5 Steps How To Listen To Your Body

Do you listen to your body, do you know what your body really needs and wants? The dangers and devastation of not listening to your body. And what you can do today that will help you find out what your body really wants and needs.

Do You Listen To Your Body?

Do you know what your body needs and wants on a daily basis? Really know what your body needs and wants. Well, the reality is our body is a miraculous vehicle that does so many things every day to help keep us safe. To help keep us alive, happy, and healthy. If you listen to your body enough it will give you all sorts of information.

Our body can tell us so many things when we listen carefully enough. It can tell us when we are really hungry, tired, cold, hot, sad, happy. It gives us cues when we need to take more rest or when we are a bit run down.

But do we listen to our body, really listening to our body? And giving our body what it needs. From what I have seen in thousands of students and clients we don’t.

Because every day most of us go against what our body is trying to tell us. Look at overeating, we consume things that our body system doesn’t want or need. Look at Stress, we put our bodies under a considerable amount of unnecessary stress for things that are not that important. We are so focused on the external world, the material world we are not listening or taking good care of the body we are in and have been blessed with.

When You Don’t Listen To Your Body

When you don’t listen to your body, don’t listen to the dis-ease in your body you end up with disease. Diabetes, the stroke, the heart attack, cancer, adrenal fatigue and burn out started with small signs of dis-ease we didn’t listen to.

Your diseases started the day dis-ease started in the mind, body, and emotions. It started when you didn’t listen to what you really needed when you listened to the destructive mind. Listened to the conditioning and beliefs that had you believing you have to do this, that, you should do this, that. When you stopped listening to your inner compass, you inner guidance that uses your body to speak.

Dis-ease starts when we put other things before what our body, mind, emotions, and spirit needs But the problem today is most of us are so distracted by the monkey mind. We have lost the art of listening to our bodies, in-fact listening to our bodies has ended up at the end of our lists of priorities.

Look at how much time we spend daily filling our minds with distractions and useless information. The wasted hours we spend watching someone else’s dramas even made up dramas on TV or social media. We constantly fill our heads with useless information and other people’s stories. We spend so much energy and time focusing on trying to control the future, we fail to be present in the now. We fail to appreciate and fully tune into the beauty of what is happening right now. We ignore the signs our body is giving us right now.

Common Symptoms When You Don’t Listen To Your Body

Adrenaline Fatigue is a common symptom of too much stress. A common example is where the sufferer has been pushing the mind, body, and spirit too much against its natural state of balance. Or suffering from the physiological symptoms of trauma.

Bad Posture is often a symptom of continual bad habits of pushing the body into an unnatural state of being. It can be caused by sitting in the wrong type of chairs, holding a lot of muscle tension, and pain. Moving the body and muscles in ways to fit in, for example a child that is a lot taller than his peers who tries to physically shrink down his natural structure.

Chronic Pain And Tension are very much like above it can start with stress tension that is not addressed, illness, or an injury that hasn’t been cared for properly. Fibromyalgia is often triggered and exacerbated by stress, anxiety, trauma as well as post-viral and chronic bacterial and mold issues.

Chronic Stress, most chronic stress begins with everyday stressors that we haven’t managed or dealt with effectively. During periods of anxiety and stress where we don’t listen to what our mind, body, and emotions are telling us. When we don’t do what it needs us to do, the body forgets how to relax, rest, and repair. The body then finds itself in a state of chronic stress, chronic dis-ease which leads to disease.

Diabetes Type 2 is mostly caused by individuals very detached from what their body truly needs. They are so entangled in their emotional wounding and the desire to smother their pain they get caught in the self-soothing habit of unhealthy eating.

High Blood Pressure is also a common example of where the person puts themself under considerable anxiety and stress but again denies what the body is trying to tell them until it leads to something even more dangerous, heart disease and stroke.

The Devastation Of Not Listening To Your Body

I know too well of the devastation of not listening to your body can leave behind. In 1988 at only 19 years of age, a dentist put mercury up a root canal instead of my tooth. Within days I came down with what Dr’s described as a very bad bout of flu. Other than the normal symptoms linked a very bad flu I started to suffer a wide range of unexplained complications. I suffered periods of paralysis, numbness, and a whole long list of symptoms that became even more complex. I went from a very motivated 19-year-old, who had 2 jobs and sang in a band, who walked several miles a day to someone who struggled to walk and function. Now, very slowly I managed to get some of my stamina back but I still struggled physically, my body just wouldn’t do most of the things I wanted to do.

Why The Mind, Body, And Spirit Connection Is So Important

It was a time when self-help mind over matter books was very popular. So every day I tried to push past my physical limitations with my mind. The problem was most of these teachings were so focused on success at any cost, they missed out on something very very important. Which was the need for equilibrium between the mind, body, and spirit. The need to know yourself, the need to understand what was right for me and my body.

I was highly empathic and intuitive and at my core, I knew my body needed more support and rest. I loved to dance, sing and walk but no matter how hard I tried my body struggled to do 20-30% of what it used to be able to do. But as you know society pushed us to work because tiredness or exhaustion is viewed by many as not an excuse not to go to work. The stress and anxiety of pushing through and exposure to more toxins over the next few years wouldn’t help. A serious reaction to a Fluorescein Angiography on my eye done by the NHS, exposure to a variety of toxics when working for two different fashion designers. And then exposure to isopropyl alcohol in recording studios left my body seriously compromised.

