How to Discover the Secret Wisdom of Your Body
Tap into the wisdom of your body and release the weight of stuck emotions.
Your body doesn’t lie. It provides vital information regarding the state of your mind, heart, and spirit. When you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, your healthy body and emotions are impacted. Learning how to listen to your body can help you heal emotional and physical wounds.
In this month’s Finding Fearless Community session, Kristi Vitali, founder and Co-Creative Director of Be Well Austin Center & Yoga House, led a workshop on how to discover the inner wisdom of the body. Here’s how you can align your energy, heart, and mind to move towards your goals with clarity!
Feel to Heal
Feeling is healing. There’s a secret wisdom of the body that’s always communicating with us. While the mind can go forward and backward in time, the body is always present—it’s the perfect anchor.
Tapping into the physical sensations of the body and really feeling them can help bring you into the present moment. Once you’re centered, you can access your inner wisdom and emotions. “You have a deep well and a resource of beneficial information that comes to you, moves through you, and is within you. Learning how to access it is golden,” says Kristi.
Have Compassion for Your Body and Emotions
Tuning into your own body will provide you with insights of the state of your emotions, mind, and health. When you check-in with yourself, be prepared for uncomfortable feelings or sensations to pop-up. You might find you’re feeling sad or notice physical pain in your body. Whatever happens, embrace it with compassion.
Accept your shame, anger, happiness, embarrassment, or frustration for what it is—be open to difficult emotions. Pain is inevitable, but the amount of suffering you endure can be optional. Suffering is what happens when there’s resistance against strong emotions, so learning to accept them is the first step toward limiting how they affect your mental well being.
Here are some journal prompts from Kristi to encourage self-compassion:
What are your body and heart trying to say to you right now?
Think of the first sentence, phrase, sensation, or feeling that comes to mind.
What’s something you’ve been challenged with lately?
Are you resisting it mentally, emotionally, or physically?
What is your response to being vulnerable?
How do you react?
What does it feel like in your body?
Where do you feel it in your body?
Release Unresolved Emotions
The body houses and expresses unresolved emotions, memories, and beliefs, all the way down to a cellular level. According to Kristi, it’s possible to liberate our bodies from the effects of unresolved emotions. How do you do this? You feel all the feelings.
Letting yourself truly feel your emotions completes the stress response cycle, which means negative energy can’t build up in the body and cause emotional or physical problems. When you have a strong emotion, feel it in your body, greet it with compassion, and then take action to resolve it. Here are some practical exercises to release negative feelings and unwanted emotions:
Move your body
Be kind to yourself
Practice self care
Have compassion for yourself
Let out a good cry
Give or receive physical affection
If we can listen to our bodies and be mindful of our feelings, we can increase our quality of life. Our energy, creativity, connection to our internal wisdom, and clarity of purpose can all be strengthened by simply knowing how to check-in with our physical bodies and release unsettled emotions.