How do you know if your body is telling the truth?

I live and work on a fairly intuitive basis, but I recently experienced a particularly strong knowing in my body about a situation in my life. The logic and evidence to support this knowing was slim, but this was a deeply intuitive hit.  No amount of reason seemed to be able to persuade my body otherwise. This begs the question, how do you know when to trust your body? How do you know when it’s telling the truth? 

In one way, our bodies don’t actually lie. Sensations are neutral raw data. It is only once we start interweaving stories, meaning, and interpretation with our sensory input that the question of trust and truth becomes relevant. These stories often derive from  true experiences somewhere in our individual, familial, ancestral, or collective history, though they may no longer be applicable or true. The strongest stories likely originated to ensure our survival, and usually operate at very deep subconscious subcortical levels. Somatic work helps us  become aware of how our embodied consciousness connects to the stories we are telling ourselves so we can participate in letting go of outdated stories, systems and structures, and bring new ones into being. We are capable of rewriting our embodied stories, and there within our freedom lies. 

Just as we are always practicing something whether or not we know it, we are always talking to our bodies, and our bodies are always talking to us. What are you saying to your body in this moment? And what is your body saying to you? The more attunement we received as little ones, the more likely it is we are able to hear and interpret our own bodily sensations accurately. You can feel when your bladder is full and you understand that means you need to pee. You can tell when your stomach is empty and you know it’s time to eat. You can feel your heart rest when someone wishes you well. You can register when your arms want to reach out to draw someone close to you, or push someone away.  Trauma including abuse, egregious misattunement, and neglect can cause these signals to get scrambled. 

When does a stomach ache mean that something bad is about to happen, versus when does it mean you just ate something that was a little too far past its expiration date? When does the quickening of your heartbeat mean that you should not go down a particular path, versus when does it mean you are on the verge of something new, exciting, and worth pursuing?

In order to recalibrate your intuition, you have to establish what relative safety actually feels like in the body. This can take years depending on the present baseline, and may even be a lifelong practice. As far as I know, it’s possible to continuously expand one’s sense of relative safety so that fewer and fewer situations activate a threat response. It’s never that we want to rid ourselves of a properly functioning threat response. It’s that we want to recalibrate our sensory perception to update how we’re interpreting our bodily signals. 

A few physiological signs that may be associated with an increased sense of relative safety: your breath inhabits your whole body freely and easily;  you might sense your environment with greater openness and clarity; your center of gravity may drop a bit lower in your body as you are less braced or pulled up away from the ground; your digestion may gently rumble;  your overall posture is more open and your movement freer; your voice is more resonant. It is from the embodiment of relative safety that you can begin to trust your intuition more deeply. Inner knowing becomes associated with deep calm. If you think you’re intuiting something, but you’re barely breathing, your muscles are tight, and you have very little awareness of the space around you, you may be operating more from a place of threat response and fear. You may be doubling down on your assumptions about what you think will happen, or desperately grasping onto what you think you want to happen in a situation, rather than responding to what’s actually happening. There may still be important information to understand and respond to from this state, but it warrants examination. 

I find it endlessly fascinating that our nervous systems are wired to respond to any novel stimulus by assessing how safe it is or not. New people, places, and experiences often stimulate a threat response in us, even if minor. So in a new situation, and when it’s appropriate, it’s always worth giving yourself more time to track this activation and let it flow through you as you’re able. This is largely what work like Somatic Experiencing helps us do: surf increasingly larger waves and cycles of activation and settling in our nervous systems which leads us to more resiliently meet the stressors of our lives. Over time, you unravel outdated meanings attached to particular sensations which creates space to allow for new sensations and meanings to come through.

Then what is embodied truth? Maybe it’s an emergent felt sense and knowing  how to respond to a moment as needed from the integrity and wholeness of who you are in service of the highest and most grounded good of yourself and all. Maybe it’s a dance with not knowing what each moment will bring, and being free enough to update your stories in real time. Paradoxically it seems the more willing you are to not know, the more you actually know. The practice of feeling safe in the not knowing  reduces interference with our intuition. Embodied trust and truth are a more aligned knowing of what choices lead you into a more expansive YES to life. You begin to know earlier in your journey which choices will lead you back down familiar pathways that constrict and reduce your options of who you think you are, and which choices grow you into a more expansive sense of self, and a more expansive sense of what’s possible. 

So did my whopper of an intuitive hit come to fruition as I expected? I am writing and living the truth of my new story now. 

Vulnerability & Defense

Photo by Miriam Miles on Unsplash

Let’s take a moment to thank our defenses.

Established out of necessity in response to physical, mental, emotional, and energetic boundary breaches, our defenses are what have gotten us through to this moment. They may arise as attempts to exert control over our lives when we feel unsafe, unmet, unseen, unheard, helpless and overwhelmed. We lock down, shut down, and close off when our boundaries are overridden. Another person may initiate these ruptures, for example, in obvious cases like abuse. However we may also be responsible for overriding our own boundaries, like in instances of empathic individuals who give more of their time and energy than they are able to without taking care of their own needs first.

Sometimes though, our defenses interfere with our ability to connect with those we care for and love. They may hinder us from becoming the people we wish to become, and doing the things we want to do. So what’s the alternative?

There are those who might tout radical vulnerability as the answer, total openness. And because so many of us are so closed off, this may seem like the obvious answer to move in the opposite direction. However, just as a turtle has the option to retract its head, arms, and legs into its shell, we want our systems to be able to contract and expand with manageable conscious ease. We want body-mind-selves that respond appropriately to the demands of whatever situation is at hand, wherever that lands us on the spectrum of choosing to put up our defenses or choosing to open up more.

Repairing boundary breaches and becoming conscious of our habitual defenses helps us achieve a greater sense of wholeness and agency. Somatic Experiencing guides us to detect how our boundary breaches manifest psycho-biologically, and discover our innate capacity to repair these ruptures.  Alexander Technique helps us understand how our coordination may be keeping us trapped in defensive postural patterns. Excess tension can act as a suit of armor against sensing and feeling. We learn how to gently unwind these fortified patterns and experience greater safety and freedom in more open, vulnerable, embodied coordination. Both modalities cultivate a more accurate internal barometer to judge when something is an actual threat or just perceived as such.

We are filters for a vital life force moving through us, permeable beings in connection to our environments and one another. Healthy boundaries mean we are more capable of choosing who and what we allow in, and more intentional with what we share with the world.