Stop Holding Back: A Somatic Healing Perspective

(this blog entry lives in two parts, the part that is public and the other for Mystic Marrow..)

"Speak louder. Be more confident. Stop holding back."

I've heard some version of this since I was a child. Every teacher. Every coach. In every room I ever walked into. And I understand now, they meant well. They wanted me in my fullness. They wanted me to share my voice, unguarded and whole.

But what none of us understood in that moment, what my body understood long before my mind caught up…was that I wasn't choosing to hold back. There was no switch to flip.

I was surviving.

I grew up with a mother whose love came wrapped in abusive control. The kind of presence that takes up so much room in a house, in a body, that there's no square inch left to be anything but small. When you're a child in a home like that, you learn fast: the safer you make yourself, the safer you are. Taking up space wasn't a decision. It was a risk. And so my nervous system did what nervous systems do…it protected me the only way it knew how.

There is no framework, no four-step plan, that unwinds that kind of conditioning. It is not linear. It spirals. It takes years of slowly, carefully building a sense of safety in your own body before "taking up space" stops feeling like danger.

Even the trauma-informed spaces I found as an adult didn't always understand this. Somewhere along the way, even in a community built around presence, there was still a version of the body that was allowed to pass, and a version that wasn't.

What Changed Everything

I was in my thirties when I finally saved enough, and found the right teacher, for my yoga teacher training. I'd spent years looking. Because even in yoga spaces, there's often a quiet expectation that your body should look a certain way to earn the credential.  When the philosophy itself says the opposite. Whatever the body expresses today should be enough.

I met my teacher, Mandee, and something in me broke open before I even said my name. I introduced myself through tears. She just knew. She held that moment without needing an explanation.

In her training, the language was different. Invitation. What shape is taking form today? How is the body expressing itself right now? Curiosity, not correction. Is it really like that? Let's explore.

That container — held gently, without agenda — is where something in me finally had room to shift. Not all the way. Not fixed. But enough. I began to understand that being with what is, without forcing it into a different shape, was its own kind of medicine. That my nurturance created safety. And safety is what let me start inhabiting a little more space in my own body, a little more of the time.

How I Teach Now

This is why my yoga classes look the way they do. They're not for everyone, and that's on purpose. They're for people who want an hour of gently, curiously being with the body, exactly as it shows up that day.

If you need to disassociate the whole class, that's allowed. If you need to cry through it, that's allowed too. We're not trying to fix anything or emerge as some improved version of ourselves. We're just moving together — offering the body the medicine of breath, of community, of joints and fascia getting to communicate with the nervous system again. New research keeps pointing to fascia as one of the body's great communicators, right alongside the nervous system itself. When we stretch, we're connecting to that conversation.

I don't teach from a place of being healed. I'm still in it.  Still navigating decades of this work in my own body. But I'm in it with you, not ahead of you. It's never about doing it the way I do it. It's an invitation to let your own body reveal what it needs, and let the rest fall away.

Somatic Healing perspective on 'stop holding back'

If you've ever said this to someone, or had it said to you, please hear this: it was never about willpower.

It's about a body that learned, once, that safety meant smallness. That is not brokenness. That is intelligence. Your body did exactly what it was built to do.

So maybe the invitation isn't to stop holding back at all.

Maybe it's to finally get into conversation with the wisdom your body has been holding onto, the whole time, and let it lead from here.

For the ones who want to go a little deeper in this conversation with journal prompts and a growing library of Somatic Yoga practices... The Mystic Marrow is where you'll find the depths... Join here.

Natalie

If any of this is stirring something in you — if your body has a story it's ready to tell in a room that won't rush it, I hold 1:1 somatic sessions for exactly this. No agenda, no fixing. Just space to be where you're at.