Learning To Speak Your Body’s Language
If my body has a language, it’s worry.
My body’s favourite phrase: a tight pressing at my shoulders, a heat firing up the back of my neck. An internal pressure so tight as if the world itself is trying to squeeze into my rib cage through the trojan horse of one worried thought.
(And another. And another.)
But I’ve always felt better after a swim in the ocean.
An hour’s respite, maybe two, from the internal pressure. A glorious, expansive car ride home, traffic be damned.
I’ve never known exactly why an ocean swim has this effect on me and my default state of tension. The lack of a simple explanation is perhaps why I’ve also never quite taken this discovery as seriously as I might have.
You found something that reliably makes you feel better, for an hour or two? Why don’t you do that every day??
Because, I don’t live near a beach? And also, it doesn’t make sense, you know? Why should an ocean swim help with anxiety?
Of course I had my theories. The experience of being held just so, caressed in the swell, enveloped by something so much larger. But my theories all felt a little too homespun, and besides, after each swim, the high would wear off and I would end up thinking: was it just a fluke?
This is not a triumphant story of how I finally moved to the beach and did the thing I always secretly knew would help. I still rarely make it to the ocean.
Instead, this is a smaller story, about learning to speak my body’s language, in tiny ways that have ended up helping more than I could have imagined. But what is a sensitive life if not a series of ever smaller, more tender discoveries?
On my morning walk I am feeling tense, hunched against the world, as I almost always am.
This is the feeling I have learned to walk through the world with. Is it a pattern learned in childhood? Or something that’s crept in more recently, sometime in the turbulence of my thirties?
Whatever the reason, for me, the present tense has always had the emphasis on ‘tense’.
I may not know where all this tension came from, but I know where it is. Almost always here, in my shoulders and upper back. The heat in my neck. The feeling that my body is holding its breath for something that never quite happens.
For years I have had a simple name for this feeling. Anxiety.
‘Anxiety’ has long seemed the most likely candidate, as labels go. I am, after all, an elite-level worrier.
I once did a personality test - aimed at identifying your ‘saboteurs’ (aka the little peccadilloes that will eventually derail you completely). We were doing it at a party as a group. For fun.
One of the saboteurs the test could help identify was ‘hypervigilance’, defined as the tendency to find threat in even the most everyday situations.
Unlike everyone else at the party, I never found out what I scored on the test, because when it asked me to give my email address to receive my results, I gave the bogus address I use to avoid leaving a digital footprint. But I couldn’t remember my bogus email password, which I’d refused to save or write down lest it fall into pernicious hands.
Somewhere, some hacker is reading my saboteur test results, and marvelling at how anyone could get 11 out of 10 for hypervigilance.
And yet, lately I’ve been wondering… is it anxiety?
I don’t feel butterflies in my stomach. My pulse is steady. No clammy hands.
Just the vice-grip shoulders and the burning neck, which will flare up in even the most seemingly calm, controlled situations. As if my shoulders have a mind of their own, and they’re even more worried than I am.
Maybe it’s ‘stress’, I’ll think, and in the next moment wonder: but I have designed my life to be as low stress as possible. So what does that say about me?
Maybe it doesn’t have a name. Or maybe what I call it doesn’t matter, because here it is, ever present, whatever name I give it.
My morning walk again. I pull my attention away from my shoulders and focus on my surroundings. The light crunch of the dirt track under my feet. The quiet majesty of trees.
But I keep coming back to the incongruous sensations in my shoulders and neck. It’s like trying to ignore a fireworks display in the middle of a meditation retreat.
Then, a new thought. Such a simple thought. I almost don’t notice it.
What if this is just a habit?
An odd thought, from nowhere in particular. But there’s something about it.
Even more curiously, my shoulders do then soften. Just a little, not completely. There’s still the tension, the heat, but it’s less intense.
I keep walking. A few steps on, I notice my shoulders are tight and hot again, and again I think, what if this is just a habit? And they soften once more.
