Muslims Have a “Body Problem,” and It's Not What You Think

Many of us are moving too fast to realize what our bodies are carrying. And this comes with drastic costs.

You're mid-conversation with your spouse, and your chest tightens before you've registered a single thought. You keep talking. You keep your voice level. But something in your chest has already locked, and you spend the rest of the conversation trying to end it rather than being attuned to the emotional dynamic you’re both in.

Or you wake up after a full night's sleep and your body feels heavy anyway, like it never got the message that rest happened. Not tired in a way more coffee fixes. Heavy in a way that has nothing to do with what you did the day before, and everything to do with something your body is still carrying that sleep alone can't put down.

Or you open your phone, start to scroll, and keep scrolling to a point where a minute or two becomes thirty. Your shoulders hunch forward and tense. Your stomach drops. Your jaw and temples feel tight. Yet you keep scrolling without noticing any of this while your body keeps the score of the content you are consuming. You set your phone down and can’t remember why you picked it up in the first place.

Or a friend asks a simple question, how are you doing, and what comes out is a week's worth of everything at once. Not because you decided to unload. Because the moment someone finally asked, the pressure that had been building since Monday found the first open door and went through it all at once, leaving you both a little startled by how much was in there.

We tend to file these under personality, burn out, or a bad week, or being told we're too sensitive, too reactive, too much. We tell ourselves we're not patient enough, not grateful enough, not connected to God the way we should be. Rarely do we stop and ask what these moments actually have in common. A tightened chest during a hard conversation with someone you love. A body still heavy after real rest. A tense body after doom-scrolling. A flood of words the second someone opens the door. Different situations, but the same thing happening underneath each one: a body responding on its own, faster than thought, faster than choice, to something it has yet to reach the level of your conscious awareness.

This is what we call being disconnected from the body. And once you can see it as that, a different question opens up. Not what's wrong with me…but when did I stop living inside my own body, and what taught me that leaving it was safer than staying?

After almost two decades of working with Muslims, in Muslim communities, and focusing on my own healing, I can say this with confidence: “Muslims, we have a body problem.”

(And yes, I was trying to channel Tom Hanks’ famous line in the movie Apollo 13 - some of you may have noticed this. Thank you!)

Back to the topic at hand. We are disconnected from our bodies, and most of us don't know it, because disconnection doesn't announce itself. It just looks like a short temper, a heaviness no sleep can touch, irritability that lingers, a flinch you can't explain, a flood of words you didn't mean to release. It looks like everything except what it actually is.

To be clear, this isn't a uniquely Muslim condition. Disconnection from the body is close to a societal default at this point, rampant across cultures, faiths, and backgrounds far beyond our own. But every community carries its own specific version of how that disconnection got built, and its own specific reasons the gap keeps getting reinforced generation after generation. This is ours.

And I'd argue we can afford this gap even less than most. Because so much of the Islamic ethos is built around struggle as the means to spiritual growth, the constant, deliberate work of refining the self, examining the self, returning to the self again and again in pursuit of something higher. But you cannot do that work on a self you've never learned to feel. If the body is where all of this striving is supposed to actually take place, then leaving it unaddressed doesn't just slow our growth down. It quietly caps it, no matter how sincere or disciplined the effort above the neck.

Where This Actually Comes From

So where does this disconnection from our body come from? Not as an accusation, but as an honest excavation, because you cannot repair a relationship you don't understand the history of.

It starts with how we were raised. It starts earlier than most of us realize (often in-utero, in our mother’s womb), in how we were raised emotionally, long before anyone used words like nervous system or regulation. Think about what you were taught to do with a big feeling as a child. Chances are you were taught to manage it, quiet it, redirect it, or wait it out until it passed, and rarely were you taught to actually feel it, to locate it, to notice where it lived in you and what it was asking for. The body was almost never part of that conversation. It was there to be fed, dressed, disciplined, kept presentable, kept functioning. Nobody sat us down and said your body has something to tell you, let's learn to listen. We were raised to use the body, not to know it.

That absence doesn't feel like an absence when you're young. It just feels normal. You grow up learning that emotions are largely a waste of time, too dramatic, a sign of weakness, or something to push and get through rather than something to understand and show compassion towards. Or if you're given any room at all, it sounds like this: “okay, we know how you feel, now how do we fix it, how do we move on?”

