Feel. Sense. Why Have We Learned to Answer "I'm Fine"?
"How are you?" — "Good, thanks!"
How many times a day do we say this without even thinking? And how often is it actually true?
For most of us, this answer has become automatic. Not because we're lying — but because we've learned to say it before we've even had a chance to ask ourselves: what am I actually feeling right now?
When Feeling Becomes a Foreign Language
For many of us, emotions once felt dangerous. In childhood, they could mean criticism, shame, or being left alone — "don't be spoiled," "don't be too sensitive," "don't be a burden to others." So we learned a survival skill that served us well as children but, in adulthood, becomes a wall between us and our own lives: feelings get suppressed instead of felt.
The problem is that we often no longer know how to name what we feel. Not anger, not sadness, not joy — everything blurs into one neutral "fine" or "okay." The mind has learned to bypass feeling with a quick, safe answer, before it even has a chance to surface.
But the Body Doesn't Forget
However skillfully the mind learns to deny or bypass feelings, the body speaks its own language — and it's far more honest.
Tense shoulders. A clenched jaw. A tight stomach. Breath that stays high and shallow in the chest, never quite dropping down into the belly. These aren't random physical quirks — they are emotions accumulated over years, sometimes decades, unexpressed feelings that found refuge in the body because the mind no longer had a safe place to "put" them.
Somatic work — working with the body, the breath, and presence — begins to open exactly this space, so often forgotten. When we let the body speak instead of trying to control or explain it, something deeply liberating happens.
What Happens When We Start Feeling Again
Working with the body — through breath, movement, and presence — often opens something unexpected: the capacity to feel returns.
Not just the big, dramatic emotions, but the subtle nuances too — intuition, an inner knowing, a sense of what's "right" for me, rather than what's "right" in general. People who walk this path often describe starting to notice synchronicities as well — coincidences that seem too precise to be random. This isn't mysticism for its own sake — it's a natural result of being present in our lives again, rather than living on autopilot, disconnected from ourselves.
When feeling returns, clarity about our path returns too. Not because we suddenly know all the answers, but because we can hear our inner voice again — the one that had been silenced for years.
Back to the Authentic Self
This journey — from "I'm fine" to truly feeling — is a journey back to our authentic self. It isn't a one-session process, but a gradual return, layer by layer, breath by breath.
And this is only the beginning. Because when we learn to feel, we don't start feeling less — we start living more.
In the next post, I'll continue this theme, exploring how breathwork specifically helps "unlock" suppressed emotions, and what the first steps of working with the body actually look like.
Do you often answer "fine," even when you feel otherwise? If you feel ready to begin your journey toward true feeling, book an online session — together we'll create a safe space where your feelings can finally be heard.