Take care of your body; it’s the only place you have to live – Jim Rohn
I use the insight timer app for meditation and mindfulness. Every day they have a quote and very often it resonates with me and I share it. I shared the above quote recently and it really got me thinking about how humans are not particularly good at looking after and listening to their bodies. Even when we think we are doing it good – very often we are pushing it to extremes (extreme diets and exercise for example).
The body is resilient and it adapts to the stresses we put it under. However, just like anything else, over time, its resilience starts to diminish, if we do not listen to it and provide it with nourishment. This can present in lots of ways: tension and pain in our musculoskeletal system, digestive issues such as bloating, nausea, diarrhoea, and constipation, headaches, chest pains, and heart palpitations. These can all be somatic responses to not taking care of where we live, our bodies.
Sometimes people have these responses not because they are not taking loving care of themselves; these can be responses to events experienced as traumatic by the body e.g. accidents, loss of a loved one, traumatic life events, abuse by a loved one.
What we can do is to start noticing what is going on in our body and responding to it with kindness and compassion. What does that look like? I think the first thing is noticing what we are doing that isn’t working e.g. working long hours at a computer without taking breaks, having that glass of wine in the evening even when we know it will stop us from sleeping well, going to bed long after we noticed we were feeling tired, doom scrolling on our phone. The next step is making changes to these habits we have.
We can also introduce activities into our lives that we enjoy doing or try different things e.g. going for a walk after work, reintroducing that forgotten hobby, going to a yoga class, meditating for 5 minutes at the start and end of the day.
Body work is another way of taking care of the body. Spending too much time in our fight, flight, freeze, faun state is not good for the body or mind. Regular treatments can support the body to relax, rest, and restore. When we go for body work treatments, we are giving the body an opportunity to heal because body work supports the body to go into the state of rest and digest (from fight, flight, freeze, faun).
And that brings us back to where we started:
Take care of your body; it’s the only place you have to live – Jim Rohn