Don’t shoot the messenger

Your relationship with your body – your most intimate sensate experience with yourself – is formed way before you can speak or think.

You swim in a deep ocean of interoceptive richness – discovering yourself, your inner world and the world around you through the messages that sensations send to you – all day and all night long.

Those sensations tell you when you need to be held, fed, comforted, and played with. Over time, you learn their language well!

As you grow up they convey more and more complex needs to you – telling you when you need encouragement, or personal space, when your boundaries have been crossed, or when you are ready to start a new relationship!

As you are starting to gather by now, your sensations tell you not only about body states (for example, being cold or thirsty), they also tell you about emotional states (being lonely, or upset…). All of this is happening below your conscious awareness or control – sensations bloom into messages, like seeds bloom to flowers in your garden – that’s just the organic way.

But what happens when you associate your body – the source of those sensations – with the quality of those sensations? What happens when you can’t separate what feels uncomfortable or painful from the canvas on which it appears?

For example, as a child, I had a very sensitive gut. My intestines hurt and were swollen on a daily basis. It was not uncommon to lie down after a meal, because I couldn’t walk. I also went to the nurse’s office daily, complaining of migraines. I also cried a lot and was scared a lot. I couldn’t see a real threat, so I made myself believe that there was nothing to be afraid of.

My body felt like something was always wrong. It took me years to discover that many of the sensations in my body were not about my body states, but about emotional states – coincidentally, they also lived in my body – just like thirst, or sleepiness.

Today I know that my system was in a constant fight and flight response, but there was no way to know that back then. There was also no way to know that there were real, legitimate reasons to feel unsafe.

Needless to say I spent years trying to manage how I experienced my body. Once I entered my teenage years, I took charge and no longer went to the nurse’s office.

I felt bad on a daily basis and found a way to temporarily fix myself and rid myself of the bad feeling through countless diets, cleanses, workout routines and programs.

Yet the more I pushed and pushed to feel better, the more feeling good became an elusive mirage.

Like people who start to see an oasis in the desert, parched from days of walking without water, I saw the next gym, the next supplement, the next miracle food (hello, flax seeds and spirulina!) – as the way back to feeling good.

I had confused the messages my body was sending with the messenger! (You know that don’t shoot the messenger saying – that’s exactly what I was doing, but it was more like starving it and exercising it to death!)

And because I was young, hopeful and full of desire to do better, there was no way I was going to slow down and listen. I didn’t even know there was anything to hear, the messages were so jumbled with how my body felt.

Years later, with the incredible support of my somatic therapists, teachers and mentors, I was able to slow down enough to finally experience the emotions that were there all along.

The process of somatically digesting them not only gave those emotions life and a voice, but it gave me life and a voice.

I could finally separate the emotional states from my body states, and I could finally stop trying to change my body.

It was never my body that felt bad – it was being alone with all these emotions that felt bad.

It’s a hard thing to ask my students, but I often give them this prompt for self-reflection: when you find yourself eating in a way that leaves you feeling sick, heavy, burdened and bad – could it be because you know how to feel bad in your digestive system, but perhaps aren’t so used to feeling well?

They often recount years of feeling sick to their stomach, while also being helpless with their emotions. Some remember only getting care or attention from their caregivers when something was wrong or when they were sick. Once we can link the bad feeling to the memory and constancy of feeling bad, we can also see how feeling well, open, flowing, free and at peace is unfamiliar, new, and scary.

Uncoupling body states and emotional states and becoming clear about what I needed moment to moment was crucial in my healing and I see it as a pillar in my work today.

I am grateful for how generous our bodies are, how complex the ocean of sensate experience, how wonderful that we can start to differentiate the signals that come from the inside, so that we can give ourselves the best care and love we are capable of.

It’s hard to write about these organic, sensate experiences – in many ways, you have to feel what I am sharing about here.

I know many of you reading are already walking that path with me, and I am so happy we can do that together!

And for those of you who are considering the somatic approach to healing from food suffering – when you are ready, I can’t wait to talk to you and support you on the journey!