What If Your Body Is Constantly Communicating Instead of Failing You?

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Today I want to take you a bit into my field of work over the past decade, and into a theme I've encountered many times — in my practice and in my conversations with people, including online. It's the assumption, the perception, that something is wrong with our body, specifically when we experience different symptoms.

But one thing I've learned, through my education, my work, and my own life experience, is how much our body resonates, responds, is moved by, reacts to. A little like sand on a beach — the sand takes shape by the water, the wind, the weather moving across it. In a similar way, our body takes shape through the different components of our experience.

I want to open with a question: what if the body — your body — is actually communicating with us all the time?

What if all the things we experience as symptoms, as issues, as barriers, as challenges, are actually a live communication we never learned to listen to? We never learned its grammar. We never learned its language. What if our body is a bridge — between our physiology and our meaning and consciousness. Between the sensing, the perception, the experience, and the meaning we give to things. It is a resonance chamber. This is how I usually name it, because it has this capacity for resonance. Often, when we experience it as symptoms, as pain, as difficulty, we're experiencing the high-volume part of it. But in truth, our body is constantly communicating with us — even in day-to-day, subtle ways, when something is not right for us, when something resonates and is calling us.

There's a small exercise I use to illustrate this for my clients, and I want to share it with you now — you can try it yourself as you listen. Imagine that I place in front of you a plate with food that you truly love. Really imagine this plate in front of you — how it looks, how it smells — and notice your physical reactions. What is happening in your system, once there is a plate of something you absolutely love in front of you, something you'd be happy to take in at any time of day? Take a few minutes to explore this.

Once you're done noticing all the subtle sensations that arose, imagine the opposite: a dish you absolutely hate, or even find disgusting. When my clients really struggle with this part, I tell them they can imagine something entirely uneatable. Again, just notice what senses, what physiological reactions awaken in your system in response to that plate.

Now — can either of these experiences be described as wrong? No. We placed something in the environment, and our body responded, resonated, moved with it. We see this in attraction between people. We see it in simple things we feel pulled toward taking in, and other things we feel the wish to pull back from, to withdraw from.

We do this before we have any cognition. Babies do this. And because they don't have cognition yet, it all feels normal — it's simply part of their signaling system. But at some point in our development, we grow out of this awareness. And many of us also grew up in worlds, in environments, that didn't teach us or give us the space to stay connected to it. We were distracted into different layers of being.

So we need to find our way back to that, and learn to listen again.

Our bodies are constantly responding. That doesn't mean they hold the whole truth. Sometimes I'll go through a challenge at work and my body will respond with stress — that doesn't mean my work is wrong. It might mean I need to develop capacities and skills I'm missing. But sometimes it will be very clear: certain things are not for me, don't pull me, don't awaken my curiosity. We are all unique and different.

Starting to sense these subtle nuances of pull and push in our system really helps us come back and reconnect with a capacity many of us have lost. And then, at some point in life, a symptom flares up, and suddenly we hear it — and think it's wrong. But all of those symptoms sit within a much more complex, nuanced layer of work. They are a strong example of a noticing in our experience that got lost — because our attention, our listening, our awareness had grown distant from that place.

So I like to reframe symptoms as invitations — invitations to draw our attention back to the body, back from all the noise and distraction, the inner noise and the outer noise, and back to the place where it's most needed — not just for symptoms, but for life. We'll continue to elaborate, deepen, and unfold this in further episodes.

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