The Body Remembers What We Were Taught to Forget

Dear Land Loved,

I'm 43, and a couple of months ago a friend talked me into going to a women's circle. Someone there said your body isn't a problem you need to fix, and afterward I sat in my car and cried for a long time. I still couldn't tell you exactly why.

I've been reading since then. About the old festivals that just got renamed. About how women used to be the ones you went to for plants and birth and bleeding, and then somewhere along the way they became the ones everyone was afraid of. I don't know how to say this part right, it just worked. That's what gets me. It worked.

Because I believed it. Not in my head, I left the church at 19 and never went back. But my body still does something. I apologize when other people bump into me. I can't say the word witch out loud without a little laugh after, like I'm asking permission.

So I guess my question is: how do you get something out of your body when it was put there before you were old enough to say no? Is knowing the history enough? Because I know it now, and I'm still flinching.

I really hear you, let’s dive in.

I want to start with the car.

You said you cried for a long time and still couldn’t tell me why.

Sometimes a single sentence slips past every defense we’ve built and lands somewhere deeper than thought.

Your body isn’t a problem you need to fix.

Of course you cried.

I don’t think those were tears of confusion.

I think that sentence reached the part of you that knew the truth long before you were ready to hear it.

You asked if knowing the history is enough.

No. I wish it were.

History gives us language for what happened. It helps us understand that what we’ve been carrying didn’t begin with us. But our bodies don’t change simply because we’ve learned something new. They change when they have enough experiences of safety to believe something different.

You left the church at nineteen. Your body has been trying to catch up ever since.

Christianity has separated many women from their deepest sources of knowing. Our bodies. Our intuition. Our cycles. Our relationship with the living world. Our trust that we belong to ourselves.

For centuries, women were taught that holiness looked like obedience, silence, self-sacrifice, and making ourselves smaller. Eve became the warning. Our bodies became temptations to manage. Our bleeding became something "unclean". Birth, healing, and the knowledge women had carried for generations slowly moved out of women’s hands and into institutions that claimed greater authority. Women who held knowledge of plants, birth, and the rhythms of the earth became objects of suspicion instead of respected community elders.

Not everywhere. Not all at once. But over generations, the message settled into our bones.

Don’t trust yourself.

Trust someone else to tell you who you are.

That kind of conditioning doesn’t disappear the day we stop believing it.

It lingers in the body.

It looks like apologizing when someone bumps into you. It looks like asking permission before speaking. It looks like laughing after saying the word witch, just to let everyone know you’re only half serious.

I don’t hear weakness in those moments.

I hear generations of women who learned that taking up less space was safer than taking up their full size.

Patriarchy is remarkably effective because it becomes invisible. We stop calling it conditioning and start calling it personality. We call it being polite. Being humble. Being a "good woman".

But none of us were born apologizing for existing.

That was taught.

Which means it can also be unlearned.

Slowly. Tenderly. One experience at a time.

That’s why I don’t think that women’s circle was just a lovely evening out.

I think it was medicine.

Every time you sit in a room where women are trusted instead of corrected, where your body isn’t treated like a problem to solve, where your voice doesn’t need permission to exist, your nervous system gathers another piece of evidence.

This is what safety can feel like.

This is what belonging can feel like.

Healing happens through repetition too.

If this were my body, I’d also be reaching for oatstraw infusion.

Oatstraw is one of my favorite herbs for rebuilding a nervous system that’s been holding too much for too long. Not because it’s dramatic. Quite the opposite. It’s deeply nourishing, mineral rich, and asks nothing of you except consistency. One ounce by weight of dried oatstraw in a quart jar. Fill with boiling water, steep for at least four hours or overnight, strain, refrigerate and drink throughout the day.

It’s quiet medicine, the kind that reminds us we don’t have to force healing. Sometimes we simply have to feed what has been depleted.

And for the moments when your chest tightens and your courage feels just out of reach, Motherwort has long been one of my closest plant allies. I think of her as the lion-hearted one. She doesn’t take away fear. She helps us stay rooted while fear passes through.

I also want to say something about the word Witch.

I smiled when you wrote that you still laugh after saying it. So many women do. They say it with a disclaimer attached, as though they’re joking. As though they don’t quite mean it.

When I think of the women who were called witches, I think about how women’s authority, knowledge, and autonomy were treated as threats. Women who knew the plants. Women who attended births. Women who cared for the sick and the dying. Women whose wisdom came from their relationship with their bodies, their communities, and the land.

The witch trials were a systematic persecution of women, fueled by fear of female power and independence. They were a terrifying example of what can happen when a misogynistic culture decides that women’s knowledge cannot be trusted and women’s freedom cannot be tolerated.

And maybe that is why so many women today are reclaiming the word.

There is power in taking back something that was once used to shame and silence us.

The modern Witch is often a woman returning to herself. A woman learning the plants. A woman listening to her cycles. A woman trusting her intuition. A woman remembering that she is part of the living world, not separate from it.

The word became frightening because women who belonged to themselves have always been frightening to systems that depend on our obedience.

You asked how to get something out of your body that was placed there before you were old enough to say no.

I don’t know if we always "get it out".

Sometimes I think we grow something stronger beside it.

Trust.

Community.

A relationship with the land.

A relationship with the plants.

A relationship with ourselves.

Eventually those roots become deeper than the old fear.

And then one day you notice the flinch still visits sometimes.

It just isn’t running your life anymore.

You also asked whether ‘it’ (the patriarchy or Christianity) worked.

Yes.

In many ways, it did.

Generations of women learned to question themselves before they questioned the systems that taught them to doubt.

But if it had fully worked, you wouldn’t have cried in that parking lot.

You would have heard those words, shrugged your shoulders, and driven home.

Instead, your body recognized something your mind was only beginning to understand.

It recognized freedom.

To me, those tears aren’t evidence that you’re still trapped.

They’re evidence that beneath everything you’ve inherited, there is still a woman who knows she belongs to herself.

I think she’s been waiting for you to trust her again.

With love,

Vanessa 🖤