Feeling becomes a brief stop on the way to fixing, never a place worth staying in on its own.

So when your chest tightens or your stomach drops or you wake up heavy, you have no framework for what just happened, because nobody ever taught you that the body speaks in the first place, and that you can listen and trust it. You explain it away with whatever reason is closest at hand, you probably just need coffee, it's probably just stress, and then you move on with your day, because moving on is the only response you were ever given. You were fluent in managing it. You were never taught its language.

Then religion enters the picture, and for many of us, instead of repairing this gap, it deepens it. Think about how much of what we were taught about the body came in the form of what not to do with it. What to cover. What to avoid looking at. What not to let a hand or an eye or a private moment wander toward. How feelings can snowball into more, so don’t feel! We’re not taught how to manage and process feelings - we’re encouraged to stay away from, suppress, or “insert religious act here” our emotions away. While this is often well-intentioned guidance, what it teaches alongside the guidance itself is that the body is primarily a site of risk. Something to be watched, restrained, kept in line before it leads you somewhere you'll regret. We were handed a long list of boundaries around the body and almost nothing about the body itself, what it feels like to actually live inside one, what it's trying to tell you moment to moment, how sensation and emotion and even intuition move through it before they ever reach your mind.

That kind of framing doesn't just fail to build a relationship with the body. It actively teaches distance from it. If closeness to your own body is where sin is most likely to find you, then the safest place to live becomes somewhere else entirely, in the head, in the intention, in the rules, anywhere but the body that keeps getting cast as the risk. We learned to police the body long before we learned to know it, and a body you've spent your life guarding against is not a body you feel safe enough to actually inhabit.

None of this means the guidance itself was wrong, but does mean that the guidance often arrived alone, without the other half it needed. It also arrived without anyone teaching us that the same body we were taught to protect from harm is also the body we were meant to feel God's closeness through, to regulate ourselves through, to know ourselves through. We got half the instruction. We were left to assume the rest wasn't there.

Even for those who manage to loosen these first two layers, a third one is waiting, and this one has nothing to do with faith at all. It's simply the world most of us are living in. We live inside a culture that measures a person by output. What you accomplished today, what you produced, how much you got through, how efficiently you moved from one task to the next. Slowing down enough to feel something, to actually sit with a sensation until it tells you what it's about, reads as indulgent at best and unproductive at worst. There is no line item for it. Nobody asks what you noticed in your body today. They ask what you got done.

So even a person who wants to build a different relationship with their body is swimming against a current built to reward the opposite. Busyness becomes not just a habit but a kind of relief, because staying in motion means never having to stop long enough to feel what's underneath it. Rest starts to require justification. Stillness starts to feel unfamiliar, even unsafe, simply because it's unfamiliar. The world rewards the very disconnection the first two layers already set in motion, and it does so quietly enough that most of us never notice we're being pulled further from our bodies every single day, one full calendar at a time.

And then there's the layer underneath all of them, the one that doesn't just explain the absence of a relationship with the body, but explains why the body may have needed to be left in the first place. Something happens. To you directly, or to someone who raised you, long before you were ever born into the picture. Sometimes it's what we'd easily call trauma, and sometimes it never gets that name at all. A parent who was present in the house but absent everywhere it counted. A childhood spent moving, city to city, sometimes country to country, learning to pack up and leave before you'd finished arriving anywhere. A death that reorganized a family and was never quite spoken about again. An immigration story carrying loss that had no time to be grieved because survival came first. Emotional neglect so ordinary in the household that no one, including you, would have thought to call it that. Whatever the shape, in that moment, the body does something intelligent and necessary. It leaves. Not literally, but in every way that matters, it stops being a safe place to stay, and staying present inside it becomes more dangerous than stepping outside of it.

