Winter Practices for Returning to Yourself

The Nervous System, the Body’s Memory, and the Boundaries That Heal You

Photo by Nikita Zakharov on Unsplash

Science, Somatics & the Truth Your Body Has Been Holding For Years

Some stories live so deeply in the body that you don’t realise you’ve been carrying them until everything collapses at once.

My own story began long before autoimmune disease, long before the hospital corridors and steroid drops, long before the tremors of Graves or the exhaustion of burnout.

It began quietly — in childhood symptoms no one could explain.

The bloating.

The rashes.

The aches.

The strange pains that were dismissed with a shrug.

All of it was dismissed as “nothing.” But bodies don’t produce “nothing.” Bodies produce signals.

And mine tried to speak long before I knew how to listen.

By seventeen, the signals were undeniable — the violent flare of uveitis, the red eye that refused the light, the consultant bluntly naming what felt like a sentence:

“Your body is attacking itself.” But he never asked why. He never asked what my nervous system had lived through.

He never asked what early stress or emotional suppression might have shaped the inflammation. He never asked who I had been taught to become.