My Body Knew Before I Did

Whenever I’m sitting at my desk working, not with clients but fulfilling the admin side of what I do, and I am becoming tense, my left shoulder automatically rises. This wasn’t something that I noticed for a ridiculously long time after it started to happen. It wasn’t until I noticed that my shoulder was rising that I realised exactly what was happening. I simply didn’t notice that as I was working, tension was developing in my body. I was great at ignoring the messages from my body and so my shoulder started to let me know. Of course, there had been signals before, a slight tightening of my stomach and slightly shallower breathing, but they had been easier to ignore than the sensation of my shoulder tightening in towards my chest and up towards my ear.

On social media, because of what I do and those that I follow, I am always being confronted with posts on the mind-body connection. What it is, how it expresses itself as the constant communication through pathways that include the vagus nerve. Information, messages, travel from the brain into the body and, as with my shoulder, they influence our heart rate, our breathing, our digestion and our muscle tension. This system is a two-way street with all the information from the body travelling back to the brain, shaping our thoughts, emotions, sense of safety and overall wellbeing.

What interests me about this isn’t the mind-body connection itself, but what it means for how we understand ourselves and the different parts of who we are. When my shoulder rises towards my ear, because of what we understand about the mind-body connection, it isn’t just a muscle contracting. Something in me is responding to the demands of that particular moment. A part of me is working hard, striving, concentrating and even perhaps worrying about getting things right. Long before I consciously recognise that activation, my body already knows.

Within the work I do, I often begin by asking, “What part of me is here right now?” and, in session with clients, I ask that question of them too. Sometimes, the answer doesn’t arrive as words because sometimes it arrives as a knot in the stomach, a clenched jaw, a tight chest, or a shoulder creeping upwards towards an ear. It’s for this reason that the body can become a doorway into our inner system, our inner lives.

This is where the mind-body connection becomes particularly important. Because of the fact that the nervous system is constantly carrying information between the brain and the body, our thoughts influence our physiology, but our physiology also influences how we think, feel, and perceive the world around us. The body is not merely reacting to our parts, to our emotions; it is often expressing them.

When we learn to pay attention to physical sensations with curiosity rather than judgement, we begin to notice parts of us and the emotions that they are carrying, that may otherwise remain hidden. A tight shoulder stops being something to fix and becomes something to listen to so that the question shifts from “How do I make this tension go away?” to “What is this tension trying to tell me?”.

Most of us have spent years learning to override the body’s messages. We push through tiredness, ignore tension, dismiss headaches, and tell ourselves to keep going. Our bodies often adapt for a while, becoming louder only when the quieter signals have gone unnoticed. What begins as a slight tightening in the stomach can become chronic tension in the shoulders. What begins as restlessness can become exhaustion. The body is remarkably patient, but it is persistent.

Often the body has been speaking for a long time before we finally learn how to hear it.