Checking in
This time of year is always busy, often involving travel as my work shifts from Zoom calls to meeting rooms. On a recent trip, I came across this quote from Collette Lafia: “Our bodies are speaking to us all the time—and if we pay attention, we hear the gratitude they hold.” The invitation to pay attention to my body changed the nature of the trip, especially when I could tune into the embodied experience of gratitude.
As a coach, part of the “job description” is to be a thinking partner for our clients. Much of my experience of coaching is about the power of discovering connections between what we think and how it makes us feel. Often, those connections are most powerfully remembered in our bodies. One physician client eloquently described getting to the end of the pandemic, believing that their energy level had permanently changed until they experienced themselves in a setting that they loved before the pandemic and again felt the same flow of energy they had thought forever lost. Their embodied experience supported them in reconnecting with the kind of work that provides energy and meaning in their life.
I spent a few days living in a tiny house on Vancouver Island on my recent trip. The quiet setting with intermittent rain and the inherently contained nature of the space allowed me to sink into myself in a whole new way. I could feel myself attending to only what I needed, and my body responded in interesting ways - when I made time to listen, my body was a trustworthy friend that showed me what I needed moment by moment.
In medical careers, we learn to ignore our body’s signals, working through exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and simple triggers like hunger and thirst to make it through our days. I wonder what would happen if we started to pay attention to those signals instead.
While I am back in my office now, I am working on paying more attention to what my body is trying to (sometimes not so subtly) tell me and responding more kindly to those signals.
What might your body be whispering right now, and what would you hear if you stopped and listened?
