Body Above All

As I continue to grow as a therapist and as a human being, I keep learning the same simple lesson - body awareness and body care must come first, and must come always. The modern age has shaped every one of us in tragic ways. We are all numb, overstimulated, and under-connected to our bodies. Few of us have been able to develop the careful awareness to feel and know what is happening inside our bodies at any given time. Practicing mindfulness, meditation, or yoga is often threatening to us because we don’t want to grow this awareness. If we grow in awareness, we will have to be present with discomfort - a full dose of presence that will expose how tight we are, how scared we are, how much daily pain we are feeling in the shoulders, the neck, the back, the belly, the pelvis.

But we cannot love and heal the tense and tired structures inside us if we are numb. We cannot become more effective stewards of our own traumas and losses if we are cut off from the body.

Across numerous modalities of psychotherapy and across various spiritual traditions, there is a simple shared testimony that the path toward healing rests in simple, quiet, gentle attention to the breath and the body. This is no easy task. It is the thing we keep desperately distracting ourselves away from with phones and sugar and intoxicants and artificial light. But it is the path, the way, toward deeper peace and deeper healing.

We shouldn’t expect that practicing body awareness will lead to immediate relief. We should expect that it will be a challenge, and this challenge is best approached with Love - an attitude of redemptive self parenting. I refuse to hate myself. I refuse to be my own tormentor. I refuse to hate my inner children. I even refuse to hate the parts of me that are destructive and desperate. There are no bad parts, and I can learn to listen and love each of these aspects of myself, every one of them.

I want to seed the following expectation: you are going to slowly, surely, and confidently come into more awareness of your body sensations, moment to moment. The very fact that you are reading this sentence ensures it. You will come into more gentle, compassionate, granular sensation - you will sense yourself more. I want you to cue yourself: Body Above All. What does my body feel in the present moment? Right now, right now? You needn’t change it, coach it, transform it, master it, punish it. There is no demon to banish. Your body sensations are neither good nor bad - they simply are, and you can witness them all unfold with a gentle, kind light of awareness.

I believe you can do this, and I want you to try. Listen to your body, be kind to it, and take care of it. Listen to the signals from your body. I believe that Body Above All is crucial for being seeking balance and healing in the modern age.