28,000 Hours of Holding Still

If you went to school from age 6 to 24, studying 9 months a year, 5 days a week,

from 8:30 to 16:30, you spent approximately 28,080 hours seated.

That's over 3 years of continuous time holding still while your mind performed.

I'm not saying this to blame anyone or to villainize education. I'm saying it because when we look at chronic pain, at shallow breathing, at numbness in our pelvis, at tension headaches, at low libido, we often search for recent causes, like bad posture, stress, or aging.

But what if these symptoms have roots that go back much further?

What we reward, we reinforce.

In those 28,000 hours, what was rewarded? 

Mental focus. Staying still. Controlling your impulses. Being quiet when excited. Holding your bladder. Ignoring hunger. Breathing shallowly so as not to disturb.

What was dismissed?

Physical needs. Emotional expression. Natural energy. The body's signals.

We learned, deeply and thoroughly, that our body was something to override. Something to manage. Something secondary to the mind's tasks.

The body doesn't forget.

Those hours created patterns. Chronic holding in the back and shoulders.

Restricted breathing that never returned to full capacity.

Pelvic tension from sitting on our aliveness, our vitality, our sexual energy for years.

Headaches from swallowing words and feelings.

Digestive issues from ignoring our body's signals.

These aren't random symptoms that appeared out of nowhere, but a logical outcome of a nervous system trained to prioritize mental performance while suppressing physical awareness, or in other words, body attention.

We can find the source of our suffering in our history and through our bodies.

That source is found in how, where, and how long we repetitively held our bodies in limiting situations.

When we start recognizing where these patterns were created, not in last week's stressful meeting, but in thousands of hours of formative training, something shifts.

We stop seeing our body as broken.

We start seeing it as having learned exactly what was required to survive and succeed in those environments.

The chronic pain, the shallow breathing, the numbness. These were adaptations. Successful ones.

And what was learned can be unlearned.

We can unlearn these unnecessary efforts through attention to our body, through breath, through touch, and/or through movement.

We can begin to reclaim what was set aside in those 28,000 hours, such as the ability to relax, to rest, or to recover our energy.

We can teach our body that it's safe now to feel fully, to breathe deeply, to move freely, to be vital and alive.

The question isn't "Why do I have this pain?"

The question is: "What did my body learn to do to meet the demands placed on me then, and am I still asking it to do that now?"

This is why healing takes time.

28,000 hours of holding still.

Of overriding your body.

Of training your nervous system to prioritize thinking over feeling.

That didn't happen overnight. And unlearning it won't either.

When most of your life force has been locked into these old patterns, when your energy has been devoted to staying small, quiet, still, it makes sense that recovery asks for patience, compassion, and time.

Unlearning is a discipline. One we can master when we dedicate the time and space for it, and when we have the right kind of support.

If you're ready to stop holding still, I'm here to guide you this year, to learn the art of body attention, and build the discipline of truly taking care of yourself. Find out more about my 1:1 Body Learning / Grinberg Method Immersion: https://www.julietteviger.com/inyourbones Book your 20-minute free call if you are curious about working with me, have questions, or want to start your process. https://www.julietteviger.com/booking-calendar/20-min-free-informational-talk?referral=service_list_widget Juliette