The Body Isn’t A Machine That Can Be Commanded To Do Your Will

Left to it’s own devices, my mind commands me to do way more things than are good for me. These plans feel essential to my day or my week for one good reason or another. The problem is that my body doesn’t always have the capacity to do all the things my mind has planned. It has taken me years to get my mind to consider and listen to my body before it’s too late.

What does too late mean? Well, it means something different for each of us. Those of you who have more sensitive systems, like me, will get feedback right away when your body doesn’t like your choices. The body has opinions about all aspects of how we live such as the amount of fresh air we get, how frequently we exercise, how much rest we take, the way we breathe, the types of relationships we engage in, the ways we talk to ourselves, the way we nurture ourselves etc. The list is endless and each aspect of living has an impact on our bodies.

The challenge is that most people are conditioned not to notice. When we are young we can make bad choices for quite a while before it’s obvious that the body isn’t happy. In fact, we can make so many bad choices that the connection between our choices and the state of our health becomes blurred.

When something goes wrong, and the body presents with a symptom that’s loud enough to get our attention, it’s often confusing to know exactly what went wrong. That’s when we have to pay even more attention to our sensing within our body. The problem is that when the body hurts in any significant way, people get scared and tend to disconnect from their bodies even further.

So many of the visits to medical offices are caused by ‘bad living’. Our body isn’t a machine that we can simply command to do our will. We need to slow down enough to feel how our bodies are responding to our daily choices. We have much more power than we realize to create health simply by considering the needs of our bodies in how we live our daily lives.