The Healing Power of Strength

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Rooted Wellbeing is a monthly series exploring everyday wellbeing practices for healing and growth, simple, inclusive and accessible ways to support ourselves through the challenges of estrangement. Offering gentle invitations to pause, reconnect and grow small roots of steadiness and care.

I’m Jules, an Integrative Counsellor, Coach and Wellbeing Facilitator. Through this series, I share practices that have supported me and the communities I work with, including my own lived experience of estrangement. My hope is that each piece offers something you may want to explore or gently lean into a reminder that strength can grow in quiet, steady ways.

The Weight We Already Carry

Estrangement can feel heavy, not always in visible ways. Sometimes it’s carrying the invisible load of emotional labour, vigilance, the holding of boundaries, the weight of conditioning, society’s beliefs and expectations, the strength it takes to maintain distance, or to stay with complex feelings.

“The body often carries what the voice has had to quieten.” The body keeps the score.— Bessel van der Kolk.

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When I first began strength training, I couldn’t pick up the barbell with any weights on it. I remember thinking, I can’t do this, and all the old ‘not good enough’ feelings arose. I wanted to run away and go to something I felt safe in. I tend to steer myself towards gentle floor-based exercise like Yin or Pilates. I often go to a class early so I can hide in a corner, headphones on, and create a little safe space around me. 

But I’ve felt this growing sense of needing to explore a more Yang part of me and own my shadow part, my strength, power and sacred anger. After many years of holding and containing I wanted to integrate my Yin, Yang, and channel my often-suppressed anger, embracing my Inner Warrior woman.

I find gyms intimidating and over stimulating- the mirrors, the noise, a feeling of performative working out. I felt that everyone else knew what they were doing and that old familiar feeling of being the outsider. I didn’t feel at home in those spaces.

Maybe you recognise that feeling. If you've ever felt like you didn’t quite belong somewhere, that can echo when trying something new.

“Your nervous system is always asking: Am I safe enough to be here?”— Deb Dana

When Strength Feels Tender

Building strength can stir more than muscle, if your body has known bracing, shrinking, or staying small to stay safe, then taking up space physically can feel unfamiliar even exposed.

At times when I begin lifting the weights I’ve noticed frustration rising quickly, other times my Inner Critic part telling me I’m doing it wrong and tries to get me to quit. Sometimes the voice that says ‘I can’t’ is simply a part trying to protect us. My Inner Compassionate part is also there steadily growing, cheering me on with my fellow Inner Warrior part.

“When we approach our inner world with curiosity instead of judgement, everything begins to change.”— Richard C. Schwartz

Strength training, approached gently, feels like I’m becoming a supportive witness for myself. I’m not pushing myself through pain, or overriding my limits. I’m noticing my capacity, adding a little more weight as and when I feel ready. Repeating something that once felt impossible and finding it steadier. There is something regulating and grounding about pressing my feet into the ground before a lift, exhaling through effort and choosing when to stop. Choice matters, I have agency in my movements.

Muscle, Memory and Regulation

Our nervous systems respond to rhythm and repetition, slow, controlled resistance work can create a sense of containment. The predictability of movement, the grounding of gravity, a clear beginning and end of a repetition.

Strength training is supporting me with my chronic pain, spoons and energy levels. I’m noticing my sleep feels deeper on a strength training day. When I’m in a session my chattering monkey mind begins to quieten and I can feel this sense of clarity and focus. A growing sense of inhabiting my body. It’s offering me a felt sense of capability, not imagined strength, but embodied strength.

Estrangement can sometimes disconnect us from agency.  Strength training, in its own quiet way, can gently return some of that. Sometimes that connection is with another person, sometimes it is being with our own bodies - feeling our muscles engage and release.

The Somatic Connection

Strength training can also become a somatic practice. When we slow down enough to notice our breath, the pressure of our feet on the ground, or the moment a muscle begins to engage, we are bringing attention back into the body. For many people who have experienced stress or relational rupture, the body has learned to brace, withdraw or stay on alert. Gentle, repetitive strength movements can offer the nervous system something different; clear boundaries, effort followed by rest, contraction followed by release. Over time, this can build not just muscle, but a deeper sense of inhabiting the body again, a feeling that strength is something we can experience from the inside, not just something we are expected to perform.

Finding Spaces That Feel Safer

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I’ve learned that the environment and conditions matter as much as the movement. Some gyms still feel overwhelming to me. I practice at home mainly but, have been experimenting with quieter times at the gym, smaller classes, and instructors who offer options rather than commands. Spaces where bodies are spoken about with respect rather than critique, where rest is allowed and you are celebrated.

If stepping into a gym feels like too much, beginning at home can be a gentle alternative. You may want to experiment in a small way, lifting something from your kitchen and noticing how it feels in your hands, practising a slow squat while the kettle boils.

Notice your breath.Notice your feet on the ground.Notice where effort meets capacity.

Where the quiet possibility that strength like healing can be built, one steady repetition at a time.

A couple of links to explore. 

Joe Wicks – The Body Coach (beginner-friendly strength sessions with clear guidance):https://www.youtube.com/@TheBodyCoachTV

HASfit (accessible strength workouts with modifications):https://www.youtube.com/@HASfit

Yoga With Adriene – strength woven into slow, mindful movement: https://www.youtube.com/@yogawithadriene

A Gentle Journal Reflection

If you’d like to explore this more deeply, you might reflect:

• When I hear the word strength, what feelings arise in my body?

• What feels like a kind, manageable first step?

Building Strength and Confidence, Slowly

There is something quietly empowering about adding a small plate to the bar, feeling my shoulders steadier, noticing that I am taking up a little more physical space without apology.

Estrangement can often leave us feeling as though we have to justify our existence.

Strength training, for me, has been a practice in inhabiting my body without explanation.

Learning to feel at home in my body feels like an act of radical acceptance and a powerful way of taking space.

“The body is your first home.”— Esther Perel