Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal. ​ #whensciencefeelslikemagic

I hurt my back.

Luggage.
The ordinary, overpacked kind. I'd tried to pare down (I promise I did), but there I was with a red ‘heavy’ tag placed on my bag. And my lower back saying absolutely not.

And then, because the universe has a very literal sense of humor, I had to keep going. Pick it up again. Carry it through the airport, through the terminal, through the rest of the day. With the weight, and the wince, and the growing suspicion that this was trying to teach me something.

Friday night, midnight, to be exact, I found myself turning it over and over in my mind.

How do you carry heavy things lightly?

The physics of it came first.
close to your center,
use your whole body,
breathe.
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You carry heavy things better when you keep them close to your center. When you use your whole body instead of just your arms or your knees. When you breathe.

Literal heavy lifting.
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But it kept questioning.

Because we are carrying so much in these times. The soul-heavy kind: worry about the people we love, grief we haven't fully metabolized, futures we can't quite predict, pasts we haven't yet released. The specific heaviness of holding it together so consistently that just-barely-holding-it-together-quietly is the norm.

If the physics is close to your center, use your whole body, breathe, then the metaphysics might be this:

Close to your center becomes stay close to what you know is true. The deep-down knowing that preceded the weight. The heaviest soul things get unbearable when we carry them at arm's length: when we hold them out in front of us and stare, or hold them away from ourselves as if we could be separate from them. Pulled close, they stop being something you're confronting and become something you're moving through with.

Use your whole body becomes use your whole being (the thinker, the chooser, the feeler) and not just the part of you that's afraid. Fear carries everything with the mind alone. And the mind alone is not complete. But you are also intuition. Memory. Faith (the stubborn sense that you've survived the shape of this before, even if the details were different). You let the knowing parts, the ancient parts of you share the load with the thinking parts.

Breathe becomes stay in rhythm. There's a cadence to how hard seasons move through a life, and the soul-heavy things get heavier when we hold our breath. When we brace. Rhythm means you're still participating in time rather than being frozen by it. You grieve and you eat dinner. You worry and you notice the sky.

And you actually breathe. You use your breath to help things move through you.

Here's one more thing I realized, standing in the baggage claim of my own metaphor: carrying heavy things lightly is also about tools. Even with perfect form and clear purpose, there are loads the bare hand was never meant to carry alone.

And the thing about tools? You have to pick them up before the weight gets unbearable. The moment you most need a tool is the moment you're least able to go find one.

We need tools. To honor the beauty and joy of this world, and all that we still have to be grateful for: yes, deep thanks and the heavies. We need tools to re-source ourselves. To return to source. To find resources. Both at once.

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Your body is already keeping a meticulous, unsentimental record of everything you carry.

Neuroscience calls it allostatic load, the cumulative physiological cost of sustained stress across your cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, and neuroendocrine systems. Think of it as the body's running invoice for every season you muscled through on cortisol and good intentions. A 2025 neuroimaging study found that higher allostatic load was significantly associated with reduced gray matter volume and compromised white matter integrity in frontal and temporal brain regions: the very areas that govern attention, decision-making, and emotional regulation (Palix et al., 2025; PMID: 40230487). A 2024 study of cognitively healthy midlife adults found similar patterns: sustained stress exposure was linked to increased white matter deterioration, particularly in the frontal lobes (Lawlor et al., 2024; PMID: 38177228).

(Which is a very sophisticated way of saying: the weight you carry isn't metaphorical. Your brain is literally reshaping around it.)

This is survival mode taxing the architecture of your flourishing.

But here's where things can turn around: the same research that maps the cost of carrying heavy things also maps what helps redistribute it. And it maps with striking precision onto those three physics principles.

