What's Your Body Telling You?
Are you listening to your body?
About five years ago, we lost our son Ezra. My wife was pregnant with our third child, and all signs and ultrasounds pointed to another healthy child. On the day he was born, though, he was born into silence. Instead of listening to our son fill his lungs and let out that newborn cry, all I heard was my own sobs.
Fast forward nine months, and my family and I were getting ready to go on a little vacation up north. I was back working full-time and had just finished working with a particularly difficult client, we were expecting another child, and I had started therapy. To be brutally honest, I thought I was doing this whole grief thing really well, and in many ways, grief became this game that I thought I could win. We got up north, and my body and mind started to relax for the first time in months. And then I woke up the next morning with, what I thought was, hives across my back. It turns out it wasn’t hives at all but rather shingles, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say it hurt. I had kept myself busy for almost a year since we’d lost our son, and the moment I stopped, my body told me I should have stopped a lot sooner.
What’s your body telling you right now? Maybe you ate a bag of chips last night (I can’t be the only emotional eater here?!?), and you’re feeling like crap. Maybe you’ve been working your ass off for the last while, and your body is telling you it’s tired. Perhaps you’ve got a lot on your mind, and it’s telling you that you’re stressed or anxious. Our bodies are where we hold many of our stressors, anxieties, and tension. It can sense when we are dealing with difficult things or that we’re bothered by something.
Every July for the past five years, my back starts to cramp up at the memory of my shingles-vacation and as a reminder that the anniversary of my son’s birth is coming up. To add to this, I deal with anxiety regularly, and I can tell when stresses or anxieties are starting to rear their ugly head. My neck and back start to cramp up, and I have to be careful just picking something up off the floor, not to mention limiting my incredible dance moves for fear something is going to fall out of place.
Maybe you have had this as well. You’re in an intense situation at work, talking with your employer about the increase in responsibilities that you’ve had to do over the past year, dealing with being short-staffed again, or maybe just in a conflict with another person that just won’t resolve itself. You are going to feel this in your body somewhere. Maybe your hands start to shake a little, or you’re like me, and your back and neck start acting up. Perhaps you get sick out of nowhere, or your foot won’t stop tapping when you sit for a moment at night. All of these things are our body’s way of saying - Hey! Pay attention! Something’s going on here!
We can do three things to listen to our bodies, and it all starts with noticing how our bodies are feeling. This one is tricky. I’ve spent most of my life in glorious oblivion to how my body actually felt. Perhaps just a sign that I’m getting older, but I remember pushing my body to the limits physically, emotionally and what I was putting in my body. But I’d always bounce back within a day or two, so I never really paid much attention.
Nowadays, I’m paying more attention to how my body is doing and checking in with it more regularly, but it’s been a big learning curve. How do you know what your body is saying to you if you don’t know the language your body is speaking to you? For me, it’s been a journey of self-compassion and grace, slowly learning the language of my body. The two things that have been most helpful to me have been meditation and yoga. Meditation helps me do regular body scans and be more aware of the discomfort or simply freeing feelings within my body. I’m fairly new to yoga, but one of the things it is helping me to do is to connect my body, brain, and presence together.
Sometimes, to notice what’s happening in our body, we have to get curious and intentional with what our body is communicating to us, which may mean we need to break some familiar patterns we are in. That leads us to the second thing we can do to listen to our bodies; pay attention to what we’re putting in them.
Let me give you an example; many years ago, my wife and I did Lent for the first time. If you’re not familiar with Lent, it’s the 40-day period leading up to Easter. It’s a time that you typically add something to your daily routine or take something out. I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I was going to give up gluten. Now, I don’t know about you, but gluten is one of my all-time favourites. It’s in all of my favourite foods and drinks, and it’s likely proof that love does exist. About a week into my gluten-fast, this terrible thing happened. I started to feel better. As each week passed, that feeling only intensified. I hadn’t realized how terrible I had felt until I changed what I was putting into my body.
I know that this isn’t rocket science, but what we put in our bodies makes a massive difference in how we feel, sleep, our energy levels, all the things really. Getting in tune with our bodies will make us more conscious about how our bodies feel and help us with emotional resilience. When our bodies feel good, it’s easier to deal with emotional, mental, and spiritual difficulties.
I’m someone who has journeyed with anxiety for many years, but early on in the pandemic, it was rearing its ugly head. I could barely sit still, and when I did, my leg would bounce in place all the time, my back ached, and my mind was foggy. So I called up a friend and asked him if he wanted to go for a walk. There was something about getting my body moving and chatting with a trusted friend that helped clear that mind fog, stretched out my back, and I could sit down again without annoying myself with my bouncing leg. I started doing this more regularly, moving my body through walking, running, working out. It was a way for me to stay in touch with my body, purge some of those extra energies pulsing through it, and make me feel more like myself.
That’s the third thing we can do to listen to our bodies; move them. When we move them, we can feel where the pressure is building up. We can feel some of the things we are holding and work our bodies through them. Another reason to move them is that we can start to realize that our bodies are far more capable than we give them credit. Let me give you two quick examples before we wrap this up.
I’ve always hated physical exercise, but I’ve started running and lifting weights since the pandemic has hit. It not only is helping me get in better shape (I do a lot of sitting throughout the day!), but it’s reshaping my mind around the difficulties that I face both in the present and the future. When I’m gassed after running, I force myself to go a little bit further. When I’m doing curls, and my arms won’t lift anymore, I’ll drop the weight and squeeze out a couple of more reps. It helps me realize that my body can take more than I initially thought and break through some of the ceilings that my mind has set for my body.
At the beginning of the summer, I broke my leg. I dropped a 300+ lbs concrete slab on it and spent most of the summer hobbling around with an aircast. It forced me to pay attention to what my body could and could not do. Some days, I would push it a little hard, and my body would tell me to chill the following day. Other days, I could tell when I wasn’t moving it around enough (or pushing myself harder) because my back would tense up from being sedentary for so long. All in all, I’d give breaking my leg a 1 out of 5 stars, but the experience of paying attention to my body was 5 out of 5.
Paying attention to our bodies lets us know just how capable we are, so when difficult, shitty things happen in our life, it can serve as a reminder that we can (and will) overcome them. It will also give us signs about when we are in distress or not - when we need to take our foot off the gas pedal and coast for a bit.
And that’s where we can realize and pay attention to how difficult the situation is and where we need to put our focus to build our emotional resilience.