Body, What Do You Want to do Today?

By: Dr. Denise Renye

Many of us spend much of our lives asking what we need to do without ever asking our bodies how they are experiencing what we are doing.

We make decisions, move through responsibilities, exercise, eat, work, have sex, rest, and interact with other people while giving relatively little attention to the body that is participating in all of it. We may notice the body when it hurts, becomes exhausted, changes in a way we don't like, or refuses to cooperate with what we had planned. Otherwise, it can become something we simply expect to follow along.

There are plenty of cultural messages that reinforce this relationship. "Mind over matter" and "no pain, no gain" are familiar examples. We are often praised for overriding fatigue, tolerating discomfort, pushing through, and maintaining productivity regardless of what is happening internally. Bodies, meanwhile, are frequently approached as projects to improve. They are measured, disciplined, compared, displayed, and evaluated from the outside.

It can be surprisingly easy to lose contact with what it feels like to experience the body from within. There is a difference between looking at your body and inhabiting it. There is also a difference between taking care of your body according to what you believe you should need and developing enough of a relationship with it to become curious about what you actually experience.

Our relationship with the body has a history. We do not arrive in adulthood experiencing our bodies as neutral territory. Long before we have much say in the matter, bodies are noticed, named, gendered, compared, praised, criticized, sexualized, and assigned meaning. We absorb ideas about what our bodies are supposed to look like and how they are supposed to move through the world. For some of us, our relationship to gender also changes over time, opening new questions about what feels authentic, what feels imposed, and what it means to feel more at home in our own skin. All of this can shape how safe it feels to inhabit the body, experience pleasure, be seen, take up space, or recognize our own needs.

For some people, paying attention to the body feels natural. For others, it may feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or even threatening. There can be good reasons for that. Distancing ourselves from bodily experience can sometimes be protective, particularly when the body has been associated with pain, shame, unwanted attention, trauma, or experiences we did not have the capacity to process at the time. Embodiment does not need to become another thing we are supposed to be good at. It is a relationship, and relationships develop over time.

Yoga has been one of the practices that has shaped my understanding of this. At its most meaningful, yoga is not simply something we do to the body. It can be a practice of becoming more available to ourselves through breath, movement, sensation, stillness, and attention. The body becomes less of an object to control and more of a place from which we experience being alive.

There is a spiritual dimension to this for me as well. Not necessarily spirituality in a religious sense, although it can include that, but the experience of being present enough to inhabit one's own life. The body is where we encounter pleasure and pain, connection and loss, desire and uncertainty. It changes throughout our lives, sometimes in ways we welcome and sometimes in ways we do not. Learning to remain in relationship with ourselves through those changes can become its own kind of practice.

This kind of attention can deepen our relationship with sexuality, too. Our sexuality belongs to us whether we are partnered, sexually active, celibate, exploring, or simply not particularly interested in sex at this point in our lives. Desire and pleasure are shaped by our histories and relationships, but they are also experienced through the body. Becoming more curious about bodily experience can create space to notice what feels pleasurable, what doesn't, what we want more of, and where we may have learned to override ourselves.

Bodies also change. What felt good five years ago may not feel good now. The movement we once loved may no longer suit us. What we want from touch or sex can shift. Our capacity for stimulation, rest, activity, or solitude may change as well. Aging, hormones, illness, injury, stress, grief, and other transitions can alter the experience of living in a body. A relationship with the body has to be alive enough to change with it.

There is no instruction manual that can tell us exactly how to do this. There are certainly practices and forms of care that can support physical and psychological well-being, but no outside authority can completely tell us what it is like to inhabit our particular body on a particular day.

This is where curiosity can be useful. One very simple practice is to begin the morning by asking, "Body, what do you want to do today?"

You may not receive an immediate answer. The question may even feel silly, especially if you have spent most of your life making decisions from the neck up. That's okay. You might notice that you want to stretch before getting out of bed or that you need a few more moments of quiet. Perhaps you want to step outside. Perhaps there is simply a feeling you hadn't noticed until you asked.

The purpose is not to obey every impulse or treat bodily sensations as unquestionable truth. Our minds, bodies, histories, environments, and relationships are constantly influencing one another. Listening to the body means including it in the conversation rather than assuming it should always be overruled.

Over time, the conversation may become more familiar. You might begin to notice what happens inside you when you imagine saying yes to something you don't actually want, or the way your breathing changes around a particular person. You may recognize when you are hungry, tired, sexually interested, touched out, restless, or needing closeness with greater ease. Sometimes the body's communication will be clear. At other times it will be contradictory or difficult to understand, which is part of being human too.

There is something quietly intimate about developing this kind of relationship with ourselves. We spend our entire lives in our bodies, and yet many of us have learned to experience them primarily through other people's eyes or according to external expectations. Turning our attention inward can become a way of getting to know ourselves from another direction.

The invitation is not to master the body or to become perfectly embodied. It is to become more acquainted with yourself as a living, changing person whose body is part of your psychological, sexual, relational, and spiritual life.

Perhaps tomorrow morning, before reaching for your phone or beginning the mental inventory of everything that needs to happen, say hello to your body first. Ask what it has to say, and give yourself enough quiet to notice whether anything answers.

If you are interested in developing a deeper relationship with your body, sexuality, or inner life, psychotherapy can offer space to explore what embodiment means specifically for you. My work integrates depth-oriented psychotherapy, sex therapy, and body-centered approaches, with attention to the ways our histories and relationships shape how we experience ourselves. If you are interested in working together, you can learn more about my practice or schedule a consultation at www.wholepersonintegration.com.

A Reflection

Rather than approaching these as questions you need to answer correctly, spend some time noticing what happens when you ask them. What does your body need from you today? Where do you feel most at ease in yourself right now? Is there something your body has been communicating that you have been too busy, uncomfortable, or distracted to notice?

You don't necessarily need to do anything with what arises. Beginning the conversation is enough.

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