Many of my clients wonder this.
How do we even know when the body is out of balance?
And how did this imbalance come to be in the first place?
And I say this — these are exactly the right questions to be asking. Because most people spend years managing symptoms without ever getting to know whats underneath them.
They’ve seen the doctors, done the tests, adjusted the diet, tried the therapy. And still — something keeps returning. Or there’s just this persistent feeling that something is off (even when nothing shows up on tests!)
If that sounds familiar, let me tell you – you’re not imagining it. And your body is not failing you.
What it’s doing is something far more intelligent than that.
How Do You Know When Your Body Is Out of Balance?
This is the question I love, because the answer is almost always: you already know. You’ve known for a while.
The body is not subtle about imbalance. It just speaks in a language we haven’t always been taught to understand.
Here’s what it can look like:
Physically — pain that comes back even after treatment. Fatigue that doesn’t go away with rest. Digestive issues that flare with stress. Sleep Issues. Headaches, hormonal irregularities, a low-grade heaviness that you’ve started to think of as just how you are or that maybe its age thing.
Emotionally — reactions that feel bigger than the situation. A sadness with no clear source. Anxiety that hums in the background even on good days. Feeling disconnected from people you love, or from yourself. Not knowing who you are anymore.
In patterns — the same relationship dynamic playing out again with different people. The same kind of situation finding you, again and again. Decisions that don’t align with what you actually want, made from a place you don’t quite understand.
In a general sense of stuckness — doing everything right on paper, and still feeling like something is blocked. Like there’s a ceiling you keep bumping against and you don’t know where it came from.
All of these are signals. The body’s way of saying: something here hasn’t been resolved yet. Something here is still being held.
And when we start to listen to those signals — rather than pushing through them or managing them into silence — that’s when things begin to shift.
Your Body Is Not Broken. It’s Responding.
Before anything else, I want to say this clearly:
Your body is not working against you.
It never was.
The human body has one default setting: balance. Every system — hormonal, neurological, immune, energetic — is constantly working to return to equilibrium. It’s what the body does, every second, without you having to think about it.
When something shows up — pain, fatigue, anxiety, a symptom that keeps returning — its not your body malfunctioning. It’s the body flagging something. Communicating, the only way it knows how, that something beneath the surface needs attention.
The question worth asking isn’t what is wrong with my body.
It’s what has my body been trying to tell me, that I haven’t yet been able to hear?
How Imbalances Begin to Form
Imbalances rarely arrive suddenly. They build.(And this is something not many people understand!)
And they build through a combination of things — not just one event, not just one emotion, not just one physical stress. Usually, it’s a quiet accumulation over time.
Here are the main ways this happens:
Emotions that don’t get fully processed. When we experience something painful — a loss, a humiliation, a moment of fear or helplessness — and that emotion doesn’t get fully felt or expressed – it gets stored. In muscle tissue, in organ systems, in the nervous system’s memory. This is what we call a trapped emotion — an energetic imprint that the body holds until it gets the signal that it’s safe to release. (I’ve written more about this here.)
Physical stressors — injury, illness, toxins, nutritional imbalance. The body can also carry the residue of things that happened to it physically. An old injury that was treated but never fully resolved. A period of illness that left the system depleted. These create imbalances that continue to affect the body’s energy long after the visible symptoms have passed.
Absorbed or inherited imbalances. We can take on emotional energy from people we love — especially as children, when we’re open and absorbing and don’t yet have the capacity to filter what isn’t ours. A parent’s unspoken anxiety. A family’s generational grief. These can settle into the body as if they were our own, because in a sense, they became ours.
Prolonged stress. When the body is in a stress response for a long time — even a low-level, background kind of stress — it begins to divert resources. Things that aren’t urgent get deprioritised. And over months and years, those deprioritised systems start to show the strain.
None of these are failures. All of them are the body doing its job under the circumstances it was given.
Why the Same Experience Affects Two People Differently
This is something worth sitting with, because it removes a lot of unnecessary shame.
Two people can go through the same difficult experience — the same family environment, the same loss, even the same accident — and one develops a physical symptom or a persistent emotional pattern, and the other doesn’t.
Its not about who is stronger or weaker. It isn’t about who is more spiritually evolved or emotionally intelligent.
It’s about what was already present in the body at the time. What support was available. Whether there was space to feel and process — or whether the environment required suppression. Whether there were already layers of stored emotion that meant this new experience had nowhere to go.
The body does what it can, with what it has, in the moment it’s in.
Understanding this changes the conversation from what is wrong with me to what was my body asked to carry, and what does it need now?
Arjun’s Story
Arjun was 34 when he reached out.(Name has obviously been changed!)
