Your Beautiful Body
Our body is our guide, wisdom, intuition. Our body carries our wounds, joys and dreams.
When we attempt to solve problems and figure things out; often we talk to others, listen to podcasts, deep dive on Google, read books, stress, make a pro con list… all before we silently sit with our body and ask for wisdom.
This is a practice I often use with clients to help them practice getting in touch with their own internal wisdom. I’ll say, “Can we take a moment to have you silently sit with your body / intuition and ask what the next step is or if the body has anything to share?” More times than not, their body has information to share.
This is an important practice for those raised in fundamentalist, evangelical churches because it was likely taught, directly or indirectly, to disconnect from body, to not trust the body and maybe even to see the body as the source of evil. Purity culture teaches us to cover up our body, feel shame about our bodies beauty and to ignore the bodies messages and desires.
Yet, our body is and always has been good. Beautiful. Wise.
Our body reacts to any stimuli before our mind does, which is why it is powerful to get more in touch with our body. Psychologist and professor, Louis Cozolino, says this is the purpose of therapy; to get in touch with our body because we only have a half second between the time our body reacts to a stimuli and then our mind (and behavior) reacts. In therapy, we get to practice getting in touch with the half second, through the simple practice of noticing. The more we learn about our bodies responses, the greater ability we will have to regulate the way our mind reacts; which contributes to our actions and in turn impacts the life we build for ourselves.
There is gold in our silent moments listening to our body.
As the wise Jason Mraz wrote, “Our bodies can speak louder than when our mouths are open.”