asking to be heard.

Understanding the Pain Body: Eckhart Tolle’s Wisdom

Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle introduced a concept that changed how many of us understand our inner landscape: the pain body.

Tolle describes the pain body as an accumulation of old emotional pain—a kind of energy field that lives within us, formed from painful experiences that weren’t fully processed or released. It’s not just a memory. It’s a living presence in your body that can be triggered by present-day situations, even when those situations don’t logically warrant such strong reactions.

Have you ever had a moment where someone said something relatively minor, and suddenly you were flooded with emotion that felt way too big for the situation? That’s the pain body awakening, Tolle would say—old wounds recognizing a familiar pattern and rising up to be felt.

Here’s what I find most comforting about Tolle’s teaching: he doesn’t ask us to fight this pain or make it go away through sheer willpower. Instead, he invites us to witness it. To notice when the pain body activates without becoming completely consumed by it.

As contemplative teacher Richard Rohr reflects on this concept, pure awareness is all that’s required to break identification with your pain body. Once you break that identification, it loses power over you and begins to weaken.

For those of us who have spent decades being strong, pushing through, caring for everyone else—this permission to simply observe rather than fix can feel revolutionary.

How Depression Lives in the Body: The Somatic Connection

We often talk about depression as if it exists only in the mind—a matter of thoughts, moods, and emotions. But anyone who has experienced depression knows the truth: depression is deeply physical.

It’s the heaviness that makes your limbs feel like they’re moving through water. The exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to touch. The aching in your bones that has no medical explanation. The way food loses its taste or your body forgets what hunger feels like.

Research published in the National Institutes of Health confirms what many women have always known intuitively: somatic symptoms are core features of depressive states. Depression involves inflammation throughout the body, changes in how we process pain, disruptions to our sleep architecture, and alterations in our gut microbiome—that remarkable ecosystem that communicates constantly with our brain.

Studies show that depression is associated with biological dysregulation across multiple systems, including elevated inflammatory markers and altered stress hormone patterns. The mind-body connection isn’t just philosophical—it’s measurable.

When we’re carrying unprocessed grief, chronic stress, or the accumulated weight of a lifetime of putting ourselves last, our nervous system doesn’t simply “get over it.” It adapts. It goes into protective mode. And sometimes that protection shows up as depression—the body’s way of slowing us down, demanding rest, insisting that something needs attention.

For women in their sixties and beyond, depression often arrives hand-in-hand with major life transitions. Retirement. Empty nesting. Loss of a spouse or close friends. Changes in physical health. The slow grief of watching parents age or pass.

These aren’t just emotional experiences. They’re physical ones. And your body is responding the only way it knows how.

The Fibromyalgia and Emotional Trauma Connection

Perhaps nowhere is the mind-body connection more evident than in fibromyalgia—a condition that disproportionately affects women and often emerges or worsens during major life transitions.

Research published in Healthline reveals compelling connections between emotional trauma and fibromyalgia. A 51-study review found that the majority of people living with fibromyalgia reported a significant association between the onset of symptoms and the experience of emotional or physical trauma. Notably, emotional trauma was more common than physical trauma as a trigger.

Studies show that 45.3% of fibromyalgia patients meet the criteria for PTSD, compared to only 3% of the general population. Even more striking, in most cases, the traumatic experience and PTSD symptoms preceded the onset of chronic widespread pain.

How does a state of emotional overwhelm translate to chronic pain? Research indicates that trauma creates a sequence of neurobiological responses that can affect brain structures, change neurological synapses, and potentially alter gene expression. Your altered neural pathways then may skew pain perception and contribute to other regularly seen symptoms such as cognitive impairment, sleep disturbance, and fatigue.

For years, women with fibromyalgia were told their pain wasn’t real, that it was “all in their heads.” We now understand that fibromyalgia involves very real changes in how the nervous system processes pain signals—changes often rooted in the body’s response to emotional stress and trauma.

Autoimmune Disease: When the Body Turns Inward

Autoimmune conditions tell a similar story of the mind-body connection. In these diseases, the immune system—designed to protect us—begins attacking our own tissues. Rheumatoid arthritis. Lupus. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Multiple sclerosis. The list goes on, and women are affected far more often than men.

Harvard Health reports on research analyzing more than 100,000 people diagnosed with stress-related disorders, finding that individuals with these disorders were more likely to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease compared to those without stress-related conditions.

