Why You’re Always Tense
Linda Villines 0:00
Right now your shoulders are probably closer to your ears than they need to be. Your jaw’s tight. Your stomach has a fist in it. But nothing’s wrong, nothing is happening. But your body is bracing for impact. Maybe you’ve stretched and meditated. Maybe you’ve done the breathing exercise and you’re doing everything right, and yet your body is still tense. Why? Your body isn’t malfunctioning. It’s actually just obeying an old conditioning that says that you need to be protected. I’m Linda Villines. Welcome to The Simple Source, where we liberate your source self so you can stop striving and start arriving. Most people normalize this tension. They say, I just carry tension in my shoulders. But your nervous system isn’t like a set of keys that you can casually carry around and then just toss on the kitchen table. You’re holding on to decades-long protection patterns. And your body is carrying the weight of every suppressed emotion, every unspoken need, every heartbreak that you didn’t fully grieve. I know this because a decade ago, I experienced the spontaneous healing of a lifetime of chronic conditions while my husband was dying of cancer. My body wasn’t broken, it was just fucking stressed, morning to night, every single day for decades. And I thought that that was normal. So if you’re tense all the time, regardless of what’s happening, you have to stop asking, how do I make myself relax? And start asking, what does my body believe is about to happen? Today we’re gonna answer that question because that’s the only question that matters. And by the end of this episode, you’re going to understand exactly what conditioning is trapping your body in that tension and why your body is still obeying that conditioning, and what actually happens when you stop trying to force your body to relax and start appreciating what it’s been trying to protect you from this entire time. You’re not carrying tension. You are tense. And the weight of that tension is accumulated from every day that you have pushed through when you were exhausted, every loneliness you numbed with junk food, every moment you criticized yourself, withheld love, or performed compliance when you actually disagreed. And that weight is enormous when you consider the cost in terms of your lifespan, your joy, your well-being, your authenticity, your freedom. I had another realization when I realized that my body was chronically stressed. I realized that my body had been trying to communicate to me the whole time, trying to tell me what to heal and how through all the forms of bracing. Now you have felt this a gazillion times. Your shoulders just tense before you open an email from someone who has annoyed you or disappointed you before. Your stomach clinches before you ask for something you need. Your jaw locks before a conversation that you have rehearsed in your head with your parent during the holidays. Your breath gets shallow before your day off because a part of you doesn’t trust that rest is safe. And so your body doesn’t fully commit to it. And then there are the other ones that aren’t so obvious, right? Like your chest tightening before you expect good news, your body contracting after you get a compliment, before you see someone you have a crush on, before intimacy, before that raise kicks in, before you take a vacation. Because your nervous system learned that good things come with a cost, that good news is followed by collapse, that love is followed by loss or pain or heartbreak. And that the moment you relax, something is gonna go wrong. And that’s all bracing, that’s all your body preparing for impact and danger, some sort of threat and for something bad to happen. Physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, or relational. And so that next letdown, that next rejection, the next failure or criticism, or that next long shift or the next moment where life takes more than you have to give. That is what your body is bracing for. Most people think stress is just mental, but any type of stress is stress to your body. And anxiety is just simply your body’s reaction to a threat that isn’t even going on anymore, that’s not there. So when you’re stuck in bracing, your body is operating on a prediction based on everything that has ever hurt you, right? So it applies that prediction to the present moment, regardless of what’s happening right now in the present moment, because it hasn’t been conditioned to understand that the past pains and traumas and hurts are over and it doesn’t know that you’re safe. So bracing is rarely a response to the present moment. Bracing is largely your body stuck in the past, even though your conscious mind has moved on. Like maybe you thought you mentally processed that breakup, or that you forgave your mom, or you did leave that shitty job, or you did go to therapy for like six months, but your body did not receive the update that you

How Your Past Shapes Your Present
Linda Villines 5:16
are safe and the past is over. Your body is like still operating on an old intelligence that says that danger is your default. Pain is always coming. You got to brace yourself, prepare for something bad to happen. And that intelligence was wise in the past. Like your body didn’t make up the pain, it didn’t make up your hurt. Something did cause you some suffering and heartbreak and pain, probably over a long period of time. And it probably started when you were too young, too overwhelmed to do anything about it except try to survive. And that intelligence deserves love, not criticism, not shame, not punishment. You know, I could not move my thumbs for two years because of fibromyalgia. And I tried everything, like everything, all the supplements, even steroids. I did physical therapy. I saw all the specialists, but I never injured my thumbs. They just like started hurting one day, and then it just got so bad that I eventually just couldn’t move them. It was so terrible. And I had to wear braces and compression bands on my hands every day for like two years. But you know what I realized after I healed myself? My body was not only protecting me, it was communicating to me. Because that happened right after my husband was diagnosed with stage four cancer at the age of 37. So my body was telling me, Linda, you cannot control this girl. And it is okay. Let go of that need to be in control. But I didn’t understand the message at the time. I do now. Our hands are associated with control, and control was like the last thing I had when that diagnosis entered our lives. So once you see bracing as protection, like you can’t ever really look at your anxiety or your fatigue or your tension, your physical symptoms the same way again, because your body has been giving you a map. It has been speaking to you, it has been loving you, and you just didn’t know. Subscribe if you want to go deeper into this version of healing, because we’re going to keep pulling on this thread, what your body carries, why it carries it, and how to come back into a true healing and loving

