11/19/2025
The Lymphatic System of a Griever 🌿
Post 5/30: The Body Remembers What the Mind Tries to Forget
There are wounds the world cannot see.
The ones you never speak about.
The ones you try to bury under strength, responsibility and routine.
You tell yourself you’re fine.
You tell yourself you’ve moved on.
You tell yourself that “time heals.”
But your body knows the truth.
💚
Because your body remembers everything your mind tries so hard to forget.
Grief doesn’t disappear just because you silence it.
Trauma doesn’t dissolve simply because you refuse to look at it.
Pain doesn’t leave the body because you decided to “be strong.”
The body stores what the heart cannot carry.
💔
It hides in the fascia, the deepest connective tissue holding your life stories.
It sits in the tightness of your shoulders, the lump in your throat, the heaviness behind your sternum.
It wraps itself around the diaphragm, stealing the breath you need to heal.
It settles in the abdomen, slowing digestion and filling the lymphatic system with inflammation.
This is not weakness.
This is physiology.
This is a nervous system that has had to protect you for too long.
When grief goes unspoken, the lymphatic system becomes overloaded.
Stress hormones thicken lymph.
The fascia tightens and restricts drainage.
The vagus nerve retreats.
The body shifts into a long-term protective state.
And then you start to feel it.
🌿
The swelling that won’t leave.
The bloating out of nowhere.
The sudden weight around the belly.
The fatigue that rest can’t touch.
The random pains held in places where memories once broke you.
Your body is not betraying you.
It is communicating.
It is whispering, “There is something here that needs your compassion.”
Healing begins when you allow your body to exhale.
When you soften the areas that have been holding the hardest.
When you release the lymphatic pathways that froze in moments of fear, loss or shock.
When you finally give yourself permission to feel what you avoided just to survive.
You do not heal by pretending the pain isn’t there.
You heal by creating safety for your body to let go.
Because here is the truth:
Your body has always remembered you.
It held the parts of you your mind could not face.
And it is ready to release — the moment you are ready to listen.
🌿✨