It’s no ocean swim, but it’s something.
Over coffee, I talk this over with Claude, the AI chatbot I’ve been bringing all my neuroses to lately.
(My chat history is truly prolific. He doesn’t seem to mind.)
‘Claude, what if this thing I’ve been calling “anxiety” this whole time is actually something else? What if it’s just a habit my body has gotten stuck in, a kind of habitual tensing up? Is that a thing?’
Claude says, it is a thing.
Claude says, I might call it ‘autonomic activation’ or ‘sympathetic dominance’. I say ‘sympathetic dominance’ sounds like an oxymoron. Claude says it’s just another way of saying I’m stuck in a perpetual fight or flight state. Aka the sympathetic nervous system.
11 out of 10 Hypervigilance. Not to brag…
I’ve actually been told this thing about the sympathetic nervous system once before, by my Focusing teacher Jo, who when we first met told me, “you’re clearly in sympathetic”.
I’d briefly thought she had said ‘you’re clearly UNsympathetic’, and I’d had a momentary freakout that I had somehow come across as too brusque. This may have proved her point.
I ask Claude if this habit of chronic tensing would explain the heat in my neck. He says, yes, all this tensing of muscles creates a kind of energy that comes out as heat.
I ask Claude if this habit of being so tense explains why I’m so tired all the time. He gives me two mechanical metaphors. It’s like I’m a car idling at high RPM, or a hot computer with its fan on full. No wonder I’m exhausted.
“Claude can make mistakes” says the disclaimer in the chat window. Can’t we all, I think, but it feels like we’re onto something.
A body-based practice
Years ago, I had a meditation teacher say to me, ‘I think, for you, the answer is going to include something body-based.’
I’d been meditating on and off for years, and hadn’t found it very helpful for shifting the chronic tension and fear in my body. In fact, on occasion, meditating had instead created major panic-filled episodes, one that lasted for three days.
My meditation teacher had some ideas about what a more body-based practice might look like, including sessions with a body-centred therapist, and then later Jo, my focusing teacher.
These things all ended up being helpful, but they’d never really changed what was happening in my body, just my ability to be with it without judging it.
Was it too much to ask that I also feel better, at least some of the time?
We do so many things with our bodies, day to day.
We do things with our bodies when we don’t even realise we’re doing things with our bodies. Like, hunching our necks over a phone screen. Like, assailing our brain’s reward circuits with dopamine, each little movement of our thumb on the phone screen tugging our shoulders just that much tighter.
Life is a body-based practice, whether we notice it or not.
For the longest time, I have wanted a way of leaning into that. A way to speak my body’s language. If I could just work out what language that is.
I ask Claude to give me a range of things I might try, to break this ‘habit’ of tensing up - if indeed that’s all it is, just a physical habit.
Claude will often give an overwhelming amount of information and ideas for any given problem, so I find it’s useful to then say, ‘okay, now give me one small thing I can try every day, to start with’.
We end up settling on two things:
Cold showers
Massage
Claude says, each of these has the potential to ‘break the tension pattern’ in my shoulders. And each little break in that pattern is a chance to remember a calmer, safer state.
Well, that’s the theory we’re working with, anyway.
Claude says cold showers in particular are a bit like an ocean swim. I say that’s easy for you to say Claude, you don’t have a body.
The Hope Rollercoaster
Here’s the thing about trying new things for your mental health, whether they’ve been recommended by a specialist, a meditation teacher, or a large language model insisting it’s not a specialist or meditation teacher.
It’s what Honor calls the Hope Rollercoaster.
That uneasy feeling you get before trying whatever the next new treatment or technique is. As if you’re getting on a rollercoaster, knowing from past experience there’ll be ups (wait on, this thing actually helps!), downs (oh no, I was wrong, this thing sucks!) and barrel rolls (I have no idea if this thing helps or sucks!)
