Learning to Listen to All Aspects of Your Self
The first step in decoding cues from your body for healing is receiving the messages your body is sending. For many of us, listening to our bodies is the beginning of waking up from an unconscious or less conscious state ... waking up from living life on auto-pilot, from being overworked, overstressed or overtired, while running a full capacity schedule. Too often we get our energy from caffein and adrenaline rather than from a balanced schedule - including enough sleep and healthy nutrients.
If that last line set off warning bells in your head, don’t worry, this isn’t about having to change everything overnight. You are not being asked here to change your schedule, or change your eating habits. In fact, to start, I’d go so far as to say you should not and need not listen to anybody outside of your own body! This is about changing one small subtle behavior which happens to carry a very big impact, and that behavior is tuning in to the subtle messages of your body. Your self / essence speaks to you in several different languages: the language of physical conditions that manifest in the body, the language of thoughts that appear in your mind, the language of emotions that, ideally, are a felt sense in the body, and the language of subtle energy in which you pick up some subtle feeling, thought or image prior to the manifestation of an illness or condition in your body.
At the most subtle level, listening to your body feels a lot like listening to your heart, and it guides you on the path of your highest good. When new to this kind of listening, I always encourage my clients to begin by regularly asking themselves this question: “Will this make me feel more comfortable, or less comfortable?” If it will make you feel more comfortable, then choose that behavior, and lean into it, and stay conscious of the result.
The more you do this, the more you will find your life heading in the right direction. Things will begin to open up, daily routines will become easier, your daily rhythm and accomplishments will feel organic, not forced. It’s about living life for your own highest good, and you will find, quite miraculously, that whatever is in your highest good, is also in the highest good of those linked closely to your life. In this way, decisions become simple, rather than complicated. You don’t have to consider what is best for everyone, only what is truly best for your self, and that is the same thing as what feels most comfortable to you at the heart level, rather than less comfortable to you at the heart level.
This sounds rather simple, right? The hard part is that most of us have to do a little waking up in order to listen to this subtle level. Basically we have two choices ... We can ignore the subtle cues and wait until we’ve rammed into a cement wall (i.e. the hard way) such as when illness manifests in our physical bodies. Then a physician will tell us the changes we need to make in order to take care of ourselves. For instance, your back “goes out”, then you have to stop doing everything and lie in bed for awhile. Or you may begin to have “panic attacks” from anxiety and have to slow down, not go to crowded places. The better choice is paying attention to our subtle cues and beginning to notice what feels comfortable, then making choices based on our own needs and wants, rather than decisions based on pleasing others.
In order to receive these cues, it helps to know that they’re there waiting for us, within us. Then, we simply begin to slow down and pay attention to the messages constantly offered from our body, mind, and emotions.