Why Symptoms Are a Message
Linda Villines 7:28
partnership with it. Now, if bracing is protection, then why does it make your body feel worse? Your body’s protective response is brilliant, super useful in short bursts in acute stress moments, right? Acute stress is the type of stress that your body is optimized for. That’s when stress hormones spike your focus, that’s when your muscles tense so that you can move faster, that’s when your pulse quickens so that you can fight or you can run. Your body’s stress response is designed to save your life, keep you alive in a moment of real danger. Now, the problem occurs when that response never gets a completion signal, never finishes, never turns off. Essentially, when nobody told your body that the danger is over, that you are safe now. And so the threat may have passed, but your interoceptive system, the network your brain uses to receive and organize internal body signals, is still looping through that previous alarm danger situation. So your body is actually doing what a loyal protective system is supposed to do when it doesn’t receive that signal that the danger is over, that you can chill, that you can put your feet up. And so it keeps protecting you because that is what it’s designed to do. Now, here’s where that cost compounds and not in like a cool compound interest way. But when that stress signal never turns off, your homeostasis, which is your body’s equilibrium, that remains like off-kilter, out of balance, maladaptive, because it has adapted to stress instead of rest or repair or optimizing healing. And so what happens is you rest, but you don’t feel rested because your body hasn’t actually powered down. It’s still on high alert mode. It’s still being hyper-vigilant. That’s why you can sleep like seven, eight hours, but then you wake up exhausted, already tense, already anxious. That’s why you can eat a healthy diet, while you can exercise regularly, but you still deal with like weird symptoms and you don’t actually feel amazing in your body. Nutrition and movement cannot override a nervous system that believes something bad is happening or about to happen. That’s why you meditate, but then right after you meditate, your shoulders are like right back up to here when you open your eyes. And I know that frustration of doing everything right, of following that quote unquote perfect diet to AT, of taking all the right supplements, of seeing all the right specialists, reading all the right books, just desperate to just like not feel like shit. Even though that was a decade ago, I remember that. I was treating my symptoms like they were my enemy, like they were the proof that something was wrong with me. So I had to fix myself. And that meant I was trying to micromanage the downstream expressions of my body without ever questioning what my body was actually trying to communicate to me. Because your body is a downstream expression of what your overall system is carrying, meaning your energy, your field. And when survival is your baseline, your body forgets what being free feels like because it’s just stuck in a distorted and outdated pattern that thinks the past is the

Listening Instead Of Fixing
Linda Villines 10:53
present. So if you’re constantly braced and if your shoulders are tense right now, go ahead and drop them. You have to stop trying to force yourself to relax. Just that’s all you got to do right now. Just let your shoulders drop. That forcing yourself to relax is what actually creates more stress when your body thinks that you are not safe. So the healing thing to do is to ask your body what it is still trying to protect you from, from feeling, from receiving, remembering or releasing. And that relationship with your body is what you are missing, not like another, you know, five supplements or podcast or whatever is on your list. And that’s why your conscious mind can understand your childhood and exactly what activates you while your body is like, something bad is about to happen. We need armor, we need defense mechanisms, we need snacks. For half my adult life, from my 20s to my mid-30s, I was ruled by defense mechanisms and snacks. Always had a box of cheese hits in my car. True story. But both are no longer ruling me. But I remember what it was like to live with chronic conditions and chronic pain, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety, all sorts of digestive issues, insomnia. I mean, I’m not going to list all of them because that’s not the point, but the point is that I treated every single one of those conditions as evidence that my body was broken and thus I was broken. And then that meant I needed to be fixed. And when I said earlier that I tried everything, I really meant everything, like every single diet. The crazy ones, the wacky ones. I took all the supplements, I did all the biohacks, conventional medicine, alternative medicine. I did everything right. And I followed those protocols, I followed those practices perfectly. I did not cheat and I didn’t give up. And some things did help temporarily, but nothing resolved permanently. I never healed. I just spent years and a lot of money and a lot of frustration believing that I just hadn’t found that like quote unquote right fix yet. I still thought that somewhere out there there was like the right practitioner or the right diet that would finally make my body not broken, not embarrassing. And then my husband was diagnosed with stage four cancer at 37. And everything I thought I knew about my body and about healing just got turned upside down. And I refused to spend our remaining time together, sick and unwell. And that’s when I started asking the real and the right questions, like not about what diet or biohack that I hadn’t tried yet, but what did my body actually need that it hadn’t received? And the answer to that was less stress and more love. And then that was the aha moment. I didn’t love myself. And that lack of love made everything in life so much more stressful than it needed to be. And then that’s what I decided to give my body joy and love. And during the absolute worst emotional conditions of my life, my body actually began to heal on its own without medical intervention and crazy diets. Because I stopped all of that.

