Can You Hear Your Body Talking to You?
Your body is in a constant conversation with you in both a simple and sophisticated system of non-verbal communication. How your body asks you for help with this intuitive system is simple. With physical feelings in your body like pain, thirst, muscle tension, rashes, for example, your body lets you know how things are going.
These communications from your body are so natural for us that sometimes we don’t realize we are responding to a request.
Our body cruises right along, asking and receiving happily, unaware of this relationship going any other way.
When we STOP listening or responding to our body asking for help, we can see a connection and more importantly, a SEPARATION of the Body and Mind.
This article is the second in a series called “Understanding and Healing Emotional Pain In The Body”.
The Previous (first) Article: What is Emotional Pain
The Next Article: Understanding Deep Pain Patterns &; How To Fix Them (coming soon)
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or counselor in any form. The information in this article, on this website and in emails are my opinions from my own experiences and are not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment in any way.
How Does Your Body Communicate?
Our bodies put up with so much and sometimes for very little appreciation for its efforts from the mind. But, the body will ask the conscious mind for help in its own way, and, as adults, sometimes this “communication” needs interpretation.
Your body asks for help with little aches and pains, quietly, and barely makes a ripple in your life. After being ignored over and over, those quiet, small aches and pains become louder and more intense screaming for your attention.
Some people are great at checking in with their body. They respond with actions like moving when they get stiff, or NOT eating foods that will upset their systems, or creating iron clad boundaries around vampire sucking people. And some people are GAWD awful at understanding what that even means. Most of us are right in the middle: we know we have intuition yet we like unhealthy things, we’re stubborn, and ignoring our body becomes normal.
But the body continues to ask for help when it needs attention.
I call these communications “expressions for help” from your body to your conscious mind. The body sends these communications to signal that something is wrong and a change or tweak needs to happen.
Many of these are easy to “hear” and respond to, like feeling hungry, sleepy, angry, and sad. Many times we react appropriately right on time, which would be about 1 second to 1 hour after it happens.
Here are just a few examples of how “expressions for help” might look:
- stomach pain
skin rashes
crying
joint & muscles aches
headaches
blurred eyesight
Tinitus
There are many ways that your body talks to you or expresses itself, and you are not alone in misunderstanding these non-verbal hints about a deeper issue. But, with some practice, you can learn
your body’s language and work together with it instead of against yourself.
Listening To Your Body’s Language
“Listening to our own gut” has been a saying around for centuries. Do you listen to your gut? It tells you “no, don’t eat that”, yet you eat it anyway? Or about a person you are dating, when you first met, and your gut was not calm and happy? Did you listen then?
Sometimes we are better at noticing the “Red Flags” showing up around our **friends and families bad decisions** than our own, but at lease you are listening.
At one point in your life, when you felt pain, you stopped doing what was causing the pain. This communication of pain from your body was successful, because the behavior was stopped.
For some reason, we stop “listening” or paying attention to what our body has to tell us, and layers of issues start to form. We need to learn to listen and understand this language again!
Just like learning a second language in your home as a child, where that language becomes second nature, easy, normal, so is the language from your body. If you aren’t so great at understanding it now, you were at one point, and you’ll be able to pick it up quickly if you try.
Related: Release Stress & Emotions From Your Body: 19 Effective Ideas
How Do You “Listen” To Your Body Anyway? What Does That Mean?
Communication happens in many forms, and your body has a language to communicate with you, kind of like having a flashing “Check Engine” light in a car.
It doesn’t actually make noise, per se, or flash bright red, but it is non-verbal communication none the less to bring your attention to an issue. Some issues are more serious than others, and require immediate attention, like a cut or a bone break.
These are easy to find, easy to diagnose, and easy to treat.
Other “flashing red warning signs” from your body to your conscious mind are not as obvious and can be easy to push aside for later attention, similar to getting your oil changed in a car, or replacing the air
filters in your engine. You can ignore them for quite a long time without much affect or consequence.
But, after several attempts to get your attention, and the oil isn’t dealt with, MAYOR UNIVERSAL problems can arise. The same thing can happen in our body.
React To Your Body’s Communication BEFORE Pain Starts
When you are dehydrated, for example, your body FIRST feels dry lips & then a headache WAY before you “FEEL THIRSTY”. So, consider taking a drink when you feel that your lips are dry, instead of
after the headache has gone to a level that requires medication.If you have been at your desk for hours and your back and neck hurt, please get up and stretch. And, if you don’t stand up, at least straighten
up and stretch in your chair! This is another very common issue of your body needing some attention, but the conscious mind is too busy to give the body problem any attention.After holding on tight to the steering wheel or a heavy luggage handle, and your hands can barely let go. In response, stretch
them out.The body’s communications are easy to feel immediately, but we don’t always react in a timely or healthy fashion.
