The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest

THE MOUNTAIN IS YOU
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Psychologically, you probably know that this doesn’t work
for long. The backlog starts to jam eventually. You are
forced to sit and be still and sleep and cry and feel it all.
I wish there were some poetic, mystical truth to share here,
but there isn’t. There is only your anatomy, the physiology
of what’s happening inside you when you feel.
Emotions are physical experiences. We flush our bodies
of everything, and regularly so. We defecate, we sweat,
we cry, we literally shed our entire skin once a month.
Feelings are no different; they are experiences that must
likewise be released.
When not felt, emotions become embodied. They become
literally stuck in your body. This is because they have
something called a motor component, which means that
the minute they begin—before you can suppress or ignore
them—they create a micro-muscular activation.
Our bodies respond instantaneously.
We often store pain and tension in the area of the body
where an expression began but was never fully materialized.
This is because, neurologically speaking, the part of your
brain that regulates emotions, the anterior cingulate,
is next to the premotor area, which means that when a
feeling is processed, it immediately begins to generate a
physical, bodied response. The premotor area connects to