Hi, hold2truth, welcome to PsychCentral (PC). Body memories are memories stored in our body tissues; you know how your body remembers to ride a bike? That's because it's done it before and just "remembers" how to balance, steer, etc.

When we're really young, we don't have words but all our memories still get stored, sometimes as pictures (but pictures can only be thought about in words too, one can't "explain" what the picture is) but often as body memories. If we have a negative feeling when X happens then our body freezes up or gets sensitive to that feeling whenever it happens or, sometimes, when nonverbal clues tell it it might happen! You know the image of a mother grabbing her son by the ear and leading him along? Well, that ear will remember that! And, even when no one is around, if the now-man does something like what got him in trouble as a boy, his ear might start hurting all on its own.

We can have various tensions, how we carry our body, etc. because of how we're raised, how we were "taught" to carry our body. Body work tries to find where there are these pockets of tension (not just like when getting a massage :-) and works on them and sometimes the memories come up like with talking in psychotherapy. Children who were sexually abused, for example, might have memories "stored" in their thighs or other places where they "resisted" or were forced, some people believe. My shoulders and neck are always tight, probably from holding myself "together" as a child because I was a very anxious child. A good massage would be a comfort but the tenseness would come back because my body "remembers" the stress of holding itself together for so long. A body worker when she worked on my shoulders would probably be able to elicit memories of tense situations and, hopefully, we'd be able to "release" those memories and the tension wouldn't be as needed. That's the theory anyway :-)