We are not teaching our children to listen to their bodies, we are actually teaching them to NOT listen to their bodies. We are telling children “push through whatever your body is telling you and don’t listen to it, be productive because the only thing that matters is production.”

I have a caseload of clients who, as adults, are just now learning to listen to their bodies because of this exact thought pattern.

There has been resistance all along. If I was being completely honest the resistance around this topic had rolled from one situation to another. It was odd, I hadn’t given this resistance a voice. In fact, I had tried to deny the resistance. Why, I wondered to myself.

I recognized what I was doing. I was chasing something. I was chasing rather than allowing. I was being very human about things. So, I stopped and told myself that I really didn’t need to try that hard.

“I believed that story for so many years and it held me back in so many situations. It held back my whole life and the story that I told myself wasn’t even accurate.”

“I know. But now you have the ability to tell yourself another story, one that serves you better. I didn’t do this for you, you did this and you can do it again and again and again. You can do this in any and every situation that comes up. You can look for patterns in your life and in your stories that you tell yourself.

I wanted to say “I am so fucking uncomfortable in my skin right now because if I let you in and I trust you with my heart, my children, and my life then I also hand you the ability to hurt me. I hand you the ability to crush my heart, my dreams and my whole world. Please, please, please don’t hurt me.”

“Be careful with that, don’t drop it” he said.

The gravity of what he was saying and what I was doing really hit me. He was trusting me to hold his heart and I was responsible for keeping his heart safe.

In that moment, feeling completely safe I was able to fully process what I had experienced. Once my body knew that it was safe I had the freedom to explore the experience and begin to rationalize and understand it.

I lay down on my driveway, it is a space where I go when I need to ground myself. I took a deep breath in and with the exhale I told myself that I was safe and had the tools to openly and honestly determine if I was rejecting this statement because it wasn’t true or because it was but I didn't want it to be true.

I could rationalize it and say that this individual holds the keys to something that I want and if they believe what they were told they would have resistance to me. Then, the other side of the story is that everything happens for a reason and if these keys were going to be blocked, I trust that it is for my highest good.

As I watched her, I thought, I wasn’t the one who put you there. I didn’t do anything to you, why are you so angry at me? Why are you spitting and squealing at me as if I somehow created the situation in which you are living? Why is your anger directed at me?