Listening to the parts of you that speak through your body
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
You have been living inside a body that has been telling you something for a long time. Maybe it is pain that has settled into a specific place and stayed there long past the point when any doctor could explain it, or anxiety that arrives without warning and does not seem to correspond to anything happening in your actual life. Maybe it is depression that lifts for a season and then returns heavier the second time, or a digestive system that reacts to foods that used to be fine, or a chronic exhaustion that no amount of sleep can touch, or an addiction that keeps pulling you back even when you know what it is costing you.
Whatever form your body’s signal takes, I want to acknowledge you and it before I say anything else. Living inside a chronic condition is one of the hardest things a person can do. It is exhausting in ways that people who have not lived it cannot easily understand. It is lonely, because it wears down the patience of the people who love you and eventually wears down your own patience with yourself. And it is often accompanied by a low-grade shame that comes from years of being told, directly or indirectly, that if you tried harder or thought differently or ate differently or moved differently, you would be well. If any of that has been part of your experience, I am sorry. Your suffering is real. Your body is not making it up.
There is another way of understanding what your body may be doing when it produces these symptoms. Not a decoder ring. Not a promise of healing. Just a frame that some people have found makes the experience feel less like being betrayed by your own body and more like being spoken to by a part of you that has been waiting a long time to be heard.
The body carries what the mind has not been able to hold. This is not new insight. It has been observed by clinicians and contemplatives across many traditions for as long as anyone has been paying attention. When a person’s life demands more than their conscious mind can process, the body absorbs the overflow. The nervous system runs on high alert for years while the muscles tighten to hold what the emotions have not been allowed to release, the digestive system reflects what could not be digested elsewhere, and the immune system loses its calibration when the whole organism has been under sustained threat. Whatever specific form the symptom takes, it is often the body’s accurate report about how much has been asked of you and how little rest you have actually been given.
The pain in your back or your shoulders or your jaw may be the physical location where you have been bracing against something for years without knowing you were bracing. It is your body holding what needed to be held so that you could keep functioning through what you needed to function through. The pain deserves your respect, and it may deserve your slow attention rather than your impatience.
The anxiety that keeps arriving may be your nervous system reporting that it has been running in survival mode for longer than it can sustain. Somewhere along the way, your body learned that the world was not safe, and that lesson has been running underneath everything else you have been trying to do. The anxiety is a report from the deepest levels of your body about what it has been holding on your behalf.
The depression that comes and goes may be your system’s way of pulling you into stillness when nothing else has been able to. It may be the grief you have not been able to feel showing up in the only form your body has for expressing what has been locked away. Depression is often ancient exhaustion catching up with you, mixed with grief for things you have not yet let yourself acknowledge. It is a body asking for a kind of rest that has not been available to you in any other form.
The digestive symptoms may be your body’s report on what could not be metabolized. Not just food, but experience. Some things happen to us that we cannot process at the level of thought, and the body takes them on. The stomach and the intestines have their own intelligence, and they respond to accumulated stress with as much precision as any other system in the body. If your gut has been in rebellion for years, it is not random. It has been telling you something.
The addiction that keeps pulling you back may be a part of you doing exactly what it learned to do to survive something that would have been unbearable without it. Every addiction begins as a solution to a problem the person could not solve any other way. The substance or the behavior gave them relief when nothing else could. The addiction becomes destructive when the original problem has changed or when the solution begins costing more than it delivers. But even in its most destructive form, the addiction is a part of you that once saved you, and it deserves to be met with something closer to compassion than to condemnation.
None of what I have said is a prescription for what to do about your symptoms. That would be more than I can offer through writing, and more than any writer can genuinely offer to any reader. What I can say is that the frame you use to understand your symptoms matters. If you treat them as enemies to defeat, or as evidence that you are broken, or as problems to solve through more effort, they will keep coming back until you are willing to hear them differently. If you treat them as parts of you that have been carrying what you could not carry, and that deserve your listening, something begins to soften.
The listening can be as simple as putting your hand on the place where the pain lives and telling it, silently or out loud, that you are ready to know what it has been trying to tell you. Or sitting with the anxiety for a moment before trying to make it go away, and asking it what it is protecting you from. Or letting the depression be there for a full day without judging yourself for not being productive, and asking what part of you it is grieving for. Most of the healing that eventually happens starts with this kind of listening, because listening opens the door to whatever else your body has been waiting for.
Your symptoms have been doing their work faithfully, for a long time, in a body that has been asked to hold more than anyone should have to hold. They have been your compass all along, and the direction they have been pointing at is toward the parts of you that are still hoping you will finally turn toward them and listen.
The Persian mystic poet Rumi wrote:
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Becoming Your Own Authority
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
Comments
Thank you for your gentle reflections 🙂