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There's a particular kind of tiredness that doesn't respond to sleep.

Your chest feels tight. Your breath shallow.

You've learned to function like this - to push through, to manage.

But somewhere underneath, your body is asking:

What am I still carrying?

The body keeps holding

I've been thinking about grief lately. The kind that accumulates quietly over years.

The relationships that ended without closure. The dreams you let go. The version of yourself you can no longer be. Losses that never got named, never got felt all the way through.

You don't cry. You don't stop your life. You just keep moving - hold your breath a little, tighten your chest, swallow what wants to be expressed.

When armour becomes exhaustion

Wilhelm Reich called this Charakterpanzer - character armor. The body builds protective walls around feelings too overwhelming to feel. It's intelligent. It's survival.

But over time? Those walls use your life energy just to stay standing.

That exhaustion you can't explain? It might be this.

Someone wrote to me recently after an intensive weekend of work:

Easier to live and easier to breathe.

This is what shifts when someone stops managing their grief from a distance and takes responsibility for the part that wants to be felt.

Not responsibility in the sense of blame - you didn't cause the loss, the trauma, the things that happened to you. But responsibility for what you're doing with it now.

For the armor you're maintaining. For the breath you're restricting. For the parts of yourself you've locked away because feeling them once felt too dangerous.

When you're ready to meet that - not fix it, not make it go away, but actually feel it - the body knows what to do.

The chronic tension that's been using your life energy? It releases. Gradually.

Enough that you remember what it's like to breathe without so much effort.

A protected space to feel

People sometimes ask if this work will make them fall apart.

Maybe, yes.

But falling apart in a Schutzraum - a protected space - is different than falling apart alone.

In a protected space, you're invited to meet what's there. To take responsibility for feeling what wants to be felt.

To fall if you need to. To shake, to cry, to let your body complete what it started years ago.

The grief wants to finish. Your body knows how. It just needs the right conditions - and your willingness to stop protecting yourself from yourself.

When armor softens, you don't just feel "better." You feel more. More alive. More present.

More capacity - for joy, for connection, for breathing fully.

The tightness eases. The breath deepens. And suddenly there's room again.

If something here is resonating, you probably already know it.

Maybe your chest tightened reading this. Maybe you noticed your breath.

​If you want to explore this together, we can talk.​

My schedule is changing.

Starting February, I'm shifting my rhythm:

No more Monday sessions.

New weekly availability:

• Tuesday: 9:00-11:30 / 12:00-14:30
• Wednesday: 15:00-17:30 / 18:00-20:30

Why the change?

I need more spaciousness in my week. And I've learned something about morning sessions - there's a different quality to the work when we meet early.

A different kind of presence available. Both for you and for me.

Here's my February

Berlin sessions (4 spots):

• February 17 - 1 session left
• February 18 - 1 session left
• February 24 - 2 sessions left

End of February, I'm in Portugal.

If you want to work together:

→ Already a client?

→ New or returning? Reply to this email. We'll talk first about what you need, then find a time.

(Online sessions also available.)

Sometimes what we need isn't another strategy for managing what we're holding.

Sometimes we need the conditions where we can finally let it go.

Bis bald,

Johannes

Für alle die Deutsch sprechen - hier geht es zu der neuen Seite in Deutscher Sprache: https://dearmouring.berlin/​

Johannes Ebert Bodywork // 13351 Berlin // hello@johannesebert.com // +49 173 29 88 497
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