Your body knows what it wants and needs…
 
I am at the Wat Pho in Bangkok. It is THE temple of and the pre-eminent school from which to receive training in Thai Massage.
 
I need to own up to something… I am a sucker, and a bit of an addict for “self-care”.
 
What is self-care?
 
For me it is not just a good massage or facial, but those holistic practices that see body/mind as one; those treatments that have their roots in ancient traditions who aim to heal the whole person (not just the most recent symptom).
 
It is this mild ‘addiction’ for self-care, the desire to experience Thai Massage in this place, and the thought of training as a Thai Massage practitioner that brought me to the Wat Pho… and it sucked!

If you are not familiar with Thai Massage, it is a treatment in which you are dressed in loose comfortable clothing and lifted, rolled, rotated and stretched the result is a delicious process from which you emerge with both physical and mental tensions released and a deeper freer breath.
 
THIS experience, in the temple of Thai Massage was not that. It felt more like I was a voodoo doll being pulled, pocked and prodded. Throughout the process, however, instead of acknowledging that it was just a bad massage, I kept on trying to tell myself, well it actually looked more like an internal mental torturer who wanted to convince me and get me to admit that it was AWESOME. This internal torturer was trying to tell me that I could not trust the experience, because intellectually “I knew” it should have been the best, because I was obviously what my body told me had to be wrong. To add insult to injury, my brain was telling me that I should absolutely be appreciating and LOVING this singular experience. This internal dialogue certainly did not help make the experience any better, and it also prevented me from listening to my body, interrupting the experience and just walking out.
 
Has that ever happened to you?  That you do things that feel wrong, or for the wrong reasons because you have been told or intellectually convince yourself that you have to. How often do you grin and bear it because you intellectually believe it (whatever “it” is) is good for you?
 
Weeks later in my travels around Thailand, my addiction for self-care brought me to a non-descript Thai Massage place on a random street: none of the titles, none of the gold leaf pillars, none of the pomp and circumstance of the Famous Wat Pho and it was blissful. The massage was like a dance, being moved as if fluidly floating through water. Time both stood still and flew by, I was in a wonderful state of flow. I walked out of this tiny parlor as if walking on clouds, you know those beautiful clouds you can see from the airplane window, fluffy, enormous, dense and white and bathed in warm sunlight.
 
The Body KNOWS what the BODY wants, and, if we care to listen, the BODY is constantly talking to us and imparting it’s wisdom. This body intelligence means that our brain (our cognitive intelligence) can just watch from the back ground. This if often the result of the fact that the body is telling the brain “I’m safe”,  “things are all good”.
 
And yet, as in my Wat Pho experience, how often do we find ourselves doing things or sticking with something just because we “think” it is right, even when our body is telling us it is all wrong? Or walk into a situation because you intellectually convince yourself you should, despite things ‘feeling off’. The reverse could also be true, our body is ‘all in” and because we cannot intellectually explain/justify the choice we don’t follow our gut.

I could list more than a few situations in my life where my gut divulged some very clear signals /wisdom and I didn’t honor it and shortly thereafter my gut was proven right and I had to live through the consequences.
 
Equally we all have those practices that can help us come to a place where we can better hear our body, and trust it. It could be a walk in nature, a somatic movement practice, mindfulness or even a good Thai Massage. These things can help put us in touch with a sense of wholeness, one where our mind can sit on the bench and we can tap into our embodied knowledge.
 
Do you remember how that feels? How your perception is somewhat shifted, from the way you navigate life, read the world, what you put up with, to what you feel courageous enough to try or walk away from just is? Can you acknowledge and honor how the choices you make, even the way you behave seems to flow from an embodied feeling instead of it being the result of a thought process?

The beauty is that the more we tap in and listen to our intuition the more our mind can sit back, and the more our mind sits back, the more we are able to hear our intuitive “Body Knowledge” and behave in ways that are more aligned with what we actually want and need.

Want a Practice to Learn how to start listening to and tapping into your body’s wisdom? We will start really easy.