Becoming a Team with Your Body

Think about the last time you felt connected to your body-I’m not just talking about when you knew you were in pain or had some symptom, but really understood and trusted what your body was trying to tell you. Now think about a time when you thought you understood, but maybe misinterpreted a signal (ie-you thought you were hungry but were nauseous, you thought you were tired but went to lay down and couldn’t fall asleep). If either of those things resonated with you, this blog post might be for you.

As someone who lives under capitalism and identifies as someone in the LGBTQIA+, chronic illness, and neurodivergent communities, I have many reasons to want to disconnect from my body. From the fact that we are told we are what we do for work/productivity, to the lack of felt safety from not following gender and sexuality norms, to the pain and symptoms my body feels, and finally the mismatch of sensory input, I have a lot of reasons to want to disassociate from what I am experiencing on a day to day basis. And in some ways, this serves me-our bodies are doing their best to adapt in ways that allow us to survive. My body doesn’t want me to experience these discomforts, so it sends signals that it might be better for me to live in my mind. However, what I have found over time is that this eventually leads to there being a distrust and resentment from my mind to my body (and this isn’t even taking into consideration the soul element). What I mean here is that I felt like I couldn’t understand the cues my body was giving me anymore, which fed into the larger issue of feeling like my body and I (my thinking brain) were actively working against each other. Somehow, I seemed to be trying so hard to get well, but my body was actively seeming to try and get more sick.

Now, I recognize this is so much simpler than it is, AND I am not saying symptoms are in our head or that we are not sick–so please bare with me as I explain further…

I think a lot about the autonomic nervous system here-the one that, when functioning properly, helps us breath, digest, rest, keeps our heart pumping, etcetera; or when we are in danger, sends us to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (if that is a new one for you, no worries-the ‘what’ is not as important here, but let me know if you want a separate post about that in the comments). If you think about humans in the hunter-gatherer phase, there was much less sensory information coming to us at once; they were usually doing one activity at a time, going by the light of the sun/moon, and threats were legitimately about their body’s safety. Now, we have significant sensory overload in many facets: lights at all hours of day and night, manmade and natural sounds, sensations not just from the air but AC or heating, various smells with different chemicals…I could go on. One that I would really like to focus on that has changed even in the last 20 years is notifications from various devices-even when phones first came out in the home it was the expectation that someone would reach you when you were home and free or would have to try again-now with cell phones it feels there is this expectation to be free to everyone at all times, and not just via text, but also various social media apps, email, etcetera (which may also depend on your age). And this extends not just to friends and family, but the work environment as well. So thinking about what our body now perceives as threat, we include that mental or emotional stress of being on and available all the time, while also having to adjust to the increase in sensory experiences on the regular. 

You can maybe begin to imagine now how our bodies are more likely to live in one of those stress states of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. With that said, getting back to homeostasis (or our bodies more balanced and regular way of functioning) becomes increasingly challenging when the threat may not leave the environment entirely to give our bodies the time to recuperate. Now, let’s add any extra challenge to your body’s load-a chronic illness or disability, being in a minority group, neurodivergence, etcetera…now we really have a recipe for difficulty. With a lower threshold for what the body sees as threatening, we now are going to increasingly be in these stress states. And therefore, I would argue, we might be tempted to live in our brain instead of our body to try and talk or intellectualize our way out of these states. The problem is that the body enters these states automatically-hence why it is called the autonomic nervous system; so our thoughts are not always able to reset our body the way we’d like.

So, what do we do about this? Get back into our bodies! Which yes, again, sounds way easier than it is, but recognizing that tapping into those sensations and our bodies' innate knowing can shift the way the body reacts is the first step. Our brain is neuroplastic-meaning it is capable of making new connections and patterns of encouraging the body to react. With each “success”, our body strengthens those pathways that encourage that particular behavior to occur again-and yes, our autonomic nervous system is susceptible to that neuroplasticity as well!

This is what I hope to teach in my coaching-when we connect with our body, we may not “fix” everything, but the hope is we create a more grounded, calm, and safe system that can be a foundation for healing-basically meaning that your body may be more able to tolerate the changes you are making, medications you are put on, etcetera. I can say from my own experience that this really changed my life. At first, the thought of connecting to my body and really feeling the things I was experiencing felt horrifying; “what do you mean I need to sit in the nausea and really see where it is coming from or do a body scan just to recognize that my whole body hurts?! What kind of cruel torture is that!!” However, it turned out that that was the first step to recognizing ‘oh actually I am hungry’, or ‘this is acid reflux not nausea so that medicine won’t work’, or even ‘wow, it is my foot that hurts the worst and here is something I could try to take that inflammation down a bit’. 

Though this may not be a universal experience, I think the practice of checking in with yourself, even if just to reconnect with your intuition, is a lost art form that helps us decide what is really for us and what isn’t. Everyone is different and so many factors play into our health and wellness from culture, body type, moral beliefs, diagnoses, predispositions, living environment, etcetera; so being able to tap into what is important and works for you is going to be important for you getting the wellness experience you are looking for out of life-no one can claim to be an expert on all things you, except yourself!