Learning to Befriend Your Body (#3 of “x”)

As a competitive athlete, I learned that my body was a barrier to athletic success. I learned that my mind could visualize the success, I just needed to whip my body into shape so that it would obey. I could do one more set; I could eat a little less; I could push my body harder than it wanted to go. It worked briefly.. but the end result was always an injury- a consequence of pushing too far too fast. I’d heal.. and try again. Frustrated at my body’s lack of success, I’d try once again to beat it into submission. I was working against my body... not moving with it. And my body paid the price.


Without realizing it, I had learned to tune out all of the signals that my body was sending. One of my favorite shirt quotes was “pain is weakness leaving the body”. I thought of signals like pain and exhaustion as signals to push more not less. I thought of signals like hunger and fatigue as weakness my body could learn to ignore and overcome. I reinterpreted the language my body spoke as a dialogue of weakness.

Reclaiming our relationship with movement may involve reconnecting to those signals and learning to reinterpret them with compassion rather than self-hatred. We may begin to cultivate a relationship with a body we have may have obsessed about and yet at the same time ignored and hated. As in any relationship, the first step is listening, the next step is interpreting what it is saying, and then we learn how to respond to our bodies signals.

Questions to contemplate:
How have you moved against your body’s intuition? How has your body tried to speak you?

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Movement Is About Connection (#4 of “x”)

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Will My Body Just Tell Me When It Needs To Move? (#2 of “x”)