He was the kind of person everyone pointed to as an example. Bright student. High achiever. The one the family believed in, the one who always came through. And Arjun had believed in himself too — he had big dreams, real ambition, genuine drive.
By the time I met him, he was carrying those expectations into every corner of his life — his career, his marriage, his parenting, his friendships. There was an unspoken rule he had written for himself, somewhere in childhood, that he hadn’t consciously chosen but had never questioned: excel everywhere. Let no one down. Keep everyone happy.
He didn’t experience this as pressure. It had simply become who he was.
What brought him to me was chronic pain — a deep, persistent ache across his upper back and shoulders that had been with him for years. Physiotherapy helped for a while. Rest helped temporarily. But it always came back. And Arjun, being the kind of person who pushed through things, had largely learned to function around it.
When we began working together, what emerged was a pattern that had started much earlier than the pain.
Every time Arjun suppressed his own needs to meet someone else’s. Every time he swallowed frustration at work rather than risk disappointing a manager. Every time he pushed through exhaustion as a parent rather than admit he was depleted. Every time he smiled through a moment that quietly broke something in him — the body felt it. Stored it. Added it to what it was already holding.
What we found in our sessions was layer after layer of trapped emotions — not from one dramatic event, but from small ones accumulated over decades. Overwhelm that he hadn’t acknowledged. Resentment that had nowhere to go in a life built on keeping everyone happy. And underneath all of it — something that surprised even Arjun — a deep, exhausted fear of not being enough, sitting quietly at the centre of all of that striving.
These weren’t things Arjun was consciously aware of carrying. He wasn’t walking around thinking: I’m afraid I’m not enough. He was too busy excelling to think that. But his body knew. And it had been holding the weight of all that unspoken pressure in the shoulders.
We worked through these layers across several sessions.
The shift, as it often is, was quiet at first.
He noticed that he could sit with an unfinished task without the familiar anxiety spiking. That he’d said no to something — a commitment he genuinely didn’t have capacity for.
The chronic pain began to ease – steadily – as the body started to release what it had been quietly holding for over two decades.
The Imbalance Was Never the Enemy
This is the part I most want people to hear.
Whatever your body is doing — the pain, the anxiety, the fatigue, the pattern that keeps repeating — it began as an adaptation.
Arjun’s drive to excel, to keep everyone happy, to never let anyone down — wasn’t a flaw. It was a child making sense of what was expected of him, doing what worked, building an identity around it. The chronic pain in his shoulders wasn’t a malfunction. It was the body faithfully carrying what the mind had been asked to hold for decades — and doing so without complaint, until it simply couldn’t – anymore.
The body was doing exactly what it had learned to do.
The imbalance isn’t a punishment. It isn’t evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you. It is, in almost every case, an old adaptation that outlived the situation it was created for — and that is now ready, if you’re willing, to finally be put down.
What This Looks Like as Healing Work
In Body Code and Emotion Code sessions, we work with the body as an intelligent system that already knows what it’s holding.
Using muscle testing, we ask the body — not the conscious mind — what is present, where it came from, and what it needs. The body guides the process. There is no need to excavate every memory or relive every difficult moment. The body identifies what’s ready to be released, and we release it — gently and precisely.
What often surprises clients is how much the body is holding that they weren’t consciously aware of. And how much lighter things can feel once those layers begin to clear.
Healing doesn’t require you to have it all figured out before you begin. It just requires a willingness and time to let your body be heard.
Wondering how much your body might be holding? The free Emotional Baggage Quiz is a gentle place to start. Or if you’d like to explore this work directly, you’re welcome to book a free discovery call — no pressure, just a conversation.
A Few Questions People Often Ask
Does this mean every physical symptom has an emotional cause? Not necessarily. The body is complex and physical causes are real and important — please continue working with your medical team. What energy healing explores is the emotional and energetic layer that often exists alongside the physical — and that, when addressed, can support the body’s own healing process.
What if I had a “normal” or “good” childhood — can imbalances still form? Yes. Imbalances don’t require trauma in the dramatic sense of the word. They can form from quieter experiences — feeling misunderstood, absorbing a parent’s stress, not having space to express certain emotions. Even well-loved children in stable homes carry emotional imprints. It’s simply part of being human.
How long does it take for an imbalance to start affecting the body? There is no fixed timeline. Some imbalances create noticeable symptoms relatively quickly. Others accumulate silently for years before they surface in a way the person recognises. This is often why an illness or symptom seems to “come out of nowhere” — by the time it surfaces, it has usually been building for a long time.
Does everyone have imbalances? In my experience: yes. Every person who has lived a life — and felt things, and sometimes had to push those feelings down — is carrying something. The question isn’t whether, but what, and how much, and whether the body is ready to let it go.