The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living

If I could sum up all my years of clinical training and research in one statement, it would be this: We heal when we can be with what we feel.

Our bodies are telling the stories we have avoided or forgotten how to hear - and sometimes our inability to feel our feelings (the messages that precede the alarm bells) means that our bodies have to scream in order to get some attention.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

If you’re willing to pay attention to and dialogue with what’s happening inside of you, you’ll find that your body already knows the answers about how to live a full, present, connected, and healthy life.

We heal when we can be with what we feel.

our ability to feel our feelings as they move as energy through our body with our ability to talk about what we feel. We can sit in therapy, tell sad stories, and talk about feeling sad without ever having the bodily experience of sadness. Psychology has historically focused too much on cognition and behavior while neglecting the process that underlies them both: emotion. But current neuroscientific research reveals emotion (also called affect in the scientific literature) as the central driver behind why we are the way we are, and how we develop and heal.2 We now know that most psychopathology, or mental illness, is the result of the inability to effectively regulate emotion.

your body is the place where the Divine dwells, then you always have direct and immanent access to the Divine. That is sometimes comforting, sometimes healing, and sometimes a reminder that you do not have to keep trying to earn love—you can access it, always.

Historically, those with the least social status have been people of color, women, and those with physical disabilities. The paradox here is that the individuals who had more social power because of their bodies did not experience themselves as defined by their bodies, but they made choices that affected the day-to-day bodily realities of others. Obvious examples of this include men determining the reproductive rights of women, or people without disabilities designing buildings that restrict building access for those with disabilities.

Celebrating another person's weight loss and believing it to be complimentary supports cultural messages about weight bias that end up hurting us all. This praise reinforces the idea that our appearance is connected to our social belonging. It can hook us into a cycle of trying to change our body to earn value in the eyes of others. This system fuels conditional self-worth, which in turn keeps us endlessly chasing affirmation.

Transcendence is beautiful, but I'm not convinced it's the full picture. One of my psychology professors used to remind us that if there are only two options and one of them is bad, then we aren't seeing everything. If we think of God as only out there and certainly not here, we are not seeing everything.

Pretty soon, you find yourself spending more time on your front lawn than you do inside the house. And because your house tells the story of rainy winters and hot summers, including wear on the garage door and some faded paint, you’re working hard to maintain the outside. But over time, you lose sight of the fact that your house was made to inhabit, not just evaluate; you were meant to live inside your home, not on the front lawn. You also forget that your home is yours—which means it doesn’t have to look like the neighbors’. Your home is a place that allows you to express your own style, to entertain, and to store the resources you need to get through the demands of life. When it comes to our bodies, most of us are living on the front lawn. We are looking at our bodies from the outside only, and we have not yet learned how to move back in. In other words, we are so fixated on our appearance that we lose the ability to sense what is happening inside. Even if all our attention is on the outside, the house still exists—for us. We are all born living on the “inside”—it really is the only option. But as we start to realize we have a public body—that other people comment on, celebrate, use, grab, or critique—it gets harder to resist leaving the home that has always been ours.

The belief that we have to change our body to be happy creates conditional self-worth, which means we can be happy and valuable only if our body never changes back. It leads to an unhealthy preoccupation that increases the likelihood of disordered eating, food and exercise compulsions, anxiety, and depression related to rigid thinking and undernutrition. And it promotes the false belief that it’s better if there is less of us. Instead of changing our body, what we need to change is how we think about, talk about, and care for our body. Becoming more connected to our body, seeing our bodily self as inherently worthy, good, and lovable, means we can pay more attention to our unique bodily needs, which might include intuitive eating, healthy forms of movement, self-care, and a balanced lifestyle that includes rest and routine care.

Here are some questions you can use to ignite wonder: What other sensations can I feel right now besides the pain? If I saw a piece of art that captured what this is like, what would the image be? If my pain had a voice or words, what would it say?

It’s so obvious how much your body wants to be alive; it’s doing its very best to fight this right now.

emotion itself is never the problem; the problem is the stories that keep us apart from each other, create conditional belonging, or require us to shove things down in order to stay connected.

When a feeling happens in your body, you are responsible for exploring, understanding, and regulating that emotion.

Sadness helps us ask for comfort, helps us grieve, or gives us the release of letting go. Anger helps us set a boundary and protect ourselves or someone else. And joy takes us into full expression, sharing our experiences to help them expand.

It is so hard to be seen, because when we are seen, we can be judged and rejected. I know you are just trying to protect me from shame. You are rattling me from the inside out to get my attention, thinking that if you get loud enough, I’ll listen, and we can stop this before we get hurt. This won’t be like other times we got hurt. No matter what happens, we can handle it together. Will you come with me onto that stage? I can’t wait to tell everyone what we’ve learned.

We complete the stress cycle when we release our trauma response mechanisms by moving the stress-related energy out through the body.

we can get back to safety more quickly when we engage the healing process in the context of relationship.

But ultimately what body hatred costs us—individually and collectively—is the fullness of life. We lose out on the goodness that comes through our body. And if we are our body, we miss out on experiencing our own goodness and the presence and wisdom that comes from deep connection to ourselves. We also lose out on connection with others: the quality of touch offered to soothe a wound, kissing someone who makes our body feel electric, or celebrating how breasts can nourish and nurture a baby. There is so much goodness within and between us because of our bodies, the bodies we spend so much time trying to get away from, control, or blame.

Embodiment is the self in motion, the living, breathing story of who you are and the culture and people you have come from.

So embodiment is a coming home, a remembering of our wholeness, and a reunion with the fullness of ourselves.

Rather, transformation happens from the ground up: when we have a new experience of ourselves and hold our attention on it long enough for it to sink

No matter how or why we get there, no matter how well it may have served us, forgetting the body also costs us something—individually and collectively. We lose the fundamental building blocks of human thriving, connection to ourselves and others, and the fullness of pleasure, wisdom, empathy, and justice. Connection to our bodily selves allows us to internalize a sense of safety and connection that tells us who we are, what we long for, and how to be most fully alive.

While I do employ moment-to-moment strategies to ease my suffering, the overarching narrative had to change from avoiding or dismissing my pain to learning to be in dialogue with it, realizing that I could decide to respond to it in a way that took me closer to myself.

Here is the idea: pain can be a doorway into the present. Even more, pain can be the invitation into loving and caring for oneself, sometimes learning how to do that for the very first time. The intensity of the sensations of pain are cause for us to try to escape into our mind, but they are also an invitation into the present. When we feel nerve activation in our bodies, it is a reminder that we are here, in the right now, alive and feeling.

It takes time to feel comfortable with something we're just learning. And if we're counting on what we're learning to help us heal, that can add pressure, which can make us afraid and tight. But we can always begin again with a breath, a noticing, a shift in posture or attention, a decision to not do the same old thing. Hope becomes available when we become more aware of our inner process and learn to see off-ramps from the old cycle available in any moment.

When we are frustrated, it is easy to blame another person, but doing so means we miss a chance to see where we need to heal, seek comfort, get out of a situation, or understand ourselves more deeply. Believing that a feeling is about someone else might make us think that the other person, or the situation, has to change. That can trap us in a cycle of codependency, making us think that we can never be okay until the other person changes. When a feeling happens in your body, you are responsible for exploring, understanding, and regulating that emotion.

To say that you are your body is not to further overidentify each of us with the ways our bodies have been made objects, but rather to remind us that our personhood is inextricable from our physicality. This is meant to rehumanize us all and to distance us from the paradigms that separated us from our bodies in the first place, as if any of us could ever transcend our bodies.