There's also a grief many of us are carrying that doesn't fit neatly into personal or inherited trauma alone, because it isn't only in the past. It's ongoing, and it's collective. Homelands ravaged, communities destroyed, lives lost in numbers too large to hold, and so many of us watching it unfold in real time, refreshing, scrolling, consuming update after update, image after image, because looking away can feel like abandonment and looking directly at it can feel unbearable. This too becomes something the body has to do something with. And too often, what it does is leave. We numb, we scroll further, we keep consuming past the point our body can actually process, because there's no ritual, no communal container, no clear place to put grief this size and this constant. The mind stays informed. The body, overwhelmed and with nowhere to unload what it's carrying, quietly checks out. Disconnection, here, is not neglect. It is protection. It is the body doing exactly what it was designed to do when staying present was not survivable.

The trouble is that this protection has a long memory. A strategy the body adopts to survive one moment rarely knows when to retire once the danger has passed. It becomes the default setting, the first response to anything that even resembles overwhelm, long after the original threat is gone. And this doesn't only travel through what happened to you. It travels through what happened to the people who raised you, through a mother who was never given room to regulate her own nervous system and so could not model it for you, through a father whose own body learned early that shutting down was safer than feeling. You can inherit a disconnection you never personally earned, carried to you in the form of how you were held, how your emotions were met, what was modeled as normal long before you had any say in the matter.

This is the layer that finally explains what the opening of this piece was pointing to all along. Not why we never learned to know our bodies, the earlier layers cover that, but why so many of us actively move away from our bodies the moment something stirs. The tightened chest. The flinch. The flood of words. These are not failures of self-awareness. They are a body doing what it once had to do to survive, still running the same protective program years after the danger that built it is gone.

What This Looks Like Now

Once you can see all four layers stacked on top of each other, the imprint, the fear, the pace of the world, the protection built out of what was never safe to feel, the moments this piece opened with stop looking random. They start looking like patterns. Specific, repeatable, learnable patterns, each one a different route the body takes away from itself.

Busyness is one of the most common. Staying in motion, filling the calendar, always having something that needs doing right now, means never having to stop long enough to feel what's underneath. It doesn't look like avoidance from the outside. It looks like responsibility, even virtue. But if you're honest with yourself, some of that motion exists because stillness would mean arriving somewhere you've spent years learning to stay away from.

Freezing is another. The chest that locks mid-conversation, the mind that goes blank when someone finally asks the honest question, the body that simply stops rather than responds. This is the same protective instinct from the trauma layer, still firing, still doing its job long after the danger it was built for has passed.

Projection is another, quieter one. Struggling to locate what's happening in your own body, you locate it in someone else's instead. Their mood becomes the explanation for yours, or you get stuck in “fight” towards those who “trigger” you. Their behavior becomes the thing you manage, fix, or react to, because it's easier to have feelings about someone else's dysregulation than to sit with your own.

And people-pleasing belongs here too, more than we tend to give it credit for. Attuning constantly to what everyone around you needs is, in part, a way of never having to attune to what you need, since you've never quite been taught how. Keeping others comfortable becomes a substitute for knowing your own comfort well enough to name it.

Again - none of these are character or spiritual flaws, and none of them are random. They are what disconnection looks like once it has to go somewhere. The body still needs to do something with everything it's holding. These are simply the routes it takes when staying present with itself was never modeled, never taught, and for a long time, never even safe.

The Cost We Don't Talk About

There's a deeper cost to all of this, one that goes beyond regulation and relationships, and it's the one I think matters most.

The body is not separate from the soul's work. It is the vehicle the soul moves through in this world. Every act of worship, every moment of surrender, every reach toward closeness with God happens inside a body, not around one. So when the body is a place we've learned to leave rather than live in, our spiritual life inherits that same distance. We can pray and still feel far. We can fast and still feel numb. We can sit in remembrance and still feel like we're performing it from somewhere outside ourselves, because the very thing meant to carry us into presence is the thing we've spent a lifetime learning to exit. There is no shortcut to the soul that bypasses the body. If the vehicle is empty, the destination stays out of reach no matter how sincerely we're trying to get there.

