What Energy Work Never Touched

Blog 15: Part of the The Space Between Survival and Joy series - a post about the moment the body believed what healing never reached.

The body kept a record of every time joy made me unsafe. Until today, when it finally let go.

Last time, in When Joy Comes With a Price, I wrote about how joy cracked something open - and the grief that flooded in behind it. The memories and the deep ache. All…the price I'd paid for being too alive.

This is different.

Not about what surfaced. About what left. And not in a healing session, coaching session or in a healing circle, but in my body. In real time.

I woke up sore from dancing - that good kind of sore that tells you your body remembers how to move. But before I could enjoy it, the familiar voice slipped in: Look what joy cost you.

The scan ran through my system like it always does - that automatic sweep looking for danger. My nervous system's way of checking if pleasure was safe yet.

But this time, my body didn't brace. It didn't shut down. It didn't collapse.

It held still. Confused by what wasn't happening.

The moment after the collapse doesn’t come.

And then something broke loose - not gently. Not via a gentle or guided release. But in my bedroom, at 7AM, alone. Sobs ripped through me from somewhere beneath my ribs. Not symbolic healing tears, raw messy ugly tears. Waves of emotion emanated through me coming from what felt like my very toes.

This was purging.

Every moment joy had ever made me unsafe.

The shutdowns. The flinches and recoils my family had made me pay for being too happy, too excited, too alive.

My father's look of disgust when I laughed too much, too loud, too often. My mother's sideeye that meant - tone it down. My sister’s snark and rebuke at my creativity. The unspoken infraction list that kept track of every moment of freedom and joy to ding me with it later.

The crying came from muscle and bone and tissue. From cells that had held the grief for decades. From the fascia in my shoulders that learned to brace before the punishment came. From the fear that had lived in my jaw so long I thought it was just how bodies worked. From my feet that tried to exit before the onslaught began.

I've cleared this pattern before - “every time joy arrives, the body prepares to be punished.”

Dozens of times. In healing sessions. In my own energy work. With practitioners and healers who knew exactly what they were doing. I've named it, tracked it back to childhood, released it from my field, discharged it from my nervous system.

I thought I was done with it.

But my body wasn't.

Because all those sessions happened in structured planned spaces. In healing sessions and containers. In rooms where I was trying to get better. Where I was being watched. Where healing was the point.

This was different. It happened in my body while it was still processing joy. There was no practitioner, no healing modalities. No one was giving guidance or any kind of spiritual explanation. It was just me and my nervous system finally having evidence that pleasure didn't equal punishment anymore.

I cried until my temperature dropped. Not metaphorically. My skin went cold. I could feel heat draining from my system, like something ancient was leaving through the base of my spine. My fingers turned to ice. The back of my neck prickled with goosebumps.

The body believed it. And the temperature told the truth.

The body was resetting itself.

When it was over, I sat there feeling spaces in my chest I couldn't remember having access to. My ribcage expanded without the familiar catch. My shoulders settled differently against my back.

The body kept scanning - because that's what bodies do. But the scan came up empty.

No threat was detected, so no punishment was incoming. There was reason to brace this time.

I've spent years in healing spaces. Years mastering the tools. Decades clearing, releasing, untangling. And none of it touched what happened in that moment. Not because the work wasn't real. It was. But because my body wasn't ready to let it land.

It needed to happen inside real life. In contradiction. In messiness. When I wasn't trying to heal anything.

After the cold, when my system had emptied itself, there was this moment when something inside me seemed to exhale: finally.

Like my nervous system had been waiting decades for exactly this kind of safety. The unguarded, unexpected kind. The kind that wasn't focused around becoming better. The kind that no one was watching.

Maybe my body knew all along what it needed. Not another facilitated release and not one more supported clearing. Instead - this raw, unpretty purge that could only happen when I wasn't looking for it. When I wasn't trying and when I wasn't turning it into healing before it was done.

This is what integration actually looks like—unraveled, not erased.

Something rewired. Not in theory, in my cells.

And that's what happens when a body is no longer willing to stay safe at the cost of joy.

It uncages.

And not quietly.

There's space now—and nothing rushing in to fill it.

Love,
Sherry

NEXT »» What moved in this post needed to move. But it wasn’t the whole truth. Because once the pattern cleared, something else came in—fierce, grounded, and long overdue. The next piece begins there—with the heat that rises when you realize how much of your healing was built on overriding my nervous system. And what it costs to keep calling that progress.

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About the Author

Sherry writes from the space between dimensions - where presence meets paradox, and mastery gives way to meaning. With a background in metaphysical work and energetic healing that spans decades, her voice carries the imprint of lived wisdom - as an invitation versus a doctrine.

Her blog, It Exists (For Now), moves fluidly across themes of transformation, embodiment, remembrance, identity, purpose, and the quiet revelations of everyday life. This is not the kind of writing to teach you, fix you, or convert you. It’s a space to feel, question, soften, and come home to what’s already here.

Whether she’s naming what’s unraveling beneath the surface or tracing the shimmer of wonder returning, her words are less about offering answers and more about walking with you through the liminal. The words hold a frequency that are felt long after they are read.