The Body Keeps the Score, The High-Achiever’s Diary: Chapter III

Peeling down the layers: on performing through fear, the belief that built an empire on the basis of a wound, and what psychosomatic therapy finally set free.

From the “Human Edge Labs” Project (in the making)

“Don’t think. Just feel,” said my therapist, as if it was a yoga instruction.

Okay. Here we go again.

Another session. Another deep breath. Another time “going there.” Another time, pushing myself to connect with that pain again. At this point, I was somewhere between “Why are you doing this to yourself?”, “Can’t this just be over?”, and “Come on, Darinka, you’ve made it so far, you can’t stop now. You can do it.”

It was mid-session. My therapist, calm and present, asked:

“Do you remember- when was the last time you felt like this?”

She was talking about my anxiety attack. The one that hit me on January 1st in Bangkok, when my nervous system went into full alarm over a breakup that, rationally, should not have triggered such a response.

(I wrote about that in Chapter II, if you wanna read it, you can find it here.)

I closed my eyes. And I looked.

This is a deeply personal chapter — the one where the body finally spoke louder than the mind. I share it because I believe many of us are carrying something in our bodies that we’ve never given permission to leave or we are not even aware that we have so much stored in us.

The Girl Who Never Failed an Exam

Going back through my memories, there was generally NO anxiety in my adult life: I have spoken on stages in front of 400 people. Won a public speaking competition. Presented complex product features to C-level executives in Germany. Pitched to investors with an unfinished prototype. Walked into rooms where everything was at stake- and I showed up: composed, fully present, confident. Sometimes even “exceeding expectations.”

So anxiety? Not really my thing. Or so I thought.

But as I stayed with the feeling - really stayed with it, not thinking but feeling- the sensation started to sharpen. And a very specific memory came up, one I hadn’t thought about in years.

I was a freshman, first year of university, in Computer Science. It was exam week: ten days, five exams. Studying computer science isn’t so easy, you know: Calculus, Algebra, Probability, Algorithms- heavy, unforgiving subjects.

You could attempt all five exams or not. If you didn’t pass, you could try the next session. No real consequence, right?

Except in my mind, there was every consequence in the world.

I didn’t just want to pass. I wanted to pass all five on the first attempt with high grades. Anything less -somewhere deep inside me- felt like total failure. And in my subconscious mind, like danger.

And so, before every exam week for the first two years of university, my body showed the exact signs of being in danger. For 2–3 days before exams started, I would have “quick” anxiety attacks, with puking and hyperventilation. It would last for 4–5 minutes, and immediately after, I would sit back down and go back to studying.

As if nothing had happened. As if my body had just sent me the most desperate signal, and I had simply pressed mute. And then I would walk into the exam hall and take the test.

The results? I passed all five exams, every single time, on the first attempt, with high grades. My overall result at the end of university: a distinction, 9.4 out of 10. I never failed a single exam in the four years at my bachelor’s, never failed one in my master’s either, and finished that with first-class honours too.

So yeah, you read that right- I have never failed an exam in my life.

That is how deeply performance defined my identity, my safety, my worth, my everything.

And in all those years after- not once, not a single time- did I stop to ask: What was my body actually trying to tell me? Why was it reacting as if something truly dangerous were about to happen?

“Something Just Doesn’t Feel Right”

Meanwhile, the yoga training was increasing in intensity. Every morning, 7 AM, a two-hour session- a completely different way of confronting yourself. Two hours of meeting your edges on the mat. Two hours of trying to believe that today, in this session, you can hold that pose you’ve been working toward all week.

As we moved deeper through breathwork and movement, I could feel things moving. Emotions surfacing. Perspectives shifting. Layers I didn’t know were there were coming into view and then dissolving. I was feeling good and energetic.

But underneath all of that, something was still “off.”

“Something just doesn’t feel right. But I can’t tell what it is.”- I thought to myself. I noticed it, and because everything else felt so improved, I did what I have always done: I kept going. I told myself it would pass.

But it didn’t.

From the Yoga and Mindfulness Workshop for Women’s Empowerment

The Somatic Session That Broke Me Open

And then is when something completely unfamiliar crossed my path- a psychosomatic therapy.

“A what? What is this kind of therapy now? But, okay, I am curious to try it out, can’t hurt ”. - I thought to myself.

I booked a session having absolutely NO idea what to expect. Rationally, consciously, it was just curiosity. But maybe subconsciously, I was quietly hoping that something could finally reach the thing I couldn’t name.

