When the Body Remembers: Stress, Resilience, and the Quiet Sorrow We Carry

“How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And so we have a choice: to resist change and suffer, or to let go and grow.”

– Elizabeth Lesser

There’s a beautiful book called Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser. It speaks to something many of us know deep down but rarely give voice to—that pain, while never invited, can become a doorway to profound transformation.

This past year has broken me open in many ways.Losing John—my husband, my heart, and my partner in this work—was the most personal of earthquakes. And layered on top were the pressures of sustaining a mission-driven business amidst growing challenges: changing algorithms, shifting platforms like Amazon, Meta, and Google, and a growing sense of economic and cultural instability.

But I’ve also come to understand: stress is not just emotional. It’s biological. It reshapes our terrain—quietly, deeply, and often long before we ever feel a symptom.

The Personal Terrain of Stress

I’ve always been someone who pushed forward. I grew up in a world where hard work, discipline, and perseverance were valued—and I carried that Type A energy into every corner of my life. But over time, especially after John’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, I began to ask harder questions: Was the stress I carried also something John carried, by proximity? Did my own unrelenting pace contribute to the energetic load we both bore?

In my Root Cause Protocol (RCP) training, I’ve learned how stress strips the body of vital minerals—especially magnesium and copper—key players in energy production, detoxification, and immune balance. Chronic stress depletes the spark of life. It shifts us from vitality into survival.

And yet… despite the many stressors I’ve faced—losing both parents to chronic illness, a divorce, job transitions, cross-country moves, and the day everything changed with John’s diagnosis—I’ve always come back to a place of resilience.

On a recent RCP group call, a fellow scientist asked me, “What was your childhood like?”The answer: I grew up in a small Kentucky town, surrounded by nature. I spent my days in the sunlight, playing barefoot in the grass, wading through creeks, listening to birdsong, held by the steady love of two kind, present parents.

“That’s why,” he said.And maybe it’s true. Maybe resilience isn’t something we build only in adulthood. Maybe it begins with the love, light, and microbial richness of childhood. A nervous system imprinted with safety. A terrain fortified by joy.

When Stress Tips the Scale – Stories from Parkinson’s Journeys

Over the past four months, I’ve had the privilege of listening to stories from individuals and families navigating Parkinson’s. Time and again, I noticed a striking pattern: a period of profound emotional shock or prolonged stress that preceded the diagnosis.

Not as a cause-and-effect claim—but as a whisper. A thread.

Two fathers, both diagnosed with Parkinson’s, shared a harrowing commonality. Each had a teenage son who was hit by a car in a life-threatening accident. Each experienced and unspeakable jolt. Their sons survived, even recovered in many ways—but changed. The battle back was a long struggle of stress too. And in the fathers, I sensed a deep, quiet sorrow. A mourning for the child that once was, even as they stood proudly beside the adult their son had become.

I felt this especially strongly with one father. A sadness that wasn’t spoken but lived just behind the eyes. A sorrow for what was lost—and maybe never fully grieved.

Then there were the women. One caring for her mother through a terminal illness, holding it all together for years. Another weighed down by guilt, unable to support her mother with Alzheimer’s to the same degree as her siblings. Always strong. Always showing up. But strength, when worn too long, can become its own kind of armor—one that holds in the very stress that needs release.

The Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot Say

Hans Selye, often called the father of stress research, described how stress triggers a biological progression—from alarm, to resistance, to exhaustion. If we stay in survival mode too long, the system begins to falter.

Years later, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky expanded on this with incredible clarity and compassion, illustrating how chronic stress disrupts everything from hormone balance to brain function to immune health. In his brief but powerful video, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” he reminds us that we were never meant to live in constant activation.

Chronic stress wears the body down. It burns through minerals, disrupts the microbiome, weakens the immune system, and impairs detoxification pathways. And perhaps most heartbreakingly—it dims the spark in the eyes. That innate intelligence, the aliveness within.

The Choice to Break Open

Elizabeth Lesser writes that in times of difficulty, we are offered a choice:

Will we be broken down—or broken open?

To be broken open is not to deny pain, but to walk through it with eyes wide open, to let it change us into something more whole, not less.It means allowing sorrow to speak. Allowing stress to be felt—not buried.It means choosing authenticity over perfection. Vulnerability over performance.

And that is what I have been learning—slowly, imperfectly—through grief, through stillness, and through listening to the stories of others.

Returning to Peace

Lately, I’ve been drawn to a different rhythm. A slower, quieter one.

Peace, I’m finding, is not the absence of difficulty—it’s the presence of inner stillness, even when life swirls around us. It’s the ability to say no when something isn’t aligned. It’s long walks without a podcast. It’s feeling sunlight on your face. It’s letting the nervous system settle, without needing to earn rest.

Peace doesn’t erase stress—but it gives us the resilience to meet it differently.

An Invitation

So I offer this not as a prescription, but as a reflection. A gentle turning inward.

• Where has stress taken up quiet residence in your life or body?

• What stories or sorrows might still be waiting for acknowledgment, for release?

• What would it look like to allow yourself—not just your body—to rest?

We carry so much. But we don’t have to carry it alone. And perhaps, in the end, the most powerful form of resilience isn’t toughness—it’s softness. The kind that lets us break open. The kind that lets us begin again.

I’ll continue sharing these stories here on Martha’s Quest—blending science, story, and soul.

Because our health journeys aren’t linear. They’re layered. And together, we can uncover the wisdom in the cracks.

“The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.”

– Elizabeth Lesser

With gratitude,