By the time you reach adulthood, your shoulders have become a shelf for everyone else’s expectations. You carry the pressure to hold it all together, the impulse to stay small, the invisible command to be strong. You carry the weight of “should,” and the posture of apology.
Meanwhile, your chest has learned to cave inward, hiding the heart, cutting off the breath, quietly collapsing. This entire zone—shoulders, chest, upper back—becomes the architecture of obedience. It is where survival hardened into structure. It is where dignity gave way to duty.
Radical Undoing brings it back.
This region holds years of compression, not only muscular but emotional and symbolic. It is the bridge between upper control and lower instinct, the place where the heart gets crushed beneath duty and the breath is strangled by role-playing. Here you store guilt, self-blame, unprocessed grief. You brace emotionally, protect others before yourself, tuck in your true expression. The body learns to flinch with the old command: don’t be too much.
When your shoulders are tight and your chest is collapsed, no affirmation will undo it. The body has already decided. It has already voted for smallness, for safety, for silence.
This is the posture of the “good person”—the good citizen, the good student, the good partner. The shoulders rolled slightly forward, the chest subtly sunken, the breath shallow and high, the chin pitched forward, the arms drawn close. It is not anatomy. It is obedience written into bone and sinew. It whispers: I won’t make a scene. I’m not a threat. I’ll do what’s asked. I’m carrying it, see? I’m responsible.
Undoing this posture is not just a matter of straightening your spine. It is a matter of releasing the shame and submission that formed it.
If your shoulders feel like they live up by your ears, if your chest tightens or caves under stress, if you slouch unconsciously when things get serious, if you struggle to take a full breath without effort—these are the signs. If you hold your arms close in public, apologize too often, collapse emotionally when alone, or find yourself unable to cry—or crying too easily—these are the signals.
They are not problems. They are adaptations. But they are no longer serving you.
The work is below the line. Not because I’m greedy, but because you need skin in the game. If you won’t pay a small price, you sure as hell won’t pay the larger one—the price of tearing yourself open.
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