#16: Reclaiming the Wisdom of the Body
There can’t be real transformation without involving the body in the process. Your body is integral to how you receive spiritual wisdom, and navigate the energetics of your soul’s callings. It’s truly both a vessel and a messenger.
And yet, we all have such complex relationships with our bodies. In today’s episode, I’m talking about how you can deepen in relationship with your body, listen and act on the wisdom that it has to share with you, and reclaim it by recognizing the ways that you've distanced and isolated yourself from it.
How to trust your body and its wisdom
Everything that you have ever experienced is in your body. It remembers it all.
Your body carries the energetic blueprint of all that you’ve seen and felt – consciously and unconsciously, in this life or in past lives. It’s truly the map of you.
There’s so much to be accessed through our bodies, yet that potential if often left neglected. We tend to focus on what can be perceived through the conscious mind, without realizing the wealth of wisdom that’s within our fingertips by accessing the unconscious realm through our bodies.
The answers you seek are truly and literally within you through your body. But you need to release your expectations and attachments to outcomes, and allow yourself to be curious about your body and its emotions and sensations. And ultimately, that comes down to trust – trust that its safe to feel and listen in to what your body is trying to say.
The relationship between safety, trust and the body
Safety is a key component to trust, but most women struggle to feel safe in their bodies in our culture.
What I’ve found in my work is that safety and trust come through being in an intentional relationship with our bodies. Like with everything else, relationships have to be nurtured over time. But as soon as you start asking your body and inviting it to be in relationship with you, you’ll be surprised by how eager and willing it is to be open up to you.
You can start today by paying attention to when you’re distancing yourself from your body, from its sensations. When that happens, bring yourself back into grounding. Find movement, touch, and awareness of your experiences.
Of course, there are so many ways women are taught to fear their bodies and not even like them. I’ve never met a women who doesn’t have some level of body image struggles. A lot of the work of embodiment has to do with reclaiming your relationship with your body and seeing those shadows of societal conditioning for what they are – social and cultural narratives that have had a deep impact on you and how you relate to your body.
That’s the first step in shifting towards a narrative that feels true to and honoring of who you are and how you’re claiming yourself in the world. It requires transition from talking about changing and taming the body, to talking about honoring, accepting, and nurturing it. That is power in your hands.
Reclaiming your relationship with your body
Another piece that factors in how we relate to our bodies is today’s emphasis on doing and constantly being in rush mode.
This mentality of constant achievement and tangible results encourages us to measure success through external output at the expense of the quality of our relationship with ourselves. This leads us to consciously ignoring the messages our bodies are sending us, especially around rest, nourishment, and introspection.
When you get in the habit of ignoring your body’s messages, you’re essentially telling it that you’re not interested in what it has to add. This creates a divide in our relationships with our bodies.
Of course, we all have responsibilities we can’t always shift around in order to honor our bodies’ requests. But our bodies don’t need us to drop everything to be in relationship with it. It just wishes for some form of acknowledgment – maybe in the form of small breaks, short walks, a weekly massage, or just a moment of stillness, of being in the now.
INTEGRATING your spiritual practice through the body
The body experiences things through two layers:
A layer of inherited, divine, wild, soul knowing, and a layer of automatic, human conditioning to which your body is always reacting to.
Because of that, the body has the key to your transformation. It can help you recognize your layer of automatic conditioning and dive past it to find the deeper truths about yourself. If we don’t acknowledge our connection to our body, we’re neglecting this wealth of wisdom from our souls and the ways we react to the world.
When we’re only experiencing things through our minds, we’re not fully bringing a spiritual practice into our lives. The body, through its two layers of experience, allows us to integrate what we practice and consciously know into our day-to-day and how we’re actually being outside our daily spiritual practices.
If you, for example, meditate but don’t take action to integrate that into your life, you’re living in separation, unable to feel whole. The body is the bridge, it connects your spiritual and your human. It allows us to recognize unconscious conditioning and integrate universal, soul knowledge into our manifested existence. That’s the key to expansive, limitless transformation.
Wherever you are in your relationship with your body, continue to nurture it, to reclaim it. Validate what it’s trying to tell you and integrate it through action steps – even when it feels like it’s not much, even when it feels inconvenient, even if it clashes with what your ego is desiring in that moment.
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