Listening to your body

Embodiment –

Relearning how to listen to your body

We’re all familiar with phrases like

• Try to follow your gut instinct.
• Seeing that was really heart wrenching.
• I felt sick to my back teeth.

These phrases evolved because we do sense feelings in specific parts of our bodies.

When we’re annoyed we might feel sick to our back teeth. Our physical response can include clenching our jaw and tightening our throat which can make us feel a bit sick.

Our body will respond in some way when emotions arise, but we may have tuned out from how our body reacts.  We may have learnt to disconnect from these sensations and what the body is trying to tell us.

Most children are familiar with how emotions are expressed through the body, but as we grow up, we’re often taught to dampen these expressions and we begin to disconnect with the felt sense of our emotions.

We’re encouraged to explore the world from our thoughts rather than our feelings.
As Francis Briers says our body is a taxi for our brain.

We may be unconsciously suppressing physical instincts which takes a lot of energy, leaving us feeling emotionally drained and exhausted.

There are many books exploring this idea:- how the body keeps the score (Bessel van der Kolk), the body says no (Gabor Mate), In an unspoken voice (Peter Levine).  They all discuss the experience of how the tension builds up to a point where it creates physical problems.

There are many reasons why we’ve stopped listening to our body, it can be a way to protect ourselves from painful experiences. But by tuning out from our body’s signals, we can lose contact with feeling both pleasure and pain.  We also lose touch with our innate wisdom.

Luckily there are lots of ways to help us re-connect with ourselves and start to explore our deeper wisdom.

When we’re not aware of what we do in our body, we don’t have a choice of how to do things differently.

If we start to become more aware of our natural physical and emotional responses, we can gradually learn to experience them. Turning the level of experience dial-up or down according to the amount we feel we can handle at the time. Rather than blocking the whole experience, storing it in our body and adding more physical tension for our body to hold on to.

To learn more about how to rebuild connections read the next blog article.