A Body

It’s strange that you can go about living while at the same time not inhabiting your body.

This was my normal. Until it wasn’t.

I didn’t know it then, but my body was my ticket out of the cemented inner torment I was living in.

And it took me a long time to figure it out—that I needed to do something about my body in order to get unstuck from feeling horrible, otherwise known as struggling, broken, sleepwalking through life, [insert your version here]. It took me another long time to privately start noticing and feeling the sensations in my body. And it took an even longer time to say the word body out loud.

I remember trying meditation a while before, trying to get a handle on what ailed me. My biggest realization from meditating was that I am not my thoughts. Super helpful—I really had believed my thoughts and ideas defined me. Also with meditation, I tried a body scan while lying down, which in fact was torture the two times I tried it. Spending fifteen minutes paying attention to things like a tingle in my shin and what my eyeballs felt like? That part was boring for sure, but being with the stillness of myself was unnerving and actually a bit alarming.

So, in my long quest for feeling better, I started finding my way from books about meaning and thinking to books about bodies. You know, how one thing links to another. But I wasn’t a body person! And I kept protesting that “body work” was going to be more body scans or something even more wonky like tai chi that I used to make fun of (sorry about that, I don’t make fun of it anymore). I didn’t want anything to do with that stuff. But like most things that are eventually helpful and that I resist at first, the body stuff kept surfacing.

Lucky for me I was wrong about needing body scans and wonky stuff. There are a million ways to (re)inhabit your body. Here’s the main thing that worked for me: mindful movement. It’s anything where you notice and feel your body while moving it.

I tried different things, stopped and started, fumbled a lot. I went slowly. I discovered that feeling safe in my body was different than the way I normally felt. My body was the gateway to not struggling, not feeling broken, not sleepwalking through life, not [insert your version here]. It wasn’t easy, this body business, but it fixed everything. I know, sometimes I can’t believe it either. But here I am years later, overall feeling well and even great, which still surprises me regularly.

Maybe you still don’t like the b-word for [insert your version here]. Okay. Mull it over. Come back to it when you’re ready.