And this doesn't stay contained to any one person. It moves outward, into families, into communities, into everything we call our collective struggles. Relationship with your body is what makes relationship with your own emotional interior possible. Relationship with your emotional interior is what makes it possible to feel God's presence as something alive and internal, not just something believed in or performed. When that chain breaks at the first link, everything built on top of it inherits the break. This is, I think, part of what the Quran is pointing to when it says that Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves (13:11). We tend to hear that as a call to effort, to willpower, to trying harder. But what is within us includes the body our intentions are meant to live inside of. We can want change, pray for change, work hard for change, and still find it doesn't hold, because the vehicle carrying all of that change was never brought into the process. A lot of what we call communal struggle, family struggle, our own repeated struggle, traces back to this same exclusion, generation after generation, quietly normalized as simply how things are.

Embodiment is not a fluffy Western wellness add-on to a spiritual or emotional life. It is the beginning of our Islamic journey deepening with our soul and with God. Yet most of us were never shown how to start there. We were shown how to start from the neck up, and we've been trying to heal, connect, and draw closer to God from there ever since.

An Offer to Sit With This

Before you move on from this piece, I'd invite you to actually sit with a few questions rather than rush past them. Because it’s one thing to read this blog post, and another to integrate it into your present moment. So let’s take a few moments to integrate.

Take a moment to pick up a journal or piece of paper, and respond to the following questions honestly:

When in the last week did your body react before your mind caught up, and what was it responding to? How did it react/what do you remember feeling?

What is the first thing you do when a difficult or uncomfortable feeling starts to rise, and is that response bringing you closer to yourself or further away?

What were you taught, directly or indirectly, about what your body is for? Which of the influences shared in this blog post have impacted your relationship with your body?

If your body could speak in full sentences instead of headaches, tension, and heaviness, what do you think it's been trying to say?

A Way Back Into Your Body

For those who want to try this rather than just read about it, here's a simple place to start.

Wherever you are right now, let your shoulders drop, even slightly, and take one breath that's a little slower than the one before it. Breathe in through your nose, feel your chest rise, and then slowly exhale out of your nose or mouth. Continue breathing intentionally like this. Now, notice your feet, or wherever your body meets the ground or the chair beneath you. You're not trying to change anything yet. You're just arriving.

Now scan your body slowly, internally - not searching for a problem, just noticing. You’re checking to feel any sensations in your body. Is there tightness anywhere, your jaw, your chest, your stomach, your hands. Is there heaviness, or the opposite, a kind of buzzing or restlessness that won't quite settle? You don't need a word for it yet. You're simply letting yourself notice that something is there before you rush to explain it or fix it.

Once you've found something, whatever it is, however small, stay with it for a few breaths longer than feels natural. Ask it gently, not urgently, what are you here to tell me? How am I feeling emotionally as I notice my body? Don't reach for an answer too quickly. Most of us are so used to skipping this step, moving straight from sensation to explanation to action, that just staying a little longer than usual is itself the practice.

You can end simply, by placing a hand over your chest or your stomach, wherever you noticed the most, and letting yourself acknowledge, silently or out loud, I see you. I'm not leaving this time.

This isn't a fix. It's a rehearsal. And like anything you've spent years learning to move away from, the way back is rarely one dramatic moment. It's this, small and repeated, until staying starts to feel less unfamiliar than leaving.

Commit to returning back to your body during many small moments during your day - it will change how you experience yourself and your day.

Where This Shows Up in Marriage

If any of this felt familiar, it's worth naming that this disconnection rarely stays confined to how we handle stress or conflict. It follows us into our most intimate relationships too, into our marriage, into the moments that ask us to be fully present in our bodies with another person. A body you've spent a lifetime learning to leave is not a body that suddenly knows how to stay, just because the context changed to intimacy. If you've sensed this playing out in your own marriage and want to explore it more closely, this is exactly the terrain we work through in Season One: Intimacy in Marriage, where we go deeper into how this same disconnection shapes closeness, desire, and presence between spouses.

Where We Will Journey To Next

This isn't only a pattern I've witnessed in the people I love and the community I belong to. It's one I've watched up close in my own field. The deeper my own healing work has gone, particularly once somatic work entered it, the more it has changed how I'm able to sit with the people who trust me with their pain. And that shift is exactly what's missing from so much of the conversation happening right now with Muslim mental health and Islamic Psychology, where the language of trauma-informed, soul-centered care has become common, while the body, more often than not, is still left out of the room, starting with the practitioner. That's not a small gap. It's an ethical one. And it's where I'm headed next.