What is your body telling you?
Our bodies are in constant communication with us.
Being aware of our body and how it is speaking to us provides us with useful information about our deeper feelings, desires, and the way we view the world. This wisdom can help us live our best lives, reach our potential, relate better to ourselves and others, and make a positive impact on the world.
How can we listen and understand what our bodies are telling us?
Many of us need to actively re-learn how to feel sensations in our bodies. If feeling body sensations feels strange or hard for you, don’t worry. Practice will bring these sensations into your awareness.
The body speaks primarily through the language of sensation, which reflects how energy moves through us. Initially, it can be helpful to focus on three main sensations: movement, temperature, and pressure. These are just guideposts to explore—they won’t be present at all times.
Movement: A good way to start is to scan our bodies for large sensations such as our breath, heart beat, or parts of us that may be tapping or trembling, a foot or finger, for example. There are also more subtle sensations to be found upon closer look including, but by no means limited to, buzzing, tingling, bubbling, throbbing, streaming, calm, or stillness.
Temperature: A second group of sensations to scan your body for is temperature. Sometimes we may feel warm, hot, or perhaps even sweating. In other times and places we may experience cool, cold, or perhaps shivers.
Pressure: A third set of sensations you can scan for are related to pressure. These sensations may be experienced as tension, contraction, stiffness, or heaviness. At the opposite end of the spectrum are sensations such as lightness, looseness, or a sense of flow or expansion.
What’s the connection between these sensations and wisdom?
As we become more aware of what’s happening in our bodies, we begin to see the connection between our sensations and our moods. There is a direct interplay between our bodies and our moods and this interplay works in both directions. Our moods can impact how we feel in our bodies—have you ever felt a rush of energy when you are angry? Similarly, our bodies can impact our moods—have you ever felt sick and it left you feeling blah or down? This connection is important because it provides us with tools to shift how we are experiencing the world. Change the state of your body, you can change your mood. Change your mood, you can change how your body feels. This is powerful stuff!
But there’s more. Our moods often incline us toward certain behaviors and perspectives. If I am feeling sad, I’m likely to see the day in front of me through different lenses and act from that place, which may elicit very different behaviors than when I am feeling on top of my game. When we have a sense of what is happening in our bodies—a story told by both our sensations and mood—we begin to understand ourselves better. Over time and with practice, we are able to interject pause and perspective into moments, unlocking a whole new set of behaviors for us. We are able to choose how we want to respond to life rather than simply react to it out of habit. This is a game changer.
There is more still. As we begin to understand and listen to the way our bodies communicate, we are able to access our own inner navigation system, a deeply embodied sense of wisdom. A sense of knowing. There are many names for this presence—Holy Spirit, still small voice, the Self, Sophia, the God within. We can practice dropping down to this place within our bodies that resides beneath the chaos of our lives, beneath our knee jerk reactions and habits, beneath our long held fears and outlived beliefs, beneath our addictive tendencies, and beneath our gut reactions, to tap into this guiding presence, which enables us to engage with life from a more clear, authentic, solid, and wise place.
What happens to our minds when we drop down into our bodies?
They are still there and active; however, we get a little distance from our constant stream of thoughts and thinking ruts. Over time we can stop over thinking and loosen the hold of our reaction patterns. This allows our mind to relax, and when we do use it, it will be more focused and creative.
What happens if we don’t listen to our bodies?
We become disembodied, living some distance from ourselves. We utilize only a fraction of the resources and wisdom available to us at any point in time and the opportunity to practice our way into new ways of doing and being. And finally, we may open ourselves up to illness. As Dr. Gabor Mate writes in his book, When the body says no:
Each of us must reclaim the autonomy we lost when we parted company with our ability to feel what was happening within. That lost capacity for physical and emotional self-awareness is at the root of much of the stress that chronically debilitates health and prepares the ground for disease.
Got a moment, drop down and gain your own experience. We’ll start simple and build at the speed of trust. Here’s a practice to get your started:
DROPPING DOWN PRACTICE
The purpose of this practice is to drop down into our bodies and simply notice what is happening for us right now, without any need to fix it or change it. Just simply become aware and try not to make any judgements, positive or negative, about what you find.
Take a standing position if you are able. If you are not, arrive as you can comfortably and attentively. Feel your feet on the ground. Experiment for a moment to find your footing.
Next, begin to tune into the sensations in your body by doing a quick body scan from head to toe. The dominant sensations to tune into include:
Movement: How are you breathing—deeply or shallowly? Is your heart pounding or beating gently or at some magnitude in between? Are parts of your body moving– toes tapping, fingers rubbing, eyes twitching? What feels still? Are there any areas of your body that feel out of reach, absent?
Temperature: Where might you be experiencing any sense of temperature, hot or cold or any variations on those themes? It’s quite common for our extremities to feel cooler than our torsos, but everything can light up in different contexts.
Pressure: Where might you be experiencing tension, contraction, stiffness, or even pain? Check your jaw, neck, chest, and hips. Where are your shoulders in relation to your ears? Where might you be experiencing a sense of lightness, spaciousness, flow, or expansion?
3. What is your mood? See if you can summarize it in one or two words. Content? Anxious? Ready? Reserved?
That’s it.
Trigger Alert: Our bodies hold data including memories of experiences that are upsetting. When the body holds a memory of trauma, it is common to get caught in a fight, flight or freeze response. If you begin to engage with a part of your body that holds trauma, gently shift your awareness toward a neutral or relaxed part instead. Take some deep breaths to ground yourself and follow up with a somatically trained professional so you can learn more skills to safely begin to harness your inner resources.