Has Your Body Been Trying to Tell You Something?
As a child, I didn’t always feel at home in my body. I remember watching the other kids move through the world with what looked like easy confidence. They seemed to understand intuitively what their bodies were capable of and how to use them, and they inhabited whatever space they were in without apology. My body, on the other hand, constantly refused to do what I asked. In that way, I didn’t always feel like I belonged. I was uncoordinated, a little awkward, and reliably chosen last for every team sport. What I did have was my mind, and I lived there, almost exclusively.
I often made sense of things through books. Intellect was like a kind of currency I could accumulate, and school was where I really found my value. Part of this was simply who I was, but another part of it was the environment I was navigating. Nature and nurture, always. Home wasn’t exactly chaotic, but it always felt like chaos was close by if things weren’t managed or maintained in a certain way. I learned to read my emotional landscape like I read my books. And I chose to live in a place that felt natural and safe: my mind.
It has taken me decades of study and a great deal of living to begin to see that in retreating so completely into my intellect, I might have left something behind. My body kept moving through the world, sending out signals that I stopped listening to.
What the Body Knows First
We all know that the body is a physical system made of bone, muscle, organs, nerves, and skin. The brain, of course, is part of the body, its most complex organ, the one that regulates and responds and processes, but tissue all the same. So when we name three things—the mind, brain, and body—we are really naming two: the body, including the brain, and the mind, which is something else entirely. It is where meaning lives, where something we call consciousness flickers. Philosophy and science can explore the mind and consciousness, but they can’t fully explain it. Yet.
What we do know is that the body isn’t just a vehicle, carrying your mind (and your brain!) from meeting to meeting. It is constantly sensing, regulating, and adapting, long before thought catches up. An intelligence system in its own right! Your heart doesn’t wait for instructions; its cells contract and beat on their own, even when isolated under a microscope. Your gut senses and adjusts without consulting you. The body is constantly sending and receiving signals many of us have learned, through nature and nurture, to ignore.
The Signals We Override
Pause and ask yourself: Has my body been trying to tell me something that I have been too busy to hear? And a second question: What would it mean to actually listen?
We learn to suppress and override the body’s signals in the name of productivity, professionalism, and relentless forward motion, and then we wonder why, years later, something feels wrong, broken, or like it’s coming apart. We wonder why our body is cooperating less and less. Is it just a symptom of getting older? Of course our bodies change as we age (that and everything else), but is this sense of overwhelm just another symptom of passing time?
The thing is, sometimes accumulated stress surfaces physically before we have language for what is happening. In other words, the body can break to get the mind’s attention. I have lived it myself. It is like some desperate form of communication that is finally loud enough for you to hear.
Using the Body vs. Being in Dialogue With it
But there is a distinction here, and it took me years to understand it. Using your body and listening to it are not the same thing. And even listening is only the beginning. You can hear what your body is telling you and still dismiss it, negotiate with it, or push past. Learning to be in dialogue with your body, responding instead of simply noticing, is something else entirely.
I have done plenty of using my body—Pilates, weightlifting, cardio, etc.—and that kind of movement matters. It’s good for you in all the ways we already know. But you can do all of it and still treat your body like an instrument you operate from the neck up: something to push and optimize while you stay safely locked in your head.
There were moments in all that movement when I did drop in, when body and mind genuinely met. But those moments were easy to let pass by. What I’m pointing to is different. It’s about staying in it long enough to be changed by it, and letting the conversation between body and mind run deep enough that you actually come to know yourself through it.
Learning to Be a Beginner in Your Body
Three years ago, I walked into a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym to learn self-defense. I was, by any objective measure, terrible. I could not get my body to do what I was asking it to do, just like when I was a kid. Someone would demonstrate a movement, explain it clearly, and I would understand it conceptually, but when I would try to execute it, nothing would happen the way it was supposed to. My body and my brain were not in conversation.
One of the many beautiful things about Jiu Jitsu is that it forces you to be a beginner. You are on the mat and in your body, with no option to retreat into your head. There is no intellectualizing your way through it. For someone who had spent a lifetime earning her place through intellectual performance, this was disstabilizing in ways I did not fully anticipate. It was like learning a new language. But slowly, the conversation started to flow.
I began to feel how my body moves, when it braces, what it carries, and what it’s capable of when I stop fighting it and start listening. And the longer I stayed with it, the more it became clear that I wasn’t just learning Jiu Jitsu. I was re-learning myself: the parts of me that flinch, tense up, hold on too hard, and don’t know how to yield. The mat taught me things about who I am that no amount of thinking or intellectualizing ever had.
It took years, and it is very much still a work in progress, but somewhere along the way, something shifted.
Finding Your Practice
I am not prescribing Jiu Jitsu, although I’d be thrilled if anyone wanted to try it! But one of the things I believe most firmly is that the path back into the body is different for everyone. What I am recommending is that you find something that puts you in your body in a way that your mind can’t override. Something that requires your full physical presence. Something where the body leads and the mind has to follow.
For some people that is a martial art. For others it is dance, swimming, rock climbing, or archery. These are practices that demand your full presence, where you can’t drift up into your head because the body has to lead. Then there is breathwork, which is available to everyone, and which is one of the most direct routes into the nervous system. It operates both automatically and voluntarily, which makes it a place where the conscious and unconscious seem to meet, where we can reach down into the body’s deepest regulatory systems and begin to shift them.
Release and Re-engage
Think of it as a practice to release and re-engage. Release and re-engage. That rhythm, of letting something go and returning with more capacity than you left with, is the foundation of every physical practice.
It is also, I would argue, the foundation of leadership. The kind of leadership that I believe is your birthright, and something that many of us were slowly taught to set down: the steadiness to stay present on a hard day, the clarity to make a decision you can stand behind, the capacity to remain whole with the people you love when everything around you is moving too fast.
My mind gave me language, meaning, and a way to thrive in the world, and I’m so grateful for that. But the body carries information the mind cannot reach on its own. My goal is to help people learn when to trust analysis and when to trust sensation, and how to let the two become collaborators.