My unhealthy patterns of not listening to my body cost me 7 years of being predominately bed and housebound. And then a very long list of rare medical complications that has spanned 30 years. I had so many big relapses because I didn’t listen to my body. Too busy listening to others’ opinions or expectations. And so focused on pushing through my body’s26 symptoms that I wasn’t listening to what my body REALLY needed. Little did I know at that young age the fine line between dis-ease and disease.

Benefits When You Learn To Listen To Your Body

Now my health story had a lot of other unusual factors that I just don’t have the time to mention. But what I can tell you is that the body knows what it needs, the body knows what it doesn’t need or like. When we start to listen to our body more closely on a day to day basis we start to understand ourselves not just our body but ourselves better. Every single one of us is unique and has unique needs.

When we can truly tune into our body we become far healthier. If we listen mindfully enough to our body we are more likely to eat what our body needs and wants. We are less likely to overeat or eat the wrong type of foods that our body will struggle with. We are more likely to go and rest, go to bed when our body needs it. We are more likely to do what our body needs not what someone else’s body needs.

What Happens When You Listen To Your Body

We all have uniquely shaped bodies, some of us have bodies that can find it really easy to do this and that. When some of us are not, I have realised, no size fits all.

As a highly sensitive empath, my body is very sensitive to other people’s emotional and physical pain.I have had to really learn how to listen to what my body needs. And often have to set strong physical, emotional and mental boundaries with many people around me. This became even more necessary after surviving life-threatening sepsis when I developed a very rare form of hyperacusis that would trigger a disabling form of non-epileptic seizure.

I began to have no other choice but to remove myself from a lot of noise and vibration because of the impact it was having on my CNS. And even though a lot of people felt that I was shutting myself away. Listening to my body has given my central nervous system time to rest, time to restore more balance.

Listening to your body should be one of the most natural things we do not just daily but many times in a day. But somewhere along with with evolution, we started to listen less. I believe in many ways our busy distracted mind has begun to dampen down and drown out what our bodies are trying to tell us. But it doesn’t have to be that way you can learn how to listen to your body again.

5 Steps How To Listen To Your Body Infographic

STOP and learn how to be more in the moment, with your body be more fully present, meditation is a great way to bring you into present more awareness while accessing stillness. Mindfulness teaches how to be more mindful of everyday activities and thoughts. Body scanning helps you be more mindfully aware of your body.

LEARN HOW TO RELAX, most people today struggle to relax properly, they are so used to doing, being busy and distracted they have in many ways forgotten how to relax. The more you start to relax, be more in the moment, and more mindful it gets easier to listen to what your body really wants and needs. The more we relax and slow down, the easier it is for our inner compass and intuition to be heard. That is why my Accredited Relaxation Therapist Training is built around relaxation techniques before meditation and other techniques. Thank god I learned these techniques many years ago. They helped me reduce and manage many disabling conditions, and lower my anxiety and stress levels. Check out this Free Relaxation Technique

BODY-MIND ACTIVITIES: Body-mind activities like Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Yoga even certain forms of dancing can be a great way to connect with your body’s energy. Daily body scanning; check your posture, check for tension, and check for areas of your body that need more attention. Most of us spend too much time in certain positions, sitting in poorly designed chairs, or car seats, or even lying on poor-quality mattresses. I remember an Alexander Technique Teacher I went to point out how crazy it was that we spent more money on a car than on a quality mattress. It’s true most of us spend approx 8 hours each evening in our bed and very few hours in our car, but how often do we invest in a high-quality bed and mattress to help our body get the best rest it can. Think about how many times you use the same areas of your body to do a repeated task, like typing or thumb texting on your mobile phone. How tight are you holding that steering wheel? How tense are you when you’re sitting at your desk? Bad posture and repetitive use of one body part can be a big cause of chronic pain, inflammation, and nerve damage issues.

MINDFUL EATING. Mindful eating is a great way to reduce overeating, it is a great way to encourage more healthier eating. Comfort eating is both triggers of the mind and emotions, it is a form of self-soothing, usually an unhealthy form of self-soothing. As who tends to comfort eat with a carrot or juice or salad. It’s funny how we don’t tend to go for the nutrient packed food that will actually help boost our energy levels. That is because we are so engaged with our self-sabotaging thoughts, the stories we tell ourselves that lead to emotional distress.

ASK YOUR BODY WHAT IT NEEDS: The more you slow down, learn to relax deeply, and become connected with the inner you, your intuition and body will guide you. But learning to detach from the monkey-mind takes time. But there are a variety of other tools that can be used to help you become more connected with what your body wants and needs. One very popular tool with kinesiologists is muscle testing. Muscle testing can actually help us identify all sorts of things we need and don’t need for our bodies and other aspects of our life. The key thing about muscle testing is that you are not too tired or dehydrated then you may struggle to get an accurate message. Learn how to muscle test with this video from Dr Whitten