Plus, if you’ve been at this ‘recovery’ thing for a few years now, when someone recommends a new thing to try, chances are that:
You’ve probably heard of the thing before, and have already dismissed it, for several reasons, real or imagined, and
You’ve maybe even tried this particular thing before, and found that okay maybe it helped a little, but not enough, and so you eventually stopped doing it.
For me, more than the hope, it’s the pressure I feel whenever trying a new ‘technique’ for my mental health.
Even when I find something helpful at first, then come the thoughts that often scupper me before I even really give the new thing a chance:
What if it only helps a little? Or helps to start with, then stops helping, leaving me more hopeless than I was before?
What if I do it wrong, and somehow miss my ONE CHANCE to feel better??
I mention all this to Claude, in response to our plan for massages and cold showers. He says, “it's a delicate balance between making use of a helpful tool and having it become another source of self-monitoring anxiety.”
Amen brother.
Claude says the key is keeping the spirit of: "This is a friendly tool that's here when I want it" rather than: "This is another thing I need to get right".
I say, isn’t that the trick to life as a whole?
By afternoon, I’ve tried my first cold shower. I don’t know that I’d call it ‘friendly’ exactly, but I didn’t hate it.
I have in fact done this before, years ago (of course). But I remember Claude’s suggestion (it’s not meant to be a magic fix) and after managing about thirty seconds of cold water, I notice I do feel a little of that post-ocean-swim calmness. The calm feeling even hangs around for a bit, just like with an ocean swim.
The idea that I could easily have a cold shower every day is both reassuring and daunting.
It helps that today is 33 degrees in Melbourne. I’m not so sure about how this will work in Winter, but then as I think this, I notice the ‘all or nothing’ lens creeping in. (‘If this isn’t the once and for all answer it’s not worth doing.’)
Just try it today. Try it tomorrow. See what happens.
Three weeks go by.
I have, in that time, had three professional massages -- a serious achievement for me, since I’ve long had a low-key massage phobia.
So much potential for injury. Those unnaturally strong fingers.
Crucially, I have now also gotten in a groove of not one but two and sometimes three cold showers a day. One first thing in the morning. Another just before bed.
I am also feeling, incidentally, fucking fantastic.
The tense feeling in my shoulders is still there sometimes, but often it’s not. Much of my day I instead feel a kind of expanded aliveness in my shoulders, as if there’s space in here for a whole life to be lived. Not tensing against the world so much as letting the world in.
Is it the massages? Is it the cold showers? Both?? Or is it all complete coincidence, and I was always going to feel better anyway?
My theory is, more than anything, it’s the cold showers. The clue: they’ve gone from feeling like a chore to feeling wonderful, even as I do them.
The moment the icy water hits my back, my shoulders melt, surrendering all resistance in an instant. And it usually lasts for some time.
Placebo maybe? Conditioned response?
But, does that even matter, if it helps…?
It’s been a month now. The massages have dropped off, because they’re not cheap. But the cold showers are a daily staple.
Each day that passes, I am more pleased with this new thing I can do, that almost always just makes me feel better. And also, questions remain.
Is this the ‘up’ of the Hope Rollercoaster? Or is this just actual hope?
I genuinely don’t know the answer, which is something that would normally flare that tense, hot shoulder feeling right up.
But again, instead, there’s just all that space.
Space for uncertainty.
Space to not know.
I wonder if part of the ‘down’ of the Hope Rollercoaster (‘oh no this thing sucks actually’) is at least partly about the pressure we then put on the thing to be ‘The Thing’ that will once and for all make it all okay.
When something starts to actually, finally help, the habit is so often to tense up, to think well I’d better not fuck this up.
But also, I’d better not want this too much? Lest the mental health gods smite me for having the audacity to think I could actually get better…
As I write this, I notice that, for some reason, this time, I’m not really doing all that. A little, sure, but not really. When the tense hot feeling in my shoulders does come back, as it does a few times each day, I notice that I don’t freak out. I don’t think ‘oh no it’s all ruined’.