The Body Is Patient
The cool thing about the body, is it’s quite calm, and patient and doesn’t freak out if you don’t drink the glass of water or don’t let go of the luggage or don’t sit up straight in your chair.
It doesn’t (always) go into spasms if you ignore the neck pain or headache it’s been trying to flag you down with. Instead, there are several tries, like hundreds.
Your body will endure so much for you.
It will hide scary things, sad things, terrible things. All in the name of its love and service for you. Your temple is truly amazing.
And, if you are waking up to this fact years, or decades later, I invite you to make a cup of tea and give a deep thank you to your body from your conscious mind.
The Body Is Subtle At First
Most of the time, your body’s “pain hints” for help are so subtle, hoping it doesn’t have to rock the boat to get your attention. And, when you stretch, take a big drink of water or get some good sleep the pain in your body will go away.
The body feels satisfied, feels heard and acknowledged. Everyone is happy, and the “pain hints” go away as well… for a little while.
This is the perfect cycle: A hint comes from your body; you respond with the appropriate action “requested”, and the pain goes away. Done. No layers, no deeper meaning.
When You Ignore Your Body’s Maintenance Warnings
What happens when you feel thirsty, and you ignore the dry lips, then ignore the feeling of thirst, then the headaches and so on?
Instead, you take pain medication for the headache, put lip balm on your lips and drink a soda, beer or coffee for the thirst.
Sound familiar??
Well, what happens when you don’t change your oil in your car?
You can drive for quite a few miles, and only cause bits of damage before the engine starts to smoke and wear out.
Our body is WAY more resilient than a car engine, and unfortunately (or fortunately), some people can go YEARS without proper body attention and maintenance.
Can you imagine what the inside of a car would do without oil or lubrication of any kind? The gears would grind together and the easy FLOW of the well oiled machine is harder and harder to move. AND, each movement would be damaging to the engine!
Now, can you imagine your body doing the same thing? Without the lubrication it needs, your body still moves, but it’s not smooth, gentle gliding. Instead, your body operates in a rough & damaging manner. How many years can a body handle this without breaking down from the inside out?
Related: Self-Care Basics: A Beginner’s Guide
The Body Forms Layers Of Pain From Ignored Communications
When you keep ignoring your body’s “flashing red warning lights” with subtle pains, then pains will get a bit worse, and worse. Sometimes they will move or cause issues that don’t seem like they go together.
This is the next level of ignored pain: Layering.
Let’s say you’ve been sitting during this pandemic for 6 months, each day, without much movement, without doing some of the normal walking you were before COVID19. BEFORE, you would at least walk from your car to the store, into the office, into the bank, etc.
Even those simple movements are missing, which makes a HUGE DIFFERENCE to your body!!
Now, you are busy on ZOOM, and don’t really notice your body “raising a hand” to get your attention. How does it try to get your attention? With the slight sciatic pain you feel in your gluts, or the constant neck tension and stiffness.
This is all still the first layer.
The Body’s Deeper Layers
When you keep ignoring your pain, deeper layers of pain patterns start to form.
Here’s an example:
You get up from your Zoom call, and your left hip hurts. To avoid the pain in your hip, you start limping without even realizing it, plus, your head is tilted to avoid the pain in your neck and shoulder, and you twist awkwardly to avoid that pain as well.
A few days later your left ankle and knee “don’t feel the same” and your upper back starts to hurt between your shoulder blades. Your shoulder won’t raise above your head when you wash your hair in the shower, and when you bend over, your butt hurts, so you twist another direction to tie your shoes. Etc. Etc.
Can you see how your neck & glut pain can lead to other actions and pains?
The second and deeper layers of pain patterns start to form in reaction to your conscious mind ignoring your body’s communications.
These layers can get quite complicated, take awareness to observe, focused intention to untangle and take longer to let go.
It IS VERY POSSIBLE to heal from these deeper layers.
When in doubt, if more complicated layers arise, breathing is always a good starting place.
I love how Dr. Lad explains breathing in this video: Dr. Lad’s pranayama breathing
He has many videos that are very helpful! START HERE to learn how to breathe and why. Around the 4 min part shows how to breathe.
Conclusion
Our body communicates with us and tries to get our attention when we need some changes in order to stay healthy.
When we are young, we understand and listen to this UNIQUE BODY LANGUAGE, and “answer” our bodies “requests” very naturally without even knowing there is a communication we are responding to.
As we get older, we start to ignore these hints from our body, which is hard to realize, sometimes for years. If we ignore our “expressions for help” for too long, more serious problems start to fester and fester until a HUGE problem in our body shows up.
These ignored problems start out on the surface but develop deeper layers of issues. Often, we need to heal them from he inside out.
You can START NOW to heal your body and catch up to love, honor & detox your body today! If you’ve read this far, know that there is SO much support and options for you to heal. There is hope. You are not alone.
