Listening to My Body

After twenty years of intentional self-care, I still struggle to recognize the wisdom of my body

Photo by Isha Gaines. Courtesy of CreateHer Stock.

“Listen to my body,” I write in my journal as my intention for the day. It is one that I return to frequently, a self-care lesson that I am still trying to learn. I am definitely better at it than I was when I started my self-care journey over twenty years ago. Back then, I lived in my head, the combination of childhood trauma and the higher education socialization process (hmm…maybe the latter is also trauma) having severed my connection to everything below my neck. My body was something to be subdued, ignored, overcome. Its needs for sleep, for touch, for movement, for food, for elimination were impediments to academic and professional success. A good scholar is not supposed to require eight hours of sleep and a three-hour daily self-care routine. Just attend the annual meeting of any professional conference and this becomes obvious. We are supposed to be able to start our day at 8am and be on the go for at least 11 hours with only brief breaks. This is the way.

I learned the lesson well. When my psychology graduate school classmates competed over who had more work to do, I felt shamed into silence. My fellowship freed me from the arduous schedules of teaching and research assistantships. My mentor cared more about my development than my utility for his work. Doctoral students wear their workload like people in the New Testament wore their fasting, marking their faces with somberness and long-suffering to show their dedication to the profession.

And whenever you fast, do not look somber, like the hypocrites, for they mark their faces to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matthew 6:16 NRSV)

I wish that I had been able to lean into the graciousness that I experienced. But I wanted to be seen as doing as much as everyone else. As a Black woman, I already had to contend with the perception that my admission was a consequence of my racial identity instead of my qualifications. I tried to atone for my reasonable workload by taking on extra. Instead of using existing datasets for my research (as most of my classmates did), I insisted on designing and carrying out original projects for both my masters and dissertation. I did extra clinical practica, accruing so many hours that when I interviewed for internship (the psychology equivalent of a medical school residency), people questioned whether I could learn anything from them.

What I did not do was exercise, sleep and eat well, and take time for Sabbath rest. I ignored my body until I couldn’t. One day, in my second year as a tenure-track professor in a top-ranked clinical psychology program, I woke up wracked with back and neck pain that I could not explain. It was the beginning of my journey with self-care. And while I did not know it yet, it was also the beginning of my journey with chronic illness.

Since then, I have been teaching myself the lesson that I never learned as a child, the lesson that my mother could not teach me because her father could not teach her because his parents…you get it. It’s an ancestral legacy. Living in survival mode, we’ve never had the time and space to pay attention to our bodies.

Listening to my body is a relatively new generational skill in my families. I had to start at the remedial level. Over the past twenty years, I have learned what my body’s non-negotiables are: what kind of exercise challenges me without tipping me into a fibro flare, how much rest I need, which foods do and do not work for my gastrointestinal system (no matter how healthy they supposedly are), and how much work I can reasonably do in a day. I have learned what boundaries are and how they have to be reinforced regularly, often several times a day. I have learned that I can say no and how to do it without apology (much of the time, anyway).

Twenty years later, listening to my body is still a growing edge. I struggle when my body is trying to tell me something that my to-do list does not want to hear. Everyday I wake with an ideal image of how my day should go. Often, my body has different plans, wanting to rest when I want to be active, becoming alert as I need to be winding down for the evening. Sometimes my body’s signals are genuine, but sometimes they are not.

This is the thing about bodies: they cannot always be trusted. They can get confused. They can lie. People who have experienced trauma, who are neurodivergent, or who suffer from anxiety or depression know that the communication between the body and its reality can get hijacked. Our bodies communicate things to us that are not true, at least not in this moment:

This isn’t safe.

You can’t do this.

You’re not strong enough and you never will be.

It will always be like this.

You should keep going.

Sometimes the body is deceptive. Other times it simply changes. What was true and helpful at one stage of development is no longer true at another. There’s no clear-cut marker. It’s not even a linear process. Yesterday’s needs were not the same as today’s which may not be the same as tomorrow’s. It’s complicated. Bodies are complicated.

This, too, is a way of listening to my body: learning to figure out not only what it is saying, but why, learning to discern the function of its message. Is it trying to protect me? Is the threat real, imagined, or remembered? Is this a time that calls for pushing through or pulling back? Sometimes there’s no way to know. So then I make a choice. I take a risk. I observe the impact. I learn. And maybe next time, I choose better. Maybe next time, my body’s signal becomes clearer and more precise. Or maybe it changes and I have to start learning it all over again.

Do you struggle with listening to your body? What have you found helpful? Leave a comment and join the conversation.