Every Hurt is Three Hurts
On how thoughts, emotions, and the body weave into one another—and how simply observing them can begin to untangle the knot.
This morning, while scrolling through Instagram, I discovered that a TV commercial I had lent my voice to no longer carried my voice. It had been replaced with someone else’s. Naturally, I felt a wave of disappointment. And, as always, the part of me that watches myself was quick to notice what thoughts and feelings rushed in alongside the disappointment. There was a sinking sensation — but very briefly. It didn’t even last a second. I was steady enough in my practice not to dwell on the lost opportunity. As far as I was concerned, the episode was over.
But it wasn’t really over. During my physiotherapy later, I found myself changing the music three times. Normally, I never switch tracks until an album has played all the way through. But today nothing seemed to sit right until I landed on the soundtrack of Arth — Jagjit Singh at his best. Even then, though the music calmed me, I remained slightly unsettled. What struck me was this: although I had no lingering disappointment, no conscious thoughts circling around the rejection, my mind was still affected. It had been nudged off balance, and it was subtly performing in an unsettled way.
That’s when I realized something. When something unpleasant happens to us, we usually assume it’s our emotions that take the hit. And often they do. But today I could see more clearly that the mind itself is even more affected. Even when I wasn’t feeling disappointed, even when I wasn’t thinking about the incident at all, the impact was still there, quietly playing out in the background.
The mind has a way of absorbing shocks and carrying them forward, even after the immediate feelings have burned out. It’s a little like how the body holds tension after an accident — long after the bruises have healed, the muscles remember. The mind too remembers. Not always as thoughts, but as a kind of background static that colors everything we do. We may not be actively disappointed anymore, but the rejection has left a residue. It changes the texture of our attention. It makes the mind restless, unable to settle into its usual grooves.
This is why we often think we’ve “moved on” from something, only to find ourselves irritable or distracted later, without knowing why. The event has left an imprint. The conscious mind let it go, but the deeper layers haven’t caught up yet.
What interested me even more was noticing how and when the mind finally settled. It wasn’t immediate, even after I thought the matter was behind me. The music helped, yes, but it was not just the music—it was time, it was breath, it was the body quietly adjusting itself back to balance. At some point, without my willing it, the restlessness simply lost its grip. The thoughts had already gone, but the mind needed longer to unclench. It was as if the mind had to run through its own cycle before it could fall silent again.
That sinking feeling in the chest was real. It was as if something had suddenly pulled downwards inside me, a brief but heavy tug, before vanishing. I suppose that is what emotions do—they have a physical life of their own, however fleeting. And in that instant, disappointment was not just an idea; it was a weight, a sensation, lodged in the body.
If I were the person I was ten or fifteen years ago, that fleeting weight would not have dissolved. It would have lingered, spread, and perhaps turned into something sharper. Disappointment, left unattended, so easily transforms into anger. One emotion seems to feed into another, but maybe it isn’t so much growth as it is a shift—like a current of water that changes direction when it meets a rock. The original feeling remains at its root, but its energy takes on a different form.
Physically too, one can sense this shift. Where disappointment feels like sinking in the chest, anger begins to climb. It rises—towards the throat, the jaw, the face. The muscles stiffen, the breath becomes shorter, and the body almost prepares itself for a fight. That upward rush is the body translating what the mind has begun to shape.
Of course, every person is different—shaped by different influences, different experiences, and the particular inferences they have drawn from life. So if what happened to me had happened to them, disappointment may not have expanded only into anger. For some, it could deepen into hopelessness, a heaviness that sits in the chest like a weight and pulls the shoulders forward, as if the body itself were giving up. For others, it might spiral into anxiety, felt as a tightening around the stomach, a restlessness in the legs, an urge to move but not knowing where. Still others might slip into sadness, which often shows up as a lump in the throat, a slight dampness in the eyes, or a slackness in the face. Each emotion carries its own physical stamp, its own way of announcing itself in the body, even when the mind insists it has already moved on.
Now, you might wonder why I’m describing how these things physically feel, as if you were strangers to such emotions. It’s not that. It’s because every bad thing is really three bad things. It is a thought, it is an emotion, and it is a physical sensation. Every joy or sorrow is like a tangled ball of wool, three threads woven together in one unholy knot. Each time I return to this subject, I emphasize the same point: three things are happening in the system at once.
What I have always found is this: while we may not be able to stop thinking, we can observe. We can notice the emotions, and we can notice the unique tensions in the body. Those tensions, unlike the wild horse of the mind, can be deliberately softened. Even that isn’t easy, but it is far simpler than wrestling with thought, which is a subtle, gaseous beast. And the moment we begin observing feelings and sensations, we find ourselves standing in a different space—more objective, less entangled—not only with ourselves but also with the issue that stirred up the chaos in the first place.
And the beauty of this is its simplicity. To relax the body, we don’t need a yoga class, we don’t need new-age tricks or rituals. We only need to let the body relax, to allow the shoulders to drop, to unclench the jaw, to breathe more openly. That simple act is enough to begin untangling the knot.
Disappointments and fleeting hurts all reveal the same truth: our experience is not just mental but layered—thoughts, emotions, and the body all speaking at once. The mind may forget, the emotions may fade, but the body often carries the echo longer than either. Learning to observe this interplay without rushing to fix it or to fight it is the beginning of a kind of quiet mastery, a mastery of the self you could say. Quite a fundamental thing don’t you think?
But I still can’t figure why they rejected my voice, my beautiful, convincing voice. Assholes!