Why Stress Never Switches Off
Linda Villines 14:13
If you’ve been doing the work but still feel stuck, like no matter how much healing, manifesting, or personal growth you invest in, or spiritual practices you try, something just isn’t clicking. You’re not alone and you’re not failing. The truth is, most teachings and approaches are outdated and only scratch the surface. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect As You Are, helps you understand exactly why things haven’t been clicking and how to resolve the root of why you’re struggling. Unconditional self-love isn’t just a nice idea if you truly want to be free. It’s the missing piece and the foundation for everything you desire. And you don’t have to do or figure everything out on your own. You deserve clear, comprehensive, and empowering step-by-step guidance in self-love, self-healing, and spiritual growth. The Source membership gives you daily support and transformative tools to actually start living your healthiest and happiest life today and every day. 100% of members who follow the program improve their mental, emotional, and physical health by over 50% in one year alone. Real mind, body, soul transformation is possible, and you can achieve it with joy and ease instead of stress and struggle. So, as a thank you for being a listener, you can get 75% off your first month of membership with the code podcast promo. Your links are in the show notes. Now, let’s get back to the episode.

Healing Trauma with Somatic Release
Linda Villines 15:47
So I didn’t heal because my external circumstances improved. I healed because I stopped treating my body as defective and started treating it as wise and loyal and loving, as a living expression of who I am. Because I realized if I need love, then my body needs love. And my body was traumatized because I was traumatized. And when I made that connection and consciously and actively started to stress less and love myself more in a matter of months, while my husband was dying, decades of chronic conditions resolved on their own. And then last year, lifetimes of repressed traumatic memory surfaced while I was in a relationship with my twin flame’s highest self. Actually, I did a whole episode about this called How I Fully Healed Severe Trauma and Eight Weeks with Joy, not struggle. But it was terrible. It was so intense. And I saw and I re-experienced awful, awful things I wouldn’t wish on anyone for days, like nonstop without sleep. It was so traumatic that I had to sleep with all the lights on in my house, or I had to sleep in my car on a different street during the day in a different neighborhood. That’s how bad it was. But because I know how to heal myself, that’s exactly what I did. I went from a PTSD symptom level of 10 out of 10 down to a zero in exactly eight weeks. And if you watch or listen to that episode, you’ll understand that I didn’t do that by treating my body like it was broken or that it had betrayed me. I did it by loving my body, respecting it, and providing it daily space to release that stress, to release that tension through somatic exercise, and by treating my body like an intelligent ally instead of like some rogue enemy. Now, what I have learned over a decade of healing is that your body is not an obstacle. Your body is the doorway, friend. It is the messenger. It is your home. Every symptom, every condition, every place I braced was information from my longest, most loyal friend about what my overall system was holding. So my body wasn’t like randomly breaking down. It was expressing the emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and energetic weight that I had been accumulating since I was born. And I spent decades relating to my body as like this project to manage this thing that like kept failing me. But my body spent those same decades just trying to communicate with me. And the only language available to it at the time, which were symptoms. And when I changed my relationship to my body, instead of seeking some other diagnosis, some other quick fix, some other thing,

Your Body Is the Doorway
Linda Villines 18:42
and just started to respect it, to love it, to free it, to speak and communicate back to it, to tell it the past is over. You are loved. We are safe. We are loved. Life is joyful. Even when our husband is dying, even during the pain, there is love. The symptoms began to resolve because my body didn’t have to scream at me anymore. I had heard, I had listened, and I had started to love it back. And in that love, grief surfaced, which is such a necessary part of healing. People don’t understand that enough. But in that grief, I realized how long I had been at war with my own body that was just trying to protect me, to love me, to keep me alive, and how long it had been deprived of love and respect and peace. And that’s when like the disbelief surfaced. Like, how could I have bought into the distortion that chronic stress is just a normal part of life for so long? Because when you wake up from that fog and you begin to see yourself clearly, it doesn’t make sense to normalize suffering and constant struggling because your body cannot function properly when you’re braced all the time. It cannot and it will not, no matter how much organic kale you eat. Your body doesn’t need you to be its healer, it can heal itself. It’s designed to. What it needs is for you to heal your relationship with yourself. And in doing so, heal your relationship with your

