Coming Home To Your Body
If a body works as a body, it is a good, perfect body.
Your body knows exactly what it needs to do to be healthy and to adapt to whichever lifestyle you choose to live because it is a genius and a beautiful system.
Any blocks to your health are not because you don’t know enough, aren’t trying hard enough, or aren’t disciplined enough, they are because of very valid spiritual, cultural and environmental factors that you are learning how to heal from more and more every single day.
These blocks that may be keeping you from coming home to your body are:
1. Chronic Stress
Illnesses and injuries are worsened by continuous, high stress levels. Stress floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline which breaks down healthy systems in the body. Stress is useful as a burst to run away from a tiger, to use quick reflexes to catch someone before they fall or to get a project done on time last minute, but constant stress can cause myriad issues for the body that inhibit almost all of the natural regulation and health systems within. Those suffering from PTSD know all too well its inverse effect on physical health. Thus, maintaining health is mostly about relaxation and healing somatic and neural blocks more than anything.
2. Analysis Paralysis
A paralyzing block is the fear that we need to learn more before we act; “if only I knew more or read more” can lead to a never ending cycle where we know intellectually all the information we think we need to be healthy, but we continue not to act on it out of a fear of the change that is involved in applying that knowledge into action. It is good to always be educating oneself, but eventually we need to begin trusting ourselves and finding ways to take small steps of imperfect, committed action to try on some of the knowledge we gather in practice and like a scientist, experiment until we find what works best for us in the different cycles and phases of our lives.
3. Distrusting & Being Out of Touch With Oneself
Looking to others to tell us what we need to be healthy indicates that we may not trust or be in touch with our innate wisdom. If we look externally for instructions, we may not be used to listening to our body and to our instincts to naturally take care of ourselves. We may have adopted the belief system at some point that we don’t know what to do for ourselves or we may have experienced traumas that have caused us to disconnect from our own bodily sensations and thus look outwardly rather than inwardly for health direction.
4. The Inertia of Childhood Somatic & Neural Development
As children we were “wired for” our specific living situations we received. We built solid understandings of and somatic coping mechanisms for the circumstances we grew up in. For example, if one grew up in a volatile home environment, that is the context in which they would have the most certainty, which can feel like safety because it is familiar, but is not actually safe.
In the same way, our subsequent adolescent and adult lifestyles and choices reflect this inner somatic and neural wiring; we tend to subconsciously or consciously replicate and seek out similar habits and environments because we know how to handle them better than we may know how to handle change or novelty, which to the body and mind can cause uncertainty, which can feel dangerous because it is unfamiliar, but can actually be safe.
5. Being In Control
The desire to be in control is directly a result of fear. When we do not trust life for one reason or another, we may feel afraid to leave things up to chance. Thus, we seek to control our experience by resisting it or self-sabotaging simply because we know the failure we cause purposefully is predictable, whereas the possible failure of taking a chance is out of one’s ability to have certainty.
6. The Perception of Others & Social/Societal Expectations
Many habits emerge from relationship. Whether that be a relationship with one’s family members, peers, or greater society, we often adapt our identities and outward-facing self to what would bring the most acceptance or safety. To fit in to a group that may do destructive things to their health, one would do it, too, and may be less willing to change, because that would mean not being a part of the group anymore.
There are also extremely brutal body-image issues, especially in a country like the United States, where beauty standards for men and women within the gender binary are cruelly specific and exclusionary of what a healthy body looks like for the majority of human beings. Many may adopt behaviors that aren’t necessarily healthy for them simply to reach towards their culture’s arbitrary, current “ideal.”
In response to stifling our individual authenticity in favor of what others expect from us, we may suddenly feel an urge to rebel. When we restrict our behaviors and don’t listen to what we need because we think we “should” do this or that, we end up burning out and swinging like a pendulum to one extreme back to the other, like holding a wound-up toy car back and then finally letting it go.
7. Socio-Economic Inequality, Discrimination & Disability
Everything I write is coming from a place of incredible privilege so I want to make sure to recognize that there are systems of oppression in place that prevent people from living in environments conducive to physical health. Living near pollution, with low access to fresh, affordable, organic food or drinkable water, with low accessibility and accommodations for disability and physical and mental health struggles, little green spaces or opportunities for outdoor activity, and having to work ungodly amounts of hours to be able to get by when minimum wages are so low, sometimes with little opportunity for higher earnings or high quality education, healthcare, generational wealth disparities, generational trauma, and lowered capacity to participate in politics to improve the issues they face, unjust incarceration, violence, prejudice, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination, and so forth, there could be many, many obstacles in one’s way to be able to experience lower stress and greater health. If anyone is struggling with their health and are experiencing any or all of these issues, it is NOT their fault, our government and society is failing them. My hope is that people with the blessing of privilege will use it to open up doors of opportunity and greater well being for those who are struggling the most under our current oppressive systems. No matter how one shows up under these circumstances, it is perfect.
Moving Forward
A realization I had in my process of improving my physical health is that “growing up” isn’t something that happens at a certain age, it happens whenever we decide to take full responsibility for our experience of life and who we choose to be in this world.
I decided that I would love and nurture myself, to respect the ebb and flow of my needs, desires and energies regardless of what is culturally seen as “healthy” or “unhealthy” and trust my body, releasing the stress and pressure of having to do things perfectly or the right way.
I’ve done a considerable amount of authentic movement and awareness practices from meditation, breath work, tantra, ecstatic dance, yoga, and qi gong as well as self-hypnosis, therapy, and plant medicine to reintroduce myself to my body, mind and emotions, to find my center, inner oasis, and embodied presence from which I can communicate instantaneously with my body from a place of wholeness, compassion, and acceptance. I move, eat, sleep, hydrate, and relax intuitively and trust that my body knows what it needs and that I am capable of honoring and catering to that, even when those actions are not “perfect.”
The healthiest thing you can do is to accept yourself exactly as you are, and to come home to yourself in every moment regardless of what you are or aren’t doing. The concept of unshaming is particularly powerful here: approach your habits from the perspective that they have within them beautiful messages that are waiting to unfold if we can offer ourselves non-judgmental and compassionate witnessing.
Awareness and intention are the keys to transforming our lives, and those things can only become accessible when we are able to truly witness with compassion and belief in our own power.
Let us believe in our abilities to shift our somatic and neural patterns so that we can grow from our initial wiring and take charge in co-creating the reality we choose, rather than always being at the mercy of the reality we were given as children or the reality we currently experience that we find is no longer serving us.
Let us find ways to love and take care of the beautiful bodies that support us each and every day.
Let us continue learn how to better listen to our bodies and honor what they say to us.
Let us come home to ourselves.
