Freeing the Trapped Stories From Your Body

Take a journey through the koshas to release pain and toxins

3 min readDec 9, 2022

Have you ever felt as though your mind and heart are ready to move on to a new incarnation of yourself, yet your body remains stuck in the past? Maybe you feel like your mindset lives in a new, healthier dimension, yet your body lags behind?

It is one thing to move through the pain, loss, trauma, and betrayal that settles in our body from past stories via our mind or heart. With good support, we can understand why we had to experience some pain or event and come to terms with our stories. It is quite another thing, however, for the physical body to accept these same terms.

If your body is still presenting symptoms — aches, pains, diseases, symptoms of anxiety/depression — from stories you feel like you’ve healed, it’s time to work with the body more directly.

The Koshas

In yogic anatomy, there are five layers, or coverings, of our soul. In Sanskrit, they are called “koshas.” Ordered from densest to subtlest, they are:

Annamaya Kosha (physical body)
Pranamaya Kosha (breath body)
Manomaya Kosha (mind body)
Vijnanamaya Kosha (intuitive/higher mind)
Anandamaya Kosha (bliss body)

To free our past stories and live fully in who we are now, healing must occur on every layer. It is easier to heal the subtler levels — i.e., it’s easier to accept, intellectually, why we had to learn some lesson or experience some event, or easier for our intuition to see things from a larger perspective. The denser layers, however, require more time to adopt a new pattern, belief system, or anything else we are trying to implant in our lives. As the densest layer, the annamaya kosha is slow to change and hard to break out of its conditioned patterns and routines — no matter how damaging they may be. This is why it can sometimes feel like you’ve moved on but your body has not.