A landmark study published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that cumulative childhood stress increased the risk of developing autoimmune diseases as adults. The research showed a dose-response relationship—the more adverse childhood experiences, the higher the risk of autoimmune hospitalization later in life.

Research from the Global Autoimmune Institute suggests that up to 80% of patients with autoimmune disease report uncommon emotional stress before the onset of their condition. Researchers describe a feedback loop: stress not only causes disease, but disease causes significant stress in patients.

The connection between emotional suppression and autoimmune conditions is particularly relevant for women. SonderMind reports that chronic stress and emotional suppression may contribute to the onset and progression of autoimmune diseases. The prolonged fight-or-flight response, triggered by unexpressed emotions, can dysregulate the immune system.

It’s as if the body, unable to fight the true source of its distress, turns inward.

What This Means for Women Reinventing Themselves

If you’re reading this as a woman in your sixties or beyond—perhaps navigating retirement, rediscovering who you are outside of your career or family roles, wondering what this next chapter holds—I want you to know something important:

Your body has been your faithful companion through everything.

Every sleepless night caring for children or aging parents. Every stressful day at work where you smiled through the pressure. Every time you swallowed your words to keep the peace. Every loss you grieved while still showing up for everyone else.

Your body was there. And it remembers.

This isn’t meant to frighten you. It’s meant to honor what you’ve been through. And it’s meant to open a door to a different way forward.

Gentle Pathways to Release and Heal

The beautiful news is that the body that holds pain can also release it. Not through force or willpower, but through gentle, consistent practices that speak the body’s language.

Movement That Honors Your Body

Gentle yoga, walking in nature, swimming, stretching—movement that feels like coming home rather than punishment. When we move with awareness, we help our nervous system remember what safety feels like. Research on polyvagal-informed therapies shows that paying attention to and influencing physical experience are core aspects of healing.

Breath as Medicine

Something as simple as extending your exhale can shift your nervous system from fight-or-flight into rest-and-digest mode. Deep, slow breathing has been shown to stimulate the vagus nerve, reduce anxiety, and boost the parasympathetic system. The breath is always available, always free, always yours.

The Practice of Presence

This is Tolle’s great gift—learning to notice our pain without being consumed by it. To say, “There is heaviness in my chest” rather than “I am my sadness.” This small shift creates space. And in that space, healing can begin.

Rest Without Guilt

For women who have spent decades in motion, true rest can feel foreign or even frightening. But rest is not laziness. It’s repair. It’s allowing your body to do what it knows how to do when given half a chance.

Connection and Community

We are relational beings, and isolation often worsens both emotional and physical pain. Polyvagal theory emphasizes that feeling safe is an emergent property of autonomic state, and co-regulation with others is essential for healing. Finding your people—whether through classes, groups, friendships, or simply deeper conversations with existing relationships—can be profoundly healing.

Nourishment That Supports Your Nervous System

Foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, colorful vegetables, and adequate protein provide the building blocks your body needs to regulate inflammation and support mental health. The gut-brain connection plays a crucial role in immune health, and what we eat directly impacts how we feel.

A Permission Slip

If you’ve been dismissing your physical symptoms as “just aging” or pushing through pain because that’s what you’ve always done, consider this your permission slip to do something different.

Your body isn’t betraying you. It’s communicating.

And this stage of life—this beautiful, complex, sometimes challenging season of reinvention—is the perfect time to finally listen.

You’ve spent so many years caring for others. What might become possible if you turned even a fraction of that care toward yourself?

Not as a luxury. Not as selfishness. But as the foundation from which everything else can grow.

---

This post is for informational purposes only and isn’t intended to replace medical advice. If you’re experiencing symptoms of depression, chronic pain, or autoimmune conditions, please work with qualified healthcare providers who take your concerns seriously.

---

About the Author: Inge Bundchen is a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner with over 15 years of clinical experience helping women navigate mental wellness through an integrative approach that honors both clinical science and holistic wisdom. She is also a registered 200-hr yoga therapist, meditation instructor, and brain longevity specialist through the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation.

Related Topics You Might Find Helpful:

The Healing Power of Sleep: Why Quality Rest is Essential for Mental Health (Plus a Free Sleep Assessment Tool)

Why Aging and Depression Often Go Hand-in-Hand

Holiday Depression and the Pressure to Be Happy

---