Meat Suit, Meet the Mind: Part 1 - Learning to Notice
For a large part of my adult life, I felt completely disembodied. I was a brain dragging around a meat suit that carried little import to the rest of my life. It was an inconvenience, but there you have it.
How utterly wrong could I be?
Sadly, so many of us experience our bodies in similar ways. We are annoyed with them when they don't perform the way we expect them to. We hate them when they gain weight. We badger and ridicule them in our internal dialog with them. We may exercise because we think we should, and then feel betrayed when our bodies don’t change the way we hoped. Sometimes we ignore what they need and then wonder why we feel so lousy.
It was only after beginning a practice of yoga that I began to notice sensation in my body. I marveled at how much I had missed. My body became an early warning system. I began to recognize hunger and satiety, as well as the physical sensations that accompanied stress, anxiety, and other emotions. That didn't happen all at once, though.
“Awareness also means learning what the signs of stress are in our own bodies. How our bodies telegraph us when our minds have missed the cues.” - Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No
For the first few years of my yoga practice, I approached it as my exercise practice. It felt good to have a consistent exercise routine once or twice a week. I enjoyed the more rigorous vinyasa flow and power forms of yoga because they were physically challenging.
Over time, I gravitated toward somatic yoga, which emphasizes deep internal awareness rather than what a pose looks like from the outside. I paid less attention to the shape my body made and more to what I was feeling. I began to notice where I held tension and how it changed when I breathed, moved slowly through it, and paid attention.
That small awareness was mind blowing for me. I began to realize that when I practiced yoga with the intention of easing tightness, stress, or anxiety, my body often responded. If only I had respected it more and understood it better earlier.
Are there physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, or feelings that you are not aware of in your own body? Try taking a moment several times a day to pause, look around, and notice one sensation without trying to fix it. What feels tight or tense in your body? What feels supported? Is there anything you've overlooked?
Noticing comes first. Then, we can decide what, if anything, we need to do.
These small steps are an introduction to embodiment.
I am now aware of how my body holds tension. I am aware of when my shoulders are rising up toward my ears and am able to relax them back down. I know when my breath is shallow to take deep cleansing and calming breaths. I relax my whole body, including my face, after a stressful conversation. When I have been sitting for too long and feel myself losing focus and motivation, I do a few Sun Salutations to clear the fog in my head.
For me, introducing my brain to the rest of my body has been a practice in agency over my body. It no longer seems to operate on its own without connection to me. Now that they are communicating, they more often than not try to act in concert which I find so much more appealing and predictable.
I can no longer hold an internal dialog criticizing my body the way I used to. I know it is working hard and even when it does surprise me by doing something unexpected, I have a better understanding of how I can support it better, if that makes sense.
This is the first in a series I’m calling Meat Suit, Meet the Mind. I want to explore what our bodies are trying to tell us while we’re busy living our lives, and why it can be so hard to hear them.
We’ll get into the nerdy stuff, including what happens in the nervous system when we’re stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed. I find the biology fascinating, but I promise you won’t need to memorize the parts of the autonomic nervous system to get something useful out of this. I’ll put the extra science and references in a “For the curious” section at the end of each article, so you can read as much or as little of it as you like.
I’ll also share things you can try, such as the S.T.O.P. technique, orienting, grounding, weighted blankets, and yogic breathing. We’ll talk about why one person’s favorite calming technique might make another person want to crawl out of their skin. I have a few topics in mind, but I expect others will come up as we go. For now, we begin by learning to notice.
I'm learning to listen. Sometimes, my body has to repeat itself. Sometimes, it even yells! But, I am paying better attention now, which is a considerable improvement over treating it like an unfortunate and inefficient means of transportation.
I hope this series helps you to get to know your body a bit better, too.
Janet Nash, LISW-S, is a psychotherapist and yoga therapist and the owner of Interiority Wellness. She writes about mental health, the body, and the sometimes surprising ways we come to understand ourselves.