We started gently with somatic exercises. Slowly dropping out of the thinking mind and into the body, into sensation, into the territory where words stop being useful and something deeper starts to speak.

And then my therapist asked, quietly:

“How do you feel? What comes to your mind first?”

And I blocked, completely.

“What is this? Where is this coming from?”- I was thinking. That very subtle, vague feeling of “this doesn’t feel right” was there, but I couldn’t name it. Couldn’t locate it. It was like trying to read something written in fog.

As he guided me deeper, more questions, more exercises, more space to just be with whatever was there, the fog slowly started to clear. And I could finally put words to what had been sitting in my chest for months:

“I am abandoning my old ‘successful’ life. My whole career, I spent so much time and effort building it. My whole identity. Everything I built so far, I am walking away from all of it to become… what? A yoga teacher? A coach?”

“What am I doing with my life?”

A deep sigh. And then, right behind that, quieter, rawer, more painful than anything I had said in months:

“I am a disappointment to my parents.”

“They don’t approve of what I’m doing. And now it’s getting even worse. Even further from their expectations. Even further from making them proud.”

The moment I said “my parents,” the tears came. A river of tears, again, flowing down my face the way tears flow when something very deep finally gives way. Getting more intense with every thought that surfaced, every moment I had felt like I disappointed them, every time I didn’t meet their expectations, every look, every silence, every unspoken thing that said more than words ever needed to.

And there it was, again. The same belief from before : the five-year-old in the plain dress, now wearing a different costume but singing the exact same song:

Without the performance, “you are not worthy of love and belonging.” “You are not safe.”

The Primal Release of 25 Years of Stored Fear

As I forced myself to stay with that feeling - not running from it, not rationalising it, not “handling” it - just letting it exist in my body without doing anything about it, something in my chest began to move.

A tightening that had been there so long, I had forgotten it wasn’t normal. Like a knot I had been breathing around for years. And then, like something that had been locked in a room for a very, very long time and someone had finally turned the key, it started to come out.

First came the tears, then coughing, then waves of puking and purging, my body releasing in a way I can only describe as primal. It had been waiting for this exact moment to finally go out.

“Wow, what was that?”- I thought to myself as I was trying to catch my breath in between the intense, uncontrollable urges to puke.

It would stop. And then the same thoughts would come, and the cycle would start again.

My therapist held the space calmly. Afterwards, he said simply:

“This is accumulated tension from everything, the fear, the anxiety. Every time your nervous system went into fight mode and had nowhere to discharge, it stored it here, in the chest. And it has been waiting to leave for years.”

Wow. Just- wow.

The release didn’t end in that session. It continued for weeks. Once a day, sometimes twice, triggered by a thought, a memory, or sometimes completely out of nowhere. And each time: a little lighter, a little more open, a little more space where the heaviness used to live.

From the psychosomatic therapy training, March 2026, Koh Phangan, Thailand

The Pattern I Could Finally See

And this is when everything connected.

Every time I had to show up in many situations in life, every pitch, every race, every exam, every speech, every high-stakes meeting*, *my body went into fight mode, as if survival depended on the outcome. Just like the five-year-old in the plain dress had learned she had to earn the beautiful thing, the young woman who never failed an exam had learned she had to earn safety.

But here’s the part that shook me: I hadn’t just been enduring this pattern. I had perfected it.

I had trained my nervous system to suppress the fear. To control it. To convert it into fuel. I had reprogrammed myself to thrive under pressure. To excel in difficulty. To fight every challenge that life threw at me as if it was a life-or-death situation- because somewhere inside me, it was.

Moving to Berlin alone. Starting from zero. Building a career in a foreign country, in a foreign language. Handling everything - professionally, personally, emotionally- alone. Every single one of these experiences had triggered a “danger” response, and every single time, I had gone into “warrior mode.” And it had to be close to perfection, to excellence. Because in my body’s operating system, imperfection meant abandonment.

I remember one period- I was working at a more established company where things were a bit “slower” than the fast-paced startups I was used to. And what did I do? I filled my schedule to 120% again. Joined a community to organise their events, joined a coaching programme to mentor more people, and began teaching at a university. All at the same time.

And I remember the exact moment I told myself: “Finally, I feel alive again.”

Let me say that one more time. Because it took me a long time to truly hear it: I needed my nervous system to be triggered to a level of fight-or-flight to feel alive.

And can you imagine- can you even begin to imagine- how much emotion accumulates in a body that operates like this, for years? Every time life threw a challenge on me or there was a “performance-focused” event , my system would fire up, the drive to excel would overpower the fear, I would push through, and I would succeed. And every single time, the emotion that was generated had nowhere to go.

