Letting Your Body Speak

As a full-time hospice chaplain, I was expected to bear witness to a great deal of people's journeys--both the stories of their lives, and the experiences of their deaths. I learned a lot from this time, and from my patients. What I didn't learn--not until the end of my work when my health started to unravel--was that I needed to learn to listen to myself. And by "self" I don't mean my mind--I certainly had way too much practice at listening to (and believing!) my thoughts. What I needed to learn was the subtle, ever-changing art of listening to my body, and letting it take the lead.

What I've discovered as a meditation practitioner of over 15 years is that most of us fall into two camps when it comes to listening to our bodies. The first camp is the people who have never even tried to listen to our bodies, and perhaps even think it's new-agey. I'll call them the head dwellers. Most of us have at some point been head-dwellers--we live our lives from the neck-up and don't even realize that there's a whole inner world going on beneath our collar bones. We believe that our minds are who we are, and we often let our minds pull us around like dogs on a leash. And our minds are often not our friends.

For the head dwellers, simply starting to pay attention to sensations and feelings in our bellies, feet, and hearts is an incredible first step. Doing a body scan is a great tool for head dwellers--click the link to hear one that I recorded for a meditation challenge. It's about 30 minutes long, and you can do it laying down in your bed. At first, arriving in the body can be a challenge. There are lots of locked-up feelings and sensations in our bodies, and if we've spent our lives in our heads, we often have to feel those feelings and sensations as we wake up to our inner lives. This is good news though--and I promise you it doesn't last forever. Our emotional and physical pain start to clear the way for a deeper, more holistic experience of our bodies. And the only way to that wisdom is through the pain, not around it. For more on that, read my post on Healing the Pain of the Body.

The second camp, which I have fallen into a great deal during my time as a meditator, includes those of us who have listened to our bodies through some sort of technique/method so much that we've actually gotten rigid about it and lost our sense of spontaneity. I'll call this group the over-meditators. If this makes no sense to you, just skip this section. If something in you starts to recognize itself here, read on. Us over-meditators have used meditation practice to, often completely subconsciously, actually avoid dealing with fresh, new feelings. In the beginning, we were freshly in love, feeling the new openings and flows of our spiritual journeys. Then, as time lumbered on and our minds wanted more control, we got too fixated on our technique, our posture, our familiar body sensations, to the point where we started to ignore new information, new, fresh insights from our deep inner wisdom.

The work for an over-meditator, like me, has been to unravel my techniques and start to get more creative about how to be embodied. For example, writing has been a great practice for me to connect more with what's actually going on, so I will often journal before I do yoga or meditation, just to see what's up in my consciousness. Another helpful tool has been dancing--either in classes I take, or just to music in my own living room. It's liberating to just feel your body move through space, letting it lead in its own time.

The thing is, each of us will discover our own doorways into listening to our bodies, and they may change day to day. Just practicing asking yourself, while putting your hands on your heart or belly (or one hand on each), "What does my body need today?" can go miles. You may not get an answer at first--our minds like to judge these experiences, saying, "This is silly. My body can't talk. Why am I doing this?" But the mind is just scared because it won't be in control. You can gently soothe the mind's fears, saying, "It's ok, I know you are scared, but you will be happier, too, if we start listening to some deeper wisdom. Everything will be more integrated."

Then, slowly, the body will start to speak from deep within. Trust me--you'll know it's happening when it starts to surprise you, which it indelibly will.