Body Talk
Your body is always inviting you into alignment
As you read this you may notice you have a lot, a little or zero awareness of how your body fits into the equation and overall experience of being ruled by your charged thoughts and feelings. Like…thinking that you are completely failing at life or never feeling like you are doing enough, when really you have never worked so hard! How you are caught in the juggling act, doing your best to keep up with all the demands, everyone else’s needs, including keeping your house plants alive. Or how about feeling gripped by day-to-day feelings of stress, anxiety or overwhelm from everything piling on your plate, including the things you know you need to do for you, but somehow are also the first things to get sidelined. As a Mom to two littles, and practitioner supporting other women and Mamas, these experiences are very much the norm.
It is so easy to get wrapped up in our all consuming day-to-day lives, to keep pushing and hustling our way to worthiness. This experience is fueled by fear and perpetuates a state of fight or flight in our nervous systems, communicating a lack of safety in our bodies. When we are caught up in this cycle we feel increasingly disconnected from our body, and for many of us we have never known what connection to our body actually feels like. Our mind, although working hard to keep us safe and out of harms way, leads this mission and unfortunately causes us to disengage, cutting us off from our body.
If you haven’t really thought about your body in this way before no sweat! Most of us are completely tuned out and spend time predominantly in our minds with all the chitter chatter that fuels the stress, overwhelm and anxiety we know so well.
The experience of feeling our big emotions can be assessed by our mind as dangerous or no-go territory, and so we may notice that we immediately turn away from feeling- looking to avoid or distract ourselves to feel better and subconsciously stay safe. If this sounds familiar (and I am right there with you), you likely learned in childhood that it was not safe to feel. Maybe displaying negative emotions, like fear or anger or sadness was labeled “bad” and deemed unacceptable or punished. Or time was spent intellectualizing and problem solving difficult experiences and not necessarily acknowledging the feelings around it. Either way little to no time was actually spent being with your body talking about or processing how you feel, and more time was spent building a case for mind domination, including the narrative that there is something wrong with you or the experience of feeling, which only fuels that unhelpful “I’m not good enough” story— More on this in my posts titled You can Stop Hustling and Still Matter and What’s Wrong with Fixing how we Feel?
When we turn away from, avoid or try to fix our feelings, we also turn away from the body.
Whether you notice it or not, your body is always trying to communicate with you, sending you cues and messages to get your attention- Remember we feel at the body level. Your body does not want you to suffer, but perhaps the more these messages go unnoticed, the more we create a breeding ground for unwelcome symptoms and depending on the load, even disease.
Pause. Feel. Tune In.
What follows is an invitation to turn towards. To get curious about the language your body is speaking. To notice and tune into it, to hold space and listen. If we can pause or slow down (even if just a little bit) we create an opportunity to connect and receive this communication, honouring the wisdom our bodies carry.
Our body has so much feedback to share with us…When something feels so RIGHT, our bodies will tell us. When something feels so WRONG, our bodies will tell us. When we are triggered by a food, a difficult experience, memory or emotion, or all of this combined, our body will tell us.
What do these messages look or feel like?
We are all unique and our ability to engage and connect with our bodies varies, especially when considering past trauma and how long you have felt disconnected. It can take time, and it will feel strange because it’s like nothing you have ever done before. So have some grace and compassion with yourself, what’s important is that you are creating the time and space to consider your body as a key contributor to your wellness journey today.
When asked, your body may guide you with words, affirmations, directives or a simple yes, no or cue that something still feels unknown. You may connect with images, colours, or other visual cues. Perhaps the more obvious or accessible messages our body sends involve noticeable felt sensations, movement, tension or pain, or other uncomfortable symptoms. Remember the body is doing its best to share with you, and if its messages are not getting through then it might just try to get louder. The other interesting thing to challenge is that although most of what we notice is often uncomfortable and unwanted, do these signals or symptoms need to necessarily mean that there is a problem? What if these cues could actually represent a healing or recovery state in the body?- like the perspective that German New Medicine (GNM) reveals to us. This is an entirely new conversation (perhaps for another day), but I find myself super curious about it, and I am learning how to implement it in my work with clients.
Needless to say, our bodies have a variety of different messages for us, but we may not always recognize them. Why? Because this can be a really tough thing to do! As I have already shared, we just didn’t learn to value our bodies as communicators in this way. Sometimes these signals can be crystal clear to us and have a very strong presence, like you couldn’t possibly ignore or deny them (like those gut feeling sensations). But other times we may have no idea what’s going on.
What’s Alignment got to do with it?
In a previous blog article- Moving Towards Aligned Motherhood and recently over on socials @leighberryco I reflect on the meaning of alignment. What it means to be in alignment is an experience and code that is totally unique to you. But here are some personal musings of my own when reflecting on the word and experience:
It is a state of Being. Being in oneness. Being in harmony with our inner knowing, our intuition and our BODIES. It is a conscious journey that is mindful of one’s own beliefs, values and actions, and how they line up with our truth and essence. It is the practice of going inwards, feeling, and insourcing our own wisdom. The entirety of this experience FEELS like- a returning to Self. A felt sense of ease, openness, lightness and trust. It is coming home to yourself. When you come home, you ground into yourself more deeply.
To tap into our unique sense of alignment we must boldly and courageously be with our body.
Feeling the edges of our comfort zones and turning towards the triggers, while we straight up inch towards holding space for ourselves, and our experiences (especially the difficult ones). Embracing the discomfort, and leading from a place of curiosity, wonder and love, rather than judgement and fear, allows us to welcome and bring the body into focus, and over time establish a felt sense of safety around feeling. It is the only way we are going to be able to listen, recognize and trust the cues or messages being spoken.
So I come back to courage because without it we would not be able to listen or allow the body to lead. We have learned from our life experiences and traumas (whether they are obvious or not) to roll out the red carpet for our mind and to lock our body away.
It is time to remove the shackles and come home Beautiful Soul.
The body is begging to be acknowledged and is ready to earn a valuable seat at the table to our alignment-seeking quest. Without it what would we make of our inner-guidance system? A system that is there to cue and steer us towards our highest good (even when it might not be an outcome we expected or hoped for).
The body is a powerful tool that we cannot ignore along the healing journey and it is a key ingredient in my work with clients. It wants you to heal. And it is always inviting you into alignment.
Are you ready to get curious, tune inward or decode the messages your body is sending?