Building Body Awareness

Your Body Wants to Talk to YOU!

Bodies are constantly communicating. Sometimes, it can feel like our bodies are the neighbor that is a real talker!

They are consistently letting you know when they need attention.

Let me know if you ever have the following:

- Difficulty focusing

- Tight chest

- Tight, painful shoulders

- Feeling like your head is too heavy to hold up

- Migraines

- Low back pain

- Difficulty being able to sit still

Your body is using it’s physical experience to talk to you.

These are all signs that can be indicators of a physical illness, so you always ALWAYS need to get checked by a dr. first to verify that you are healthy.

However, if your chest tightness is something that isn’t a sign of a direct illness, then you may be experiencing somatic responses.

What is a somatic response?

A somatic response is when your physical body communicates it’s mental and emotional needs. It is the experiencing physically the mental pain or discomfort you’re feeling emotionally.

For me personally, my migraines were ruled out by the medical doctors as something they couldn’t explain. It was just a phantom migraine. Which can be really scary!

And when I sat down with myself and was able to journal, I figured out that I was anxious.

Very, very, anxious.

It wasn’t a little bit anxious. I was feeling incredibly burnt out, and my body was starting to manifest the burnout through pain. I would only allow myself to take days off if I was physically ill, so my body was creating a physical illness so that I could call in to work that day, because my career wasn’t fulfilling at the time.

So what do we do about this?

It’s a two part reaction – first we identify, second we assist the body.

The first, identifying, is being able to recognize when our body is talking to us.

We need to hear what our body is saying before we can even try to assist our body to get what it needs. To identify, we can do several things. This includes body scanning, breathing well, and meditating (which I promise isn’t as awful as it can seem at first).

The second, assisting, is the practice of interacting with your body and assisting to meet it’s needs.

This means that you learn to listen, and then you act. Action to fix the issues that are causing the pain. Bilateral stimulation is a great technique to initially assist the body to calm down and soothe it. Grounding and coping skills are also available.

For further assistance, you will need to start evaluating your life and making larger scale changes.

While all of this was incredibly helpful, I had to be honest with myself. To assist with my migraines, I really had to my lifestyle, including creating more, doing less on screens, and ultimately restructuring my business to better fit with the life I wanted.

If you are ready to make more substantial and sustainable changes to your life, let me know. This is something I love to work on with people through therapy.