Are you moving with or against your body?

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I want to talk with you today about a distinction I feel is so important in our world right now — and one that's often so subtle. We need to elaborate on it, open this kind of conversation more and more, in different fields, in different places we touch upon, so we can bring more light, more awareness, more consciousness into it. That distinction is between actions and choices that go against the body, and actions that go with the body.

There was a story recently about a biohacker who received a diagnosis of an autoimmune condition. I've been reflecting on it a lot, because there's so much of what I'd call a chase today — a chase of immortality, of making our body better. We'll get into what that actually means. Taking action, using different technologies, biohacking to enhance the body's performance, capacity, vitality, life — so many times these ideologies drift back into control, into manipulation. And in that, I see actions that are completely against the body — not in a living relationship with it.

Our body is a living organism. It responds, it communicates, it moves with. And it's deeply connected to life — but also to death. To the process of expansion, of life growing, of life slowly moving through different phases. We put emphasis on, and prioritise, some of these phases, and we try to diminish others.

In my years of private practice, I've worked with a lot of women through hormonal imbalances and changes, and this was a lesson I learned there. There are phases of our cyclic month that we like — the phase of high energy, the most productive phase, when we're full with life, full with potential energy. And then there are phases where that energy goes down, where there's a kind of death in the system — just before the bleeding comes. For so many women, and their life partners too, this phase is so challenging, because the energy is less sweet, less flirty, less excited. It's sometimes sharper, more edgy. Lower. It requires different qualities. And we carry so much judgment toward it. Women, both to themselves and from the society around them, often don't give themselves the right space, time, and rhythm for these phases. They judge themselves for it.

And this plays out with the same quality on a larger scale, in society, in how humans relate to actions and activities that go with the body. We push the body a lot.

So let's talk a little about what it means to move with the body, to be in a living relationship with it. I'm speaking about this from within a female body — for men, in different phases of life, it may be different. But I know women go through phases of different energy, different rhythms, different needs in their system. And if you look closely, these rhythms and phases are so intertwined with nature, with nature's own phases and cycles. It's a cyclical rhythm.

Some time ago I was teaching at a conference, alongside another speaker, from Switzerland — a gynaecologist. I don't remember her name in this moment, but I may bring her into a future episode. She spoke about the gap in how we meet women through pregnancy and birth, and the disconnection our society has reached from the cyclical rhythms of women, of nature, and the connection between them — and I'm sure men have their own place within that too. But women took on the masculine way of life. She shared about women who come to her practice when things start to shift in pregnancy, when the organism is in a whole reorganisation process — where things die and things are reborn, and, from a psychological perspective, identities change. Women can lose their productivity, their sharpness, some ways of being they had before. Their memory shifts, their cognition changes. She spoke about the fear women bring into her practice during these transitions — because as a society, we've moved so far away from this.

And this dynamic — with the body, or against it — goes even further than this. Into the movement practices we do, the food we eat, how we rest, how we nourish, how we parent. Into how much we're moving from a disconnected place that just wants to control, to manipulate, to stay on schedule and plan rigidly — or from a place that is in a living relationship with our body, with our children, with reality, that stays flexible and adaptive in a healthy way, not a defensive way, to what is needed.

There are phases of my month where I need red meat in my body — I don't know about yours. But this alive relationship, this attentiveness, gives me the space to take my plans and agendas off my mind, and stay open to the relationship, the communication that comes constantly through my body. How the things I eat impact my energy, my mood. The same goes for movement practices. The same goes for biohacking tools. The problem is what we're measuring by. Because biohacking — not all of it, but a lot of it — came from a place of trying to preserve youth and attractiveness of a certain kind, a certain look. I want to say vitality, but it's actually not vitality. It's a way of looking. That's what it is. And it's against the body.

Because the body lives in nature, is connected to nature, and like everything in nature, like every season of the year, it moves through different phases. In some phases the trees are blooming, full with flowers and fruit. In some phases everything is dropping. In some phases it can look like everything is dying. This is nature — and this is also the nature of our body.

This doesn't mean we can't take care of our body, and it doesn't mean we should neglect it with addictions and other things — there's another episode where I talk about the cluttered system, and I go deeper there into adaptive, defensive systems, addictions, and how these clutter our connection to the body. But the other side of it is a side that uses words like "regulating the nervous system," but actually means controlling, enhancing, pushing through, riding upon the body.

So this episode is really an invitation — to think for yourself, to look at different areas of your life, and ask: where am I in a living relationship? And where am I controlling, overriding, disconnecting, not attuning, dissociating? These defences exist in every part of our life, and that's okay — they're part of our humanness. We can still feel the call, the invitation, to bring more awareness, more consciousness into these places, so we can move into a more connected, more attuned, more present way of being in life.

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