I grew up in a house where the body was cared for but never spoken about. Fed, covered, tended to, but never named.

I do not think this was unusual. For many Arab women, the body existed as a practical matter, something to be maintained and protected, but not as a subject of conversation. Not as a site of experience worthy of language. Pain was endured quietly. Change was noticed and not discussed. Pleasure was, in many spaces, not a word that belonged to us at all.

And so we learned to manage the body without speaking to it. Without asking it what it needed. Without even having the vocabulary to do so.

The cost of this silence is something I have watched accumulate in women across years of teaching. It appears as a delayed relationship with pain: a woman who has ignored something for so long she no longer knows quite where it began. It appears as a disconnection so habitual it has become a resting state, the body reduced to a vehicle for getting through the day, nothing more. It appears as shame around physical change, the belly after birth, the body after fifty, because if the body was never truly acknowledged when it was considered acceptable, how do we find language for it when it shifts?

There is also what the silence does to our sense of ownership. A body that has no language, that has never been the subject of honest conversation, is a body that does not fully belong to you. It exists in a kind of social custody, shaped by expectation, modesty, comparison, and the opinions of others, rather than in your own understanding.

What happens when we begin to speak?

Something uncomfortable at first. Naming the body, saying "my hips carry tension," saying "this part of me has changed and I am still learning to be here," can feel strange when you were not raised to do it. There may be a kind of resistance, or even guilt, as though giving language to your own physical experience is an act of self-indulgence.

It is not. It is the opposite. It is the beginning of self-knowledge.

Movement, when it is practised with attention rather than punishment, becomes a form of language. Not words exactly, but a listening. A sustained conversation between the mind and the body that begins to repair what silence separated. You start to know where you hold. Where you brace. Where you are afraid to breathe fully. And from that knowing, something becomes possible that was not possible before.

You begin to return to a body that was always yours. That was waiting, quietly, for you to arrive.

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