When My Mind and Body Disagree

I’ve noticed recently that life has taken on the thankless and often unwelcome task of reminding me of the lessons I love to espouse but haven’t quite mastered yet. I sometimes imagine that if I die and am able to view my life’s happenings in mega fast-forward, I’ll spend eternity laughing at how many times I’ve learned, failed at, forgotten, and then re-learned the same lesson. This week, the comedy show entailed remembering two things:

• My mind lies. It spins 1,000 different stories about who I am/what I like/how I should live, none of which may be true and all of which may be dependent on something external and transitory.
• My body never lies.

The thing is, my body always knows the daily rhythms, people, food, and activities it enjoys. It’s very clear about this and leaves no room for interpretation by myself or those around me. For instance, sometimes by brain tells me to go to yoga, because yoga is good for me and it turns us all into calm, angelic beings. Immediately afterwards, I may come home and see that my husband has yet again purchased overly ripe bananas, the kind that will be bruised and brown the next day. All of a sudden some sort of pent-up anger comes bubbling out and pours all over my poor husband, less than fifteen minutes after I have exited savasana. Clearly, yoga does not equal immediate sainthood. These two juxtaposed events usually leave me reeling in confusion, asking myself questions like “Am I one of those hypocritical ‘yogis’ who fancies herself some enlightened being while her whole family shudders at home awaiting her next act of volatility?” I’ve found that these temper tantrums occur when I have put too much stock in my mind and not enough in my body. Oftentimes my brain is telling me I need yoga, but my body is telling me to curl back up in bed with TV and tea. Other times it’s telling me to get my butt back to work because I have a lot to do, I’m stressed out, and self-care can wait.

I always find it eye-opening when my body appears to love something I have told myself I hate. Last Thursday, I woke up completely rejuvenated, calm, and motivated. This is odd because Wednesday had consisted of a 16-hour day, full of exercise, work-related writing, and volunteering at two separate locations in very different capacities. Early on Wednesday, I had found myself telling a friend all about how I just am not cut out for multi-tasking. I went on and on about how I was dreading breaking up my thesis-related work activities and felt like I would end the day exhausted and depleted. Thursday morning, I felt better than I had in weeks. When I reflected on the previous day, I realized I had thoroughly enjoyed hopping from one activity to the next. I had felt engaged with those around me, as if all of the energy in my body had focused itself with laser-like precision on the task at hand.

What I’ve taken from some of these experiences is two-fold. First, our society is all too inclined to sacrifice the body’s wisdom on the alter of the mind’s intelligence. We have been taught to distrust our bodies our whole lives. We’ve been told:

“Not enough sleep? Drink some coffee. Don’t nap, that’s lazy. Maybe a run will help. Yeah, that sounds good. Use up some more energy. See how you feel. What you don’t feel better? Weird.”

Or maybe:

“Feeling hungry? Don’t eat too much, and definitely don’t eat fat. Wait oops make that carbs. Wait, we mean sugar.”

… I’m sorry, say what?

We are taught how to think, rationalize, and internalize other people’s thoughts and rationalizations, but we are not taught how to sit with ourselves and listen to our own wisdom. Our wisdom tells us when and how to sleep, eat, and basically exist on this planet with some semblance of emotional and physical stability. The secret is staying still long enough to hear it.

My second take away from these musings is that I think we should tread a little more carefully around the concept of our own identity. We tend to partake in activities and endeavors that fit into the model of who we have told ourselves we are. These ideas may have very little do to with what we actually would enjoy, given we granted ourselves the opportunity. Take for instance my sixteen-hour day full of multi-tasking, an activity that I supposedly hate and am very, very bad at. Well apparently I actually love it, given what my body was telling me during the experience and afterwards. Additionally, I grew up as an avid indoor girl, with absolutely zero interest in spending a night without a roof over my head. Any mention of camping, no shower, or in any way roughing it (a definition I left open to my own loose interpretation), and I was out. Well again, I’ve now been camping, and I LOVE it. It’s the best thing ever. Sleeping outside equals happiness. Hmm. Suffice it to say, I am not someone who hates the outdoors or multi-tasking, regardless of whatever “identity” my sweet little mind has conjured up for me. From all of this, I’ve decided that life is fluid, and we should try to refrain from cramming our lives into whatever tidy box we have designed for ourselves. Maintaining openness in our lives, self-identity, and ideologies is undoubtedly a very vulnerable feeling. However, without a little bit of air and space, we will never be able to grow past our current state and into the yet unimagined people that the world is begging for us to become.