#8: What your body has been trying to tell you (and why you haven't been able to hear it)
Yesterday, we talked about solving a body problem with mind solutions. Today, I want to explore what your body has actually been saying while you've been too busy thinking to hear it.
Because your body speaks. Constantly. But you've been trained to tune it out, talk over it, and translate everything it says into language your mind can understand and control.
And in that translation, you lose the truth.
The messages you're missing
Your body doesn't speak in words. It communicates through sensations, impulses, tightness, ease, the pull toward something or the recoil away from it. The flutter in your chest when you meet someone new. The clench of your stomach when you're about to say yes to the wrong thing. The way your shoulders rise when you walk into certain rooms.
These aren't random physical reactions. Your body reads the environment, senses safety or danger, alignment or misalignment, truth or striving. Then it tells you what it finds.
But somewhere along the way, you learned to ignore these messages. You learned that your gut feeling wasn't as valid as logical reasoning. Physical discomfort was something to push through rather than pay attention to. If your body said one thing and your mind said another, you should always trust your mind.
So you stopped listening. Or rather, you started listening only to the loudest signals, the ones your body had to scream before you'd finally pay attention. The migraine that forces you to stop. The panic attack that makes ignoring impossible. The back pain that puts you in bed for days.
Your body has been whispering all along. You just weren't taught how to hear whispers.
Why the messages get lost
Think about how you were raised. When you were upset as a child, what did the adults around you say? "You're fine." "Stop crying." "There's nothing to be scared of." "Big girls don't act like this."
They meant well. They were trying to comfort you, to help you be strong. But what you actually learned was that your internal experience was wrong. What you felt in your body wasn't trustworthy. The adults, who could see the situation logically, knew better than your fear or your sadness or your overwhelm.
So you learned to override. To rationalize. To talk yourself out of what you were feeling.
And then you grew up and kept doing the same thing. Your stomach twists into a knot when your boss asks you to take on another project, and you tell yourself you're being dramatic. Your jaw tightens when your partner says dismissive words, and you tell yourself you're too sensitive. Your whole body contracts when you think about an upcoming event, and you tell yourself you're just anxious for no reason.
You've been taught to see your body's signals as problems or obstacles. You haven't learned to receive them as information.
What your body actually knows
Your body has been tracking patterns since you were born. It remembers every time someone raised their voice. Every time you were dismissed or ignored. Every time you had to shrink to keep the peace. Every time you said yes when you meant no.
All of that lives in your tissues. In your nervous system. In the way you hold your shoulders, clench your jaw, shallow your breath.
Your body uses all of that data to keep you safe. When you walk into a room and immediately feel uncomfortable, you're not experiencing irrational anxiety. Your body recognizes familiar energy, dynamics, subtle cues that your conscious mind hasn't even registered yet.
When your stomach drops before you send that email or make that phone call, you're not feeling nervousness you need to power through. Your body is saying "wait, let's look at this more closely."
When you feel drawn to someone or repelled by someone within moments of meeting them, you're not making superficial judgments. Your body reads microexpressions, tone, body language, energy, and gives you data about safety and alignment.
Your body is sophisticated. It processes information at a level your conscious mind can't access. And it tries to share that information with you through the only language it has: sensation.
The cost of not listening
When you consistently override your body's signals, here's what unfolds.
First, your body has to speak louder to get your attention. The gentle tug turns into tension. The tension turns into pain. The pain turns into injury or illness. Your body escalates because it has to.
Second, you lose access to your intuition. Gut knowing, that clear sense of yes or no, the ability to read situations and people accurately, all of that comes from your body. When you stop listening to the subtle signals, you lose the very guidance system designed to keep you safe and aligned.
Third, you disconnect from your own experience. You're no longer sure what you actually want or feel or need because you've spent so long translating everything through your mind's filter. You start living according to what you think you should want instead of listening to what your body tells you it needs.
And fourth, your nervous system stays dysregulated. When you ignore the signals that you're not safe, not aligned, not okay, your body never gets the message that you're listening. So it stays on high alert, waiting for you to pay attention, keeping your system in perpetual activation.
Learning to hear again
The good news? Your body never stops speaking. The messages are still there. You just need to learn how to listen.
This starts with slowing down enough to notice. Your body can't get a word in when you're rushing from one thing to the next, when your mind is constantly planning and analyzing and problem-solving. You need space. Stillness. Quiet.
It continues with curiosity instead of judgment. When you notice tension in your shoulders, instead of immediately trying to release it or figure out why, can you just be curious? Notice the quality of the tension. Notice exactly where it sits. Notice if it's tight, heavy, sharp, dull.
The more you practice simply noticing without trying to change or understand, the more your body begins to trust you. It realizes you're finally listening. And when it trusts you're listening, it can speak more softly. It doesn't have to scream anymore.
The practice of listening
Your body is always communicating. Right now, as you're reading this, it's giving you information. Are you comfortable? Is there tension anywhere? How is your breathing? Are you hungry, thirsty, tired? Where are you holding stress?
Most of us read something like that and either don't check at all, or we check so quickly and superficially that we miss the actual information. We think "yeah, I'm fine" and move on.
But what if you actually paused? What if you took a full minute to genuinely scan your body and receive what it's telling you?
Start there. Not with big revelations or profound insights. Just with the simple act of checking in and actually registering what's there.
Because once you start hearing the small messages, you won't miss the big ones. Once you rebuild trust with your body, it won't have to shout to be heard. And once you know how to listen, you'll have access to the deepest wisdom you possess.
In the next post, we'll explore where you're actually carrying all of this in your body, and what these holding patterns are costing you.
Your practice
Three times a day, set a small reminder on your phone. When it goes off, stop whatever you're doing and take 60 seconds to check in with your body.
Notice where you're holding tension right now. Notice how your breathing feels - shallow, deep, held, easy? Notice the temperature of your body. Notice if you're hungry or thirsty. Notice what your energy feels like - wired, tired, calm, agitated?
Don't try to change anything. Don't judge what you find. Just notice and register. You're rebuilding the habit of listening.
At the end of each day, write down one thing your body told you that you wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't checked in.
This simple practice of noticing rebuilds the connection between your awareness and your body's signals. You're teaching yourself to hear whispers again.