My body remembered all of it, silently, for years. Stored in the tissue, the fascia, the muscles of my chest and shoulders and throat. Every performance-related tension. Every suppressed fear. Every stress response that was never fully discharged. Like a thousand files, the nervous system never closed.

And then it was clear: beneath all of it was a single underlying pattern — satisfy the expectations, meet the standard, earn the love. A limiting belief, quietly inherited from the first people who ever mattered to us, our parents. The first humans who shaped, without intending to and often without knowing, the lens through which we would see ourselves for decades.

And this is where the paradox is — our parents love us. They gave everything they had to raise us, and that love was real. But love, even the most genuine love, can still pass something harmful down. Because our parents were also five-year-olds once, also learning what safety costs, also shaped by their own inherited beliefs about what a person must be to deserve belonging. And those expectations — built for their world, their era, their fears — are often nothing like the world we are actually living in today.

And then society added its voice, same message, louder: achieve more, perform better, earn your place — until the belief became the architecture of an entire life. Installed in the nervous system before we had the capacity to question it. Stored in the body every time we performed through fear and called it strength.

And I know this because I lived it. Sitting in that therapy room, finally hearing my own voice say out loud what had been sitting in my chest for months: “I am abandoning my old ‘successful’ life?” That was not a career crisis. That was this belief, speaking clearly for the first time. The identity I had spent decades performing — through other people’s eyes, through my parents’ eyes, through society’s eyes — finally cracking under the weight of something more true.

From the “Reselince Workshop” for Entrepreneurs

What the Body, and Yoga, Always Knew

In yogic philosophy, the body is not only a physical structure. It is an energy body, a living system of prana- the life force, flowing through energy centres known as chakras. The fourth chakra, Anahata, the heart centre, is the seat of love, connection, and fear. When unprocessed emotions accumulate there, the energy stagnates, the chest tightens. A heaviness settles in that you can’t quite name, can’t quite explain, can’t quite shake.

In yogic psychology, every emotion is understood as a *frequency, designed to arise, peak, and release. When you feel it fully, it moves through and leaves completely. But when you suppress it- not now, hold it together, keep going, you don’t have time for this- *then is when you interrupt this natural cycle and the frequency has nowhere to go. It compresses into the body. Layers on top of everything else that was never allowed to move.

Over the years, over the decades, those layers build. And you start to feel exhausted in ways sleep doesn’t fix. Tense in ways holidays don’t touch. Overwhelmed by things that “shouldn’t” affect you this much. Reactive in ways that feel disproportionate. Anxious for reasons you can’t identify.

Because it was never just about this moment. It was about everything this moment was sitting on top of.

You cannot think your way out of what the body is holding. You can understand your patterns perfectly and still be run by them -because the score isn’t kept in the mind.

The body keeps its own record. And it will hold what was never allowed to move, until you give it permission.

We are all carrying something inherited. Emotions that were never allowed to move, stored in places we have never thought to look.

I share this because I know I am not the only one who has spent years storing everything in the body — pressing mute on every signal, converting fear into fuel, and calling it strength. I deeply believe that learning to listen to what the body has been holding is some of the most important work we can do — for ourselves, and for everyone around us.

When we finally give the body permission to release what it has been carrying, we don’t just become freer. We become better. More present partners, more grounded parents, more honest friends, more conscious leaders. And slowly, one person at a time, that ripple moves outward — into families, into teams, into communities.

The looking can begin anywhere. It can begin here. It can begin with exactly the feeling you are having right now.

This is where this chapter ends — but the journey continues. In the next chapter, I’ll share the deepest self-worth conflict that survived every breakthrough — and the moment I finally heard “you are enough.”

If you’re curious about the deepest layer — Read Chapter IV: The Failed Olympian →

If this landed somewhere in you, if it touched something in you, tell me what it stirred. Tell me what your body has been holding. I’d love to hear where you are in your journey.

My DMs are open on *LinkedIn and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/darinka.nova_).*

With love and presence, Darinka

This is Chapter III of The High-Achiever’s Diary — an ongoing blog series where I share raw, unfiltered insights from my own personal and spiritual growth journey. The diary is envisioned as a personal exploration of what runs underneath the ambition — the subconscious patterns, limiting beliefs, and unspoken truths that high-achievers carry but rarely talk about.

The next *Chapter IV →: the deepest self-worth conflict, and the moment I finally heard “you are enough.”*