When the Body Remembers

Kapotasana has a way of finding me.

I don’t rush into it. I reach up before I reach back. I press my legs firmly into the mat and take my time creating space, especially in my low back where I’ve learned not to collapse. The first round I practice on my own. The second goes deeper, with steady support behind me. I feel grounded. Safe. Strong enough to explore the edge.

When I come upright again—back on my knees—something shifts.

Without my hands on the floor, as my back body lifts the weight of my torso, a surge rises through the front of me. Not joy this time. Something heavier. I can feel it building before I understand it.

I reach for a wheel and fold forward over it, letting my spine return toward neutral. The edge presses just below my sternum. My knees hold it in place. I breathe. And then the tears come.

I know why.

Nineteen years ago, my life changed in an instant. The moment that began that chapter—its chaos, its helplessness—lives somewhere deeper than memory. I’ve written about it in my memoir. I’ve shaped it into sentences. I thought I had processed it.

But as I fine-tune the manuscript, revisiting moments I once tried to suppress, something in my body loosens.

On the mat, the images flash. First the page—me writing it. Then the moment itself. The fall. The shock. The sound. An urge rises sharp and primal: to scream. If I had been home alone, I might have.

I cover my face with a towel and lean into my hands. I feel the armor I’ve built over the years resisting the release I know I’m ready for.

I’m not reliving the trauma. I’m not undone. I’m responding.

Grief, nineteen years old, still shows up and asks to be metabolized.

For a long time, I needed that armor. I needed to stay composed, to raise my boys, to build a career, to keep moving forward. But now, in a steady Mysore room where no one rushes in and no one tries to fix me, I feel safe enough to soften.

Backbends open the front line of the body—the throat, the chest, the psoas, the places we brace without realizing it. When those areas lengthen, what’s been held can surface.

The scream I didn’t release then rose quietly on my mat. I didn’t let it out. I didn’t need to. The tears did the work.

Yoga doesn’t erase grief. It doesn’t solve it. But it gives the body a way to finish what it once had to postpone.

Nearly two decades later, I am still healing—not because I’m broken, but because the body remembers what the mind once had to move past.

And sometimes, when the armor loosens and the breath stays steady, that remembering feels less like collapse and more like integration.