What is my body trying to tell me?

The body is so much more than a machine. The idea that you rotate the tires, fill it with gas and oil, and that is all it needs leaves out nearly everything. If you are asking what your body is trying to tell you, you already know that. Your question assumes it has something to say. It does. And it says it through the only means it has access to, which is sensation. What I have found is that most of us are carrying two different things at once. There is what the body is actually feeling, and there is the story we have been telling about it for years. The story is usually louder. Set it down for ten minutes and you can hear what is underneath, and often it has quite a lot to say.

I want to tell you what happened to me, because it is the reason I take this seriously, and because I got part of it wrong at first.

The explanation I already had

Last October my left shoulder started hurting. A sharp pain, only when I moved a certain way, worst in the morning and easing off during the day. It went on for about three weeks.

I had a confident explanation. Early frozen shoulder, a physical problem and not an emotional one, architectural.

That is the value of a diagnosis. It is specific, it has a name, and it lets you stop wondering. Which is also its cost, because I did stop wondering.

Then I tried something I had learned from a practitioner I have studied with. I turned my attention to the place that hurt, the way you would turn toward somebody in the room who had been trying to get your attention for a while, and I asked it what it wanted me to know. And then I waited.

The first thing that came was three words. Don't rush me.

Then a picture arrived with a sentence attached. The weight of the world is on my back, and I want to put it down, and I don't know how.

I asked how long it had been carrying this. It said, I was asleep, and when I woke up the weight was there. I asked who gave it the job. It said it would feel so good to put it down, but it's my job. Do your duty.

What I got wrong about it

For a long time afterward I described this by saying the pain moved. It flared in my elbow, then turned up behind my shoulder blade, then near my spine, and I told it as though the pain had traveled.

That is not what happened, and the difference matters.

What actually happened is that I was so deep in the conversation that I failed to notice the pain had gone. When I checked in with my whole body, the first place was quiet. And then I noticed something over here. Nothing pulled up stakes and marched somewhere else. One thing resolved, and something else became available to be felt.

I had turned my own experience into a tidier story than the truth, which is exactly the thing this practice is supposed to catch. So it caught me too.

The whole session took somewhere between an hour and two hours. There were tears and deep sadness. By the next day the pain was almost entirely gone, and I can tell you it was about ninety-eight percent rather than all of it, because I wrote it down while it was happening and small sensations were still there when I moved.

What is actual, and what is story

Pain is produced by your nervous system rather than piped straight up from the tissue. Attention, expectation, and what you are carrying all affect how much alarm gets raised. That part is ordinary physiology, not a fringe idea.

What I am not going to do is tell you what your pain means. I do not know, and neither does anyone who has not lived inside your body.

What I can tell you is that most of us learned early to override the body. Push through, take something, get on with the day. It works well enough that we do it for decades. And a part of us that was trying to say something just gets louder, because volume is the only language it has left.

Sometimes a thing quiets down considerably once it has actually been heard.

Ten minutes with something ordinary

Start with a doctor. When you have good medical guidance, this process might be a useful add-on.

Pick something small. The knee, the jaw, the ache under your ribs. If there is something that keeps you up at night, leave that one alone for now and let this earn your trust first.

Then notice the explanation you already have. You have one, everybody does. It is my age. It is the mattress. It is the gluten. It is the thing the doctor said in 2019.

Set that story down for ten minutes. Not because it is wrong, since yours is probably true and mine usually is. Set it down so you can hear what else is in the room.

Then be genuinely curious and ask it something. What are you trying to tell me? What are you feeling? How old are you? What do you want me to know? Out loud is best, though an inner question works too.

Then wait, and do not answer for it.

Some questions will give you nothing at all. Nothing is a real answer. It does not mean you are bad at this and it does not mean you are broken. Ask the next one. Sometimes there is only a feeling, so describe it. How big is it. How deep does it go. Does it have a color or a texture. Be with it and let it be there.

Then check the place that hurt. Is it the same? Has it changed? Is it quieter? You are not grading yourself and you are not grading your body. You are only looking.

Ten minutes is enough to find out whether anything is there.

One caution, because it matters. It is easy to open something up and stop before it is finished, and I think that can leave a woman worse off than if she had never started. If something bigger surfaces than you expected, that is the point to stop, put both feet on the floor, and get support rather than push on alone.

Your body has been talking for a long time. Ten minutes of listening is a small thing to offer it.

Kristin Milan

Coach and author for women in the third act of life, holding faith and consciousness in the same hand. Master's in Social Work, degree in Psychology, HeartMath trained, and nearly five decades engaged with the science of change. She writes about outgrowing the aging default and coming home to a wholeness you already belong to. Meet Kristin