11 TAN UPDATE 10.13.2022 - Listen to your Body

—  Rachel Richter  —

Have you ever found yourself in a place where you didn't have enough data or familiarity with a situation to make an informed decision?Who am I kidding — in March of 2020, everyone felt that way. No one knew the pandemic was going to unfold exactly the way it did.What can you do when you don’t have sufficient data, familiarity, or visibility into what’s next?

Here are two things that will never BS you.1) Listening to your body2) Trusting your own discernment(Details on this next week so you can digest the first one below)

Bringing your conscious awareness to your body and your own discernment can be your superpower, allowing you to make more intentional decisions that are in greater alignment with yourself — especially in the absence of data or personal familiarity.

In an earlier season of my life, I treated my body as an Uber for my brain. Sounds familiar, right? It would get me from place to place to "do life" at each destination before transporting me to the next one. I just carried myself around with me.This way of moving through the world got me into serious trouble. I became sick. The trouble didn't cease until I started to change my relationship with my body by listening to it.

   Meet Your Body:  

In short, everything in your body is deeply connected.

• Your brain is connected to your gut.

• Your immune system and endocrine system are connected too.

• There’s a connection between the emotions you experience and physical sensations you feel.

• Your body uses hormones to control and coordinate your metabolism, energy level, reproduction, growth & development, and response to injury, stress & mood.

Rather than using words, your body mainly uses feelings and sensations, both pleasant and unpleasant, to communicate with you. 

This feedback that your body provides applies to many things including physical, logistical, personal, and even professional in nature. Through this feedback it can share with you whether or not the specific things you do contribute to your alignment or detract from it: food you eat, sleep you get, physical activity you engage in, company you keep, news you read, media you consume, music you listen to, book you read. 

The body is always giving you feedback to restore alignment.

A body in healthy alignment generally feels good to live in. 😌 How do you listen to your body to understand what it needs? When something is aligned with you or a “yes” for you, you experience something, it may be tingles or a feeling of openness. Feelings and sensations from the body that indicate a state of alignment and optimal functioning are generally perceived at a conscious level as pleasant sensations unique to you such as:

• Feeling of lightness

• Feeling of openness in your chest

• Naturally deeper breathing

• Lack of tension

• Feeling energized

• Sensation of tingles

When the body’s whispers are ignored, it starts getting louder and can even gets in the habit of yelling. This is when the messages sent to the brain can be experienced as unpleasant sensations including:

• Pain

• Pressure

• Stomach tied into knots

• Heaviness

• Fatigue

• Tension

This can also appear as inflammation, "flare up" of a chronic illness, pain, weight fluctuation, dysregulation, and more.

to interpret your body's sensations it’s quite simple: pleasant sensation is good, unpleasant, not so good.

This process of listening to your body and responding to it is a natural ability we all possess at deep level. 

If you haven’t been listening closely to your body as a source of truth, that's okay — where exactly were you supposed to learn this before? It is why this newsletter exists.

When looking “out there” to data or expertise for answers, it is easy to miss the whispers or screams of your body as the communication it is — after all, your body's communication is devoid of what many people think communication involves: words.

Therefore, is it surprising that most people have lost touch with this important and reliable source of internal information? Not at all. You can begin to listen to it more by:

• Noticing what the sensation is and if it's pleasant or unpleasant

• Asking yourself what you're thinking or doing around the time the sensation is occurring

So the next time there is a lack of data or familiarity with a situation, listen to your body when making a decision so that it's in greater alignment with you. Meet Your Own Discernment: We'll cover this next week. For now I'll leave you with this ➡️In 1912, Abdu’l-Bahá, the much loved son of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith traveled from Palestine, where he had lived his entire life, to the United States to spread his father’s message. He was encouraged by some of those traveling with him to make his passage across the Atlantic on the historic maiden voyage of a magnificent luxury liner, the Titanic. Abdu’l-Baha declined to do so and traveled instead on a much more modest ship, the Cedric. When asked later why he had not chosen to travel on the Titanic, his responded, “My heart did not prompt me to do so”.

Found value from reading this? Who in your circle could benefit from having the opportunity to read this too?Be a source for good — share it with intention. It is how ideas that create positive impact can spread the most.Best,RachelP.S.Do you prefer to get my weekly newsletter on a Thursday or Friday? I'd genuinely love to know. 🧐Reply with what you'd like to share and connect over. 👋