I Am Not A Failure Because My Body has needs.

I am not a failure because my body has needs.

Those are the words that brought tears to my eyes during a recent therapy session. I didn’t realize I needed to hear myself say them. It was tough to recognize that while I beautifully and gently hold that truth for the people whose healing journeys I support, I wasn’t holding it for myself.

Bodies are not broken. We don’t need fixing. Our bodies want and deserve attention, they need to be tended to. They tell us about their needs through communication that many would call “symptoms”.

As I first wrote these words, I was lying in bed, my body sharing the communication of microbial imbalance and immune response in the left side of my throat. My throat wanted rest, soothing liquids, opening of the tissue around so my body could bring in the mediation team. This team, the immune cells, tries to help my throat microbe families come back into balance. Fortunately, most of the time, they are really good at that job.

It’s also true that antibiotics can SOMETIMES be helpful in moving our bodies towards microbial balance. Pharmaceuticals of all types are definitely used more frequently than is best for our bodies. Nonetheless, sometimes these and other western-medical tools can offer insight and spaciousness. This spaciousness allows us to find and address the understory (the underlying contributors that have brought your body to where you are now) and opens our bodies to the natural healing that moves us towards thriving and wellness.

This is the goal of my work, to trust in the intrinsic and natural healing of our bodies and see all tools as potentially valuable. My main concern with the solely western medical approach is in the ways we have outsourced our body wisdom and knowing, the ways we have placed more value and reality on the imaging or lab result, the way people are led to disbelieve their body’s communication as “in their head” or “psychosomatic” and thus “not real”. That pattern is harmful. It deepens our distrust in our bodies, separates us from our body communication and contributes to a story that our bodies are out to get us.

Our bodies are NOT out to get us, are NOT against us and DON’T hate us. How would that attitude benefit our survival? Our bodies are part of us, an important and essential part of us. Our bodies want us to thrive. The communications from our bodies (“symptoms”) are them calling us home.

It can take time to learn what your body is communicating, or even what part of your body is communicating. We spend so much more time in typical school spaces learning how to do math and write with “correct” grammar than learning about our beautiful and amazing bodies. Bodies we will be interacting with our whole lives. And, when we don’t understand something it can feel scary.

I have found that my most important work as a healing practitioner is helping the people I support better understand their bodies. Helping them slow down and engage with their body communication through curiosity instead of fear. This helps them access the more typical medical system with more empowerment, curiosity and agency.

I can’t offer this support 1:1 to everyone, in fact, I’m learning that my capacity is limited and I can probably only really hold space for four people each week. So I’ve built various online opportunities to help more people learn about their bodies in an embodied, body positive, trauma-aware kind of way.