How truly conscious of your body are you, really, I ask because I find mostly that we aren’t, we ignore the signs over and over again of what our body is truly telling us. We just don’t listen enough to what our body has to say to us and part of the reason for this is because of how busy we are all the time, how we constantly fill our time up, our minds up with stuff, and a constant flow of things to do and information to take in. So we don’t take time to quieten the mind, and give it the space to allow us to hear what the body has to say, or the mind has to say about how we are feeling in our day to day actions.
Becoming aware of how you feel in your body for me is absolutely key for good health, you can not have good health if you are continually just concentrating on what is going on around you. Your internal world needs just as much attention if your body is to keep getting you to your next destination.
You have to stop and listen to how you are feeling with the things you are doing, who you spend time with, how you are living your life, and of course what you are eating. Often my clients will tell me they think that something is bad for them, but carry on having it anyway, or that the way they are living their life is making them ill, but they are carrying on. We run rough shod so many times over our body’s signalling mechanisms that are saying stop, listen to me, change what you are doing….and our own feelings, in the pursuit of what we think will make us happy in some determined future. I ask you to think about now, how it feels on that journey to get to the destination you have planned to get to, but in all this it’s the journey that matters, and the vehicle of your body is the only vehicle that can get you there, so you need to listen to it and what it truly needs.
We often are so unaware of how we feel when we eat or do something that we ignore the signs for years, putting up with pain, and discomfort and carrying on and on until we finally totally break down with disease and suffering, hardly living our lives with enjoyment. Why do we do this? What a waste, Andy Finlayson who appeared on Food for Thought this week said to me, he had been in pursuit of that eternal question why are we here, well whilst we are finding that out, you know what you need to enjoy it, have fun, and experience that in every cell of your body in a joyful way.
The pain and suffering we often put ourselves through though can be totally unnecessary if we stopped and took time to listen, and go into ourselves to ask ourselves often the hard questions about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and then come to terms with whether it’s the right thing for us. Often we know it’s not the right thing, but the pain of changing it we feel will be hard to do in the short term, Jane Fondas workout used to say, no pain no gain….the change pain is never forever!
Our culture is often determining that you are to keep working through pain and illness, it’s almost like a badge of honour to keep turning up despite being on deaths door. To be able to do that we have a cupboard full of sticking plaster suppressing approaches, just patch me up and get me back out again. I was the same for years, I used to say to my poor naturopath Jean, just patch me up, tell me what’s now going wrong, give me the supplements to deal with it, and the diet that will keep me going, and get me back out there. I treated life like a war zone…and so do many others now, suppressing with medications their true internal pain, because to listen to it means that you have to become honest with yourself about how unhappy life is and how out of balance it is, and how lacking in enjoyment it has potentially become for you.
When we get in touch with our heart energy in all that we do it allows us to find ourselves, take time over ourselves, love ourselves, and we then choose to live much of our lives differently, saying no without guilt. When we take time to go inside and listen, and move to our heart energy, we bring the right people in around us who have the resonant energy, it makes it so much easier to say yes to those things you know will help you to wag your tail, and enjoy the life you have been given.
Listening to ourselves and making choices from the heart with what we do to our bodies means that we have listened and know that something isn’t feeding us on the many levels that food feeds us on. I know some foods feed the soul, and that’s important, it is far from being just a physical aspect of rebuilding the body, it wants to feel energy and vitality that it knows it deserves to have not just day by day, but year on year, moment by moment, forever.
You are what you absorb…in every cell, and your body needs to feel good to be able to do that effectively, it really does, the less at ease it feels, the more stressed it feels and the less it will absorb to rebuild your body. Slowly it deteriorates, and very possibly this is because you haven’t truly decided to listen to it from the heart. The sticking plaster approach that medicine has works for a while, but it doesn’t give you true longevity of life, it suppresses you on so many levels, and this suppression just pushes the issues deeper and deeper, making them harder and harder to deal with and undo.
How hard to you want to make this for yourselves? It’s easy to start with your food, food diaries are great ways of seeing what you eat, when you eat it and how you eat it, tracking emotions and reasons for eating can give great insights. Also what is fascinating is how it changes behaviour, because guess what, it makes you more aware, in some cases I’ve found scarily aware of your behaviour. It makes you sit up and listen to yourself if nothing else around the foods that you probably knew you shouldn’t be eating but are, and makes you face the reasons behind it. Journals can be insightful, looking at the language and patterns to your behaviours and asking yourself key questions in regards to why that might be the case. It’s not about beating yourself up, it’s about being fascinated and curious about yourself, and having some fun with what you are doing.
Writing and tracking what you eat can be a physical way of starting to listen for those people who just can’t stop, and empty the mind, and this is one of the main things people say to me, they can’t and don’t stop, and they can’t quieten the mind for more than a moment if at all. So start to write, and express what is in and on your mind, and release those thoughts in a more physical sense, because at some stage you will reduce the burden on your mind, allowing the listening to start to truly happen.
Start by looking at patterns behind your fatigue and energy losses, is it food, people, things, environment that affects your energy, times of day? Look, observe and be aware of what makes you feel good, and what really doesn’t give you balance and energy. What helps you to wag your tail, what makes that tail stop wagging and feel quite frankly flat. You are looking to become conscious on what will make your tail wag all the time.
Get it out on paper if you can’t listen…the more information you get out the more aware you will become of yourself and the things that you would like to do differently in your day to day life. Sometimes by listening and creating awareness we become aware of something that we are doing which we just didn’t realise was causing us a problem, this can be so true of environments and people, which can drain you without realising. I’ve noticed when some of my clients stop working for a month their stress goes, and they don’t feel angry or comfort eat anymore, their weight changes, and they just feel happier in themselves. Until that point they hadn’t realised how unhappy with their job and lifestyle they really were.
You now it’s easy to do the sticking plaster approach, it takes so much less time, and takes your responsibility for change away, and of course this way you don’t have to take a long hard look at yourself and the things you probably know in your heart of hearts isn’t feeding you on that level. And that is the crux of this really, if you suppress it’s your true heart energy you suppress, which then affects every other part of your body, that energy is truly important, but you have to listen to hear it. You have to take time to care about yourself, and come from a loving place with everything, including yourself.