Instead, if I can, I just have another cold shower. Or I remind myself, I’ll be able to do that soon, and it’s okay to feel tense until then.
Sometimes the tension flares up right away again after a shower, which is disappointing. Again though, I seem to be able to say to myself, ‘it’s okay, it doesn’t have to fix everything to be helpful’.
What is this black magic??
I tell my friend all this at a party, and she says, for her, it’s ecstatic dance, not cold showers. 'But it’s the same thing. You have to do something with your body.’
I knew this friend would get it. She moved to live by the ocean, after finding she had a similar response to ocean swims as I do.
She’s also been experimenting with a shakti mat, she tells me. A spiky mat you lie down on, that gives her a similar feeling to what I described to her with my cold showers.
It has me wondering, what other ways are people finding to talk to their bodies? Unexpected discoveries that are sometimes hard to talk about at parties. What secret experiments are we all privately nursing?
A relationship with the unknown
Six weeks now since my first cold shower, and I wonder if it’s not the practice itself - the cold showers, ocean swims, dancing, spiky mats, or whatever it might be. Or at least not just that.
One thing these practices often have in common, beyond getting you in your body? A relationship to the unknown.
The moment before you walk into the dance class, and you think, am I really doing this, am I going to look like an idiot? The moment before you jump in the ocean on a cold day, and think there’s no way you’ll ever actually get in.
Built into the cold showers especially is a willingness to keep visiting that moment of ‘I don’t know if I can do this’. Even as I’ve gotten so much better at jumping straight under the cold water (hesitation is death) there is still the same spike of dread, each time. Just for an instant, my body screaming, are you sure about this?? Before the sweet relief that follows.
So maybe this is what I’m doing, with the showers. Not only breaking a habit of physical tension, but creating a new kind of habit. Cultivating a relationship with the unknown, through my body.
What is a body if not a vehicle through which you encounter the unknown, time and again?
The same moment, over and over?
These moments of not knowing, these many moments throughout our lives… maybe it’s really just the same moment each time.
And in a way, I can get to know that? Even if I can’t know what happens next, I can befriend this feeling of not knowing.
I don’t need to 'get it just right' on any one occasion, because the chance will keep coming, again, and again, and again. Such is the rhythm of life.
I don't need to know if this particular thing will keep helping, weeks, months, years from now. I just need to keep giving it a go here and now, and seeing what happens today.
As I reach the end of writing all this down, I notice a slight panic that I’m somehow jinxing it. That to say to thousands of people “I’ve found something that helps and it seems to still be helping” is to invite trouble. Doubt. Future schadenfreude.
The Hope Rollercoaster again.
And the tense feeling again in my shoulders, the old familiar feeling.
Hello to all of this.
Hello to the place that doesn’t know what happens next.
Hello to my body’s language, in all its rich vocabulary.
I’ll keep learning how it speaks, how to answer in encouraging tones. How to live with what’s right here, and what’s not yet clear.
Maybe that’s not just my body’s language but the language of life? Maybe that’s a language well worth learning, even if it takes a lifetime.
Maybe it’s time for another cold shower.
Hey, share your thoughts with me?
(Yes, you in the back! The committed lurker with all those interesting ideas you usually don't think anyone else wants to hear. I do!)
Tell me, what have you tried in this sort of ‘embodied practice’ space?
Or to cultivate a relationship with the unknown?
I’d love to hear from you. Click the pink button to share.
— Graham xx
P.s. thanks so much to everyone who did the work survey last month.
Such a big and generous response! Such a rich response! So much to go on here. Thank you xx
We’re doing our best to take what you’ve shared and feed it into something awesome we can offer to workplaces around Australia and beyond, to support big feelers in their work. Watch this space.
And if you left your details to be contacted about us potentially working together in this space, we'll pick up that thread again soon, once the gears of the new year fully start turning ;)