Free Your Body
Linda Villines 20:22
body. Now, if your body can carry pain for decades as protection, I want to talk about the changes that happen when you stop trying to fix your body and you start relating to it with love and reverence. So let’s get back to where we started. Your shoulders, your jaw, your stomach, your breath. Just check in with them right now. Not to fix anything, there’s nothing wrong. You’re just noticing. Is there any less tension than there was 20 minutes ago? Like just a scope, a little bit. Because if you’ve been listening to this or watching this and something has softened in you, even by 5%, that is not a coincidence, friend. And it’s not just my voice being soothing, although yes, it is, but that’s not all of it. That’s your body responding to being understood instead of being managed and fixed. And that response is really meaningful data. Your body doesn’t need another stressful intervention of changing your entire diet and supplement stack and workout routine and biohack protocol. And you don’t need to add like release bracing to that massive list of things that you’re already trying to do every day. What your body needs is what it has always needed, which is a loving and reciprocal relationship with you. Meaning the love, the respect, the loyalty are mutual. And that’s a different resolution from what you have been told by the mainstream. But when you stop asking, what’s wrong with my body? How do I fix my body? And you start asking, What is my body trying to communicate to me? And how do I listen? Listen with love and reverence. When you ask that second question, all of that bracing is gonna begin to resolve because the stress and the tension can complete their cycles because you’re actively telling your body and your nervous system, I hear you, you’re supported, you’re loved, you are safe. And that is what your body needs. And that reverence and love mean that you get to understand your body and yourself in an entirely new way. Because every place that you brace is a place that your body learned that danger was a likely outcome. So every tight shoulder, every locked jaw, every knot, every stomach clench is a location where your body stored a memory and a pattern from a time when protection and survival were necessary. But that protection has served its purpose and it deserves a graceful retirement. Your body deserves to be free. It’s been carrying the weight of all of your past pain and stress and trauma and unfelt emotions and unexpressed needs and hurt for decades. And liberation is not gonna happen by forcing that protection to stop because you cannot, you can’t do this. You can’t heal your relationship with yourself and your body through willpower. You’re not gonna get free like just by stretching for five minutes once a week or taking a new supplement or forcing positive thinking or a mindset hack. Liberation is only achieved when you communicate to your body at the deepest level that the danger has passed. And you have to let your body know that that little kid that it has been protecting has grown up, has survived, and has arrived safely on the other side of that danger. So that liberation happens through your relationship, through thanking your body for its amazing service, for giving it that gold watch and being like, you can retire from protection service, homie, for thanking your body with kindness and like touching your body with love, like hugging it, soothing rubs, right? Hand over your heart contact. When your body is loved instead of managed, when it is respected instead of diagnosed, when it is listened to instead of overridden, the bracing patterns naturally begin to dissolve because the bracing no longer serves a purpose. My relationship with my body has been the foundation of my healing, my joy, my freedom. It’s the foundation of my ability to spontaneously and naturally see over 25 different types of energy, eyes open and closed, 24-7, hear frequencies beyond the normal human auditory range, and feel and move supra causal energy. Because the more liberated I became, the more liberated my body became. We are not just a soul in a body, we are souls with bodies. And when your body feels respected in that way, like it is part of your divinity, it will show you how magical and powerful it really is. Because love is the most powerful medicine in the world. And your body has been loving you this whole time, through every symptom, every tense shoulder, every janky knee ache, every locked jaw. It has loved you and it learned pain. So it prepared for pain. It learned survival, so it organized your entire physiology around your survival, but it has loved you through that. So your liberation begins when you stop treating that incredible protection as like some malfunction, and you start recognizing it as the deepest act of loyalty and love your body knows how to perform. So please love your body back by freeing it, by healing what made that protection necessary in the first place, so that your body can finally, after all these years and decades, take a deep and full breath without anticipating something going wrong. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope this episode awakened you, inspired you, and reminded you of what’s possible when you love, heal, and free yourself and reclaim your highest truth and power. If the show has transformed or enlightened your self-love, growth, and healing journey, please like, save, and share this episode and leave a positive review on Apple or Spotify. And subscribe to be reminded of new episodes. Your support is deeply appreciated and truly helps this show so much. And if today’s episode resonated with you, don’t stop here. Go deeper. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect As You Are, expands on these teachings and gives you the missing framework about self-love that no one is talking about. So get your copy today to start reading and loving yourself more. And if you’re ready for the ultimate healing journey with daily instruction and guidance from me, I’d love to see you inside the Source membership. The only holistic and comprehensive step by step self healing program that is proven to work. Remember, you were never meant to struggle or wait for what is already yours. It’s time to claim everything you want and more. All the links are in the show notes. I’ll see you next time.