Breathe and stay in rhythm. A 2024 study on slow, deep breathing at six breaths per minute demonstrated significant increases in vagal modulation =, a direct measure of your parasympathetic nervous system coming back online (Xia et al., 2024; PMID: 39050620). A 2025 systematic review of randomized controlled trials on diaphragmatic breathing confirmed these benefits across a wide range of health outcomes and breathing protocols (Kwon et al., 2025; PMID: 41482169). A separate 2025 scoping review concluded that slow breathing and heart rate variability biofeedback are effective, low-cost interventions for improving vagal tone and stress resilience (Giorgi & Tedeschi, 2025; PMID: 40252198).

What that means on a Thursday afternoon when you’re wishing the day was OVER: six slow breaths per minute is a pace your body recognizes as safety. Inhale for four counts, exhale for six. Your vagus nerve, that long, wandering thread connecting your brainstem to your gut, reads the rhythm and begins signaling the rest of your nervous system to stand down. Because you've told your body that you're not in danger right now.

You're redistributing the weight from the alarm system to the repair system.

Name it and find a handle for it. Neuroscientists call it affect labeling: the act of putting precise language to what you're feeling. fMRI research has consistently shown that naming an emotion activates the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex while simultaneously dampening amygdala reactivity, your brain's alarm center gets quieter when your language center gets specific (Lieberman et al., 2007; Burklund et al., 2014). A 2024 pilot study with veterans experiencing PTSD found that a brief affect-labeling intervention reduced both PTSD symptoms and amygdala reactivity, with symptom reduction correlated to neural changes (Tabibnia et al., 2024, Frontiers in Psychology). And a 2026 fMRI study demonstrated that affect labeling during encoding not only modulated amygdala responses but enhanced memory for the experience itself (PMID: 41764048).

Said simply: naming what you carry gives you a grip on it. The right word for a heavy thing is, quite literally, a handle.

Ask what it's for and let meaning do structural work. This is the close-to-your-center principle made neural. When you actively construct meaning around a stressful experience, your brain's default mode network: the sprawling neural system responsible for self-reflection, future thinking, and narrative coherence shifts its activity in measurable ways. A 2023 fMRI study found that meaning-making during mental simulation was accompanied by decreased default mode network connectivity, which in turn mediated the relationship between stressful events and stress-related growth (Li et al., 2023, Behavioral and Brain Functions; PMC10350273). A 2025 randomized controlled trial demonstrated that a seven-day online meaning-making intervention significantly enhanced stress-related growth and positive emotions in individuals under active stress (East China Normal University, 2025, Journal of Psychological Science).

Translation for the rest of us: asking what is this weight for isn't wishful thinking. It's a cognitive operation that reorganizes how your brain processes the stressor itself. Weight plus meaning doesn't equal lighter. It equals bearable in a structurally different way.

PRACTICE

the weight inventory​
​(10 minutes. paper. pen. no screens.)

Paper matters here, Reader. The act of writing by hand slows the mind enough to let the body weigh in and the body has opinions about what you’re carrying that your thinker on autopilot may have been overriding.

1. List it. Set a timer for three minutes. Write everything you’re currently carrying. Not a gratitude list, not a to-do list, a weight list. The stuff pressing on your chest in the middle of the night. The thing you keep almost saying out loud but didn’t. The responsibility nobody assigned you but you picked it up anyway. Go until the timer stops or the page fills, whichever comes first.

2. Sort it. Read each item back slowly. Next to each one, mark it:

Close to center. This is mine. I carry it because it matters and I’m the right person for it. It stays.

Set it down. This was never mine, or it was mine and it’s finished, or I picked it up out of guilt and it’s been quietly draining me. I’m putting it down.

Hand it over. This is real weight, but I’ve been carrying it alone and I don’t have to. There is a person, a resource, a tool, a conversation that could redistribute this.

3. Look at the ratio. You don’t need to do anything yet. Just see it. How much of what you carry is actually yours? How much are you muscling through with locked arms that could be shared? The inventory itself is the intervention you’re externalizing the allostatic load, moving it from a felt blur in the body to a visible map on paper. Weight you can see is weight you can rethink and reimagine carrying lightly.

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