Your body is a compass

Dear Team Joy,

What does it mean to honor your body?

I was looking to become a #coach just as I was recovering from an intense #Crohn’s flare and diagnosis. I wanted to find more meaningful work, and I was craving a new relationship with my now “sick” body. For years my body had been a tool for performance- something to be controlled, inspected, and ideally desired.

As I was looking through coach training programs I expected myself to go to Georgetown, the intellectually prestigious school that focused on training executive leadership coaches. But the more I learned about Martha Beck 's life coaching program, the more I knew there was something there for me that I needed. One of the core theses of her program is:

Our bodies have an innate ability to guide us towards what’s meant for us and away from the things that are not.

In my coaching program we call it learning to listen to and calibrate our “Body Compass.”

The Body Compass is a metaphorical tool that can help us tap into our own intuition to make important decisions in our lives. It’s based on the idea that our physical sensations and emotional responses are valuable indicators of what we need and desire, as well as what we do not.

When faced with a decision or situation, our bodies will often respond with sensations of expansion or contraction. Expansion is associated with feelings of lightness, openness, energy, and alignment. It lets us know a particular choice or path is aligned with our true desires and values. On the other hand, contraction is associated with feelings of heaviness, tension, discomfort, or unease. It suggests that a choice or situation is incongruent with our true wants, and will likely lead away from our desired outcomes.

?? By learning to pay attention to these physical and emotional cues, we can gain clarity and make decisions that are more aligned with our genuine needs and aspirations.

Many of us (often myself included) are so distracted by external content consumption and our own ruminating thoughts that we aren’t attuned to our own body’s sensations. We overlook the hunched shoulders, crooked neck, and tight chest. We power through the tension, falsely believing that the tension will subside as soon as we finish the next task or cross the next finish line.

Too often, we get stuck in these cycles of tension. After a while, we are not able to tolerate the discomfort and seek distraction instead. But the longer we distract ourselves from this tension, the bigger it gets.

Think of it like our body sending off bigger and bigger warnings that something is wrong. First it’s a yellow light on the dash that eventually turns into a “check engine” sign. Sooner or later, the engine will just stop running if we ignore the warning lights.

When our bodies are deeply uncomfortable, it is so challenging to turn back towards ourselves. I know from personal experience all I want to do is keep running in those moments.

But when we finally do the have courage to slow down, get curious, and be with ourselves, we will discover that the tension always has something to teach us… if we are willing to listen.

I was initially hesitant to use this tool with clients. Most of my clients are highly intellectual, and I did not want to come off as crazy or ungrounded. I know full well that advocating for somatic ways of knowing is counter-cultural, especially in business circles. But the more I used this tool with my own emotions and watched it get used in coach training, the more I was convinced I had to be brave enough to lead in new ways. Not using our bodies as a way of knowing is like driving but refusing to look at the directions. You will certainly get somewhere but who knows if that’s where you wanted to be.

The Body Compass is now one of the first tools I introduce to new clients. It’s crucial to learning to lead from our own intuition, instead of getting caught up in all the noise around us. It’s like learning to ride a surfboard and understand the waves, instead of just being in the ocean and having to go under again and again when you get stuck in a set. It gives you a chance of being significantly less reactive, and it makes the ride way more fun!

The first step I do with clients is showing them how to calibrate their own compass. You can do this by visualizing a past experience that was slightly negative for you, and noticing the emotional responses and physical sensations that come up. Then you visualize an extremely positive experience and notice the differing emotions and physical responses to that.

By becoming more aware of how negative experiences actually feel in your body, it becomes easier in the future to realize a situation is making you tense. That gives you more information to navigate it. You may still choose to remain in the situation but you are acknowledging your own experience in it.

On the flip side, hearing about the positive experiences is a joy. Listening to clients talk about driving winding Italian roads in a convertible, winning a high school state track meet, or crushing a work presentation where you offered meaningful innovation to the team, all fuel my passion to empower my clients to cultivate more positively powerful experiences in their life. We all have these incredible memories stored within our bodies, and they help point us towards what we uniquely love. Without this awareness, we often cultivate a life based on what our culture tells us we should love, instead of what we actually love.

Big experiences are easier to calibrate initially, but overtime we get better attunement. We learn to notice that the well-intentioned hand placed on our back actually made us feel bristly and to let that be true without self-blame. We learn to notice that we actually LOVE taking our shoes off and having our feet in the grass, regardless of how folks respond. We learn to notice that our bodies simply do need a break during the workday, despite the expectation that they don’t. And once we notice these feelings, we can gently inquire what we do need— water, sleep, fresh air.

We don’t even have to start with the expectation that noticing these things will lead us to do anything differently. Consider this my permission to go right ahead and keep working. Because even when we take the time to notice and acknowledge our lived reality through our body, that’s a BIG step in the right direction.

I help clients activate this side of themselves so they can use it to make choices that lead to greater meaning and well-being in their lives. Beginning this process of attunement REQUIRES slowing down, and for many of us, by the time we slow down there’s too much tension, and we’re too scared to look. Doing this work alongside a coach, can guide us to doing it in manageable pieces so we don’t scare the shit out of ourselves. ??

Honoring our bodies is the first step toward creating a life that aligns with you. If you feel ready to take that step, I am here to help.

Much love,

Isabel

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