Your Body Is Not The Enemy
Inside Nat's Notebook - Real Reflections for Real Change
Have you ever noticed how quickly the relationship with your body can change when it stops doing exactly what you expect of it?
Maybe you wake up tired after what you anticipated had been a decent night's sleep. Your shoulders are somewhere up around your ears by lunchtime. Your favourite jeans suddenly have opinions about your waistline that you did not ask for. Or you get halfway up the stairs and find yourself wondering when, exactly, stairs became quite so ambitious.
It doesn't take long before the commentary begins. Why am I so tired? Why does everything ache? Why can't I sleep? Why haven't I got the energy I used to have? Why won't my body just cooperate?
When you're used to being capable, getting things done and relying on your body to carry you through whatever life throws at you, changes in how it feels can be incredibly frustrating. Somewhere along the way, the body itself can start to feel like another problem you need to solve.
But what if your body isn't the problem?
Over the last couple of weeks here, we've been exploring the relationship you have with life and with your thoughts. There's another relationship sitting underneath both of those conversations that doesn't get talked about nearly enough: the relationship you have with your body.
You've spent your entire life living in your body, yet how often do you actually pay attention to it unless something hurts, feels uncomfortable or refuses to do what you want?
You notice the headache when it interrupts the meeting. You notice tiredness when there are still six things left on the to-do list. You notice tension when your neck and shoulders start complaining. You notice wakefulness because it's 3.03am and you'd very much like to be asleep, right?
In other words, you often notice your body most when it inconveniences you. That's an interesting relationship when you think about it.
All day long, your body is responding and adjusting to what's happening within you and around you. Your heart rate changes. Your breathing changes. Muscles contract and release. Hormones fluctuate. Digestion shifts. Your energy rises and falls. Most of this happens without you giving it a second thought. You don't have to remember to make your heart beat while you're answering emails or instruct yourself to breathe while you're making dinner. Your body is just getting on with the extraordinarily complicated business of keeping you alive while you're wandering around the house looking for the magic place that you left your glasses.
And yet, when something feels uncomfortable, your first response can so easily be frustration.
Now, this, of course, makes complete sense. Nobody enjoys being exhausted, uncomfortable or unable to do something they want to do. There are also plenty of physical symptoms that need proper investigation and medical care. Listening to your body doesn't mean assuming every sensation has some profound hidden meaning. It means recognising that fighting your body while you're already struggling can add another layer to what you're experiencing.
Think about what happens when tiredness arrives on a day when you've got far too much to do. There is the tiredness itself, and then there is everything you think about being tired. You become irritated with yourself, worry that you won't get everything finished or push harder because stopping feels impossible.
Now you're not simply tired. You're in conflict with being tired.
The same thing can happen with tension, pain, sleeplessness, changes in energy and all the ordinary fluctuations that come with having a human body. The sensation arrives and, almost immediately, you begin having a relationship with it.
That's the bit I find fascinating.
Because your body isn't sitting there plotting ways to ruin your Tuesday. It isn't being lazy when your energy dips or deliberately difficult when sleep doesn't arrive on command. Your body is responding to an enormous number of things: stress, sleep, movement, hormones, illness, injury, environment, age, nourishment, emotion and the demands you've been carrying.
Yet when you're used to achieving, pushing and getting things done, it's very easy to build a relationship with your body based largely on performance. You celebrate it when it keeps up, criticise it when it slows down and pay remarkably little attention to it while it's quietly getting on with everything you expect from it.
You can become so accustomed to overriding yourself that you barely notice you're doing it. Hunger can wait until this is finished. The toilet can wait until the meeting ends. Tiredness gets another coffee. Tight shoulders are ignored because there's work to do. You become extremely skilled at hearing your body and immediately answering, “Not right now.”
Do that often enough and disconnection can begin to feel completely normal. This is one of the reasons I invite you in my sessions to notice your body before trying to change anything. Not because every sensation needs analysing or fixing, but because there is something surprisingly powerful about becoming curious about what is already happening.
Awareness gives you information. It gives you the opportunity to notice yourself before you're completely depleted, to recognise tension you hadn't realised you were carrying and to become familiar with what different states actually feel like from the inside. In essence, you begin “learning yourself” rather than simply “managing yourself.”
And I think that's an important distinction, especially when you've spent years being rewarded for pushing through.
You're probably very familiar with the language of pushing your body. Push through the tiredness. Push yourself at the gym. Push past your limits. Keep going. Get it done. What you hear far less about is becoming so familiar with yourself that you can recognise when pushing is useful and when you're simply overriding what your body has been telling you for weeks.
This isn't about becoming frightened of every sensation or spending the day monitoring yourself. It's much simpler than that. It's about changing the relationship you have with the body you're living in and recognising that it isn't simply an inconvenient vehicle carrying your thinking mind around. This is where you experience being alive.
Here's something I think is worth rebelling against: the idea that your body is here to perform for you.
That its value is measured by how much energy it gives you, how much work it gets through, what size it is, how well it sleeps, how little it hurts or how conveniently it allows you to get on with the life you've planned.
So this week, notice the relationship you're having with your body in ordinary moments, especially the ones where it isn't behaving exactly as you'd like.
When your shoulders tighten halfway through the day, when your energy changes, when your body asks you to slow down or when you're lying in bed wishing sleep would hurry up and arrive, notice what happens next.
How do you speak to yourself? Do you immediately become frustrated, or can you become interested in what you're experiencing?
You don't have to turn every sensation into a project. Just notice the conversation you're having with yourself. Because the more familiar you become with the body you're living in, the easier it becomes to recognise what you need, when you need it, and meet yourself with understanding rather than opposition.
Your body was never the enemy. Maybe it's time to stop fighting it long enough to get to know the body that's been carrying you through this extraordinary business of being human.
LoveLove
Nat x
Exhausted but still brilliant? You bet you are.
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