Listen to your Body
We are re-discovering more and more the extent of our body's innate intelligence. Psychotherapy, originally a talk therapy, has been going in the direction of including the body in psychotherapy since Wilhelm Reich and Pierre Janet's development of methods in the first half of last century which integrated body-mind approaches leading to the development of current body-based psychotherapy methods such as Sensorimotor Experiencing, Hakomi, EMDR, Emotional Freedon Technique, among many others.
There are many people who spend so much time in their heads with their thoughts of the past and future or totally focused in what they are doing in the moment that they don't have any idea of how to be in their bodies or to just 'be'. They are disconnected from their bodily sensations, their gut feelings and their intuition. In the more extreme instances, they don't know when they are hungry or thirsty and unaware of small aches and pains, the language of the body.
Are you sleeping when you feel tired? Are you eating only when you feel hungry? Are you exercising when your body needs stimulation?
Here are a few web sites that help you to listen better to your body and to get back into your body, as strange as that sounds.
What does "Listen to your Body" Actually Mean?
From the folks at mindbodygreen.com, here are three tips to get you started.
How to Start Listening to your Body
Deepak Chopra shares his excellent ideas of how to do this, from the Oprah web site.
3 Ways to Trust Your Body and Trust Yourself
From the tiny buddha website, here are three more steps to re-establish your connection, from a personal coach.
How to Listen to Your Body and Actually Get Answers
Another personal and fitness coach gives four steps to get results from listening to your body.
How to Listen to Your Body (video)
Dr. Judith Orloff explains how to do this in a ten minute video.
Meditation is a great way to tune-in to the sensations of your body and to stay in present time, as opposed to obsessing about possibilities that could happen in the future that you have no control over. It has many other proven benefits as well. Meditation provides an opportunity to experience universal aspects of stillness and well-being, clarity, wisdom, compassion, and self-compassion. This page is a practical guideline to begin a daily practice of meditation.
Eight-week MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) courses are offered in English in Geneva on a regular basis. I took the course in 2015 from Bianca King. Her web site is here.
Guided Meditation for Grounding
In this 11 minute guided meditation audio, Jeanine Sande explains what grounding is and why it's important and then guides you through the practice. The symptoms of not being grounded, are feeling light-headed, scatter-brained, having chronic fatigue and being unable to focus or concentrate on one thing.
Bodywork
There are a multitude of ways to nurture your body therapeutically. This field of practice is generally called bodywork. One type of bodywork that I've found helpful is reflexology. I recommend a practitioner in my cabinet, Matilde Ziegler, and you can find her web site here.