When illness or injury strike an undertone of the fall out is loosing trust in your own body. A sudden realisation that you aren't super human any more and things can break.
This is not always obvious but if you listen to peoples narrative after illness or after an injury there's a definite lack of trust, some people hide it away by refusing to acknowledge the illness/injury is there, powering through and not allowing it to stop them. Of course, the trust issue is there, and by hiding from it they're just burying it for another day. Others loose their trust so much that they hold themselves back, placing themselves in an imaginary cotton wool and always finding a reason to not push those boundaries.
Both are legitimate ways to deal with it, after all no one explains that part of the road to recovery is learning ot trust your body again, its an unspoken part of the trauma that's left behind.
I spent years not trusting my body from day to day, my narrative as soon as I woke up was, I wonder if I'm going to be able to walk today, I never could trust that I could bounce out of bed, whenever I did something I couldn't ever be sure how my body was going to react, whether it was a yoga class, a drive to a friends, a night out or a fitness class I couldn't tell how I would respond in the days or weeks after that. There was a constant lack of trust sitting inside.
I realised the other day when I got out of bed with my dodgy knee and tentatively took the first step, that I hadn't felt like that in a while, that I hadn't questioned how I would feel, that for the first time in my adult life I'd been just getting out of bed and getting on with my day.
And what I've realised is that lack of trust that I used to feel constantly has turned into an awareness of my bodies response to what I do, I now know that if I eat shit I will feel like shit, there's no need to not trust my body I know the response I will get, I know that if I push myself to the limit she will tell me I've done too much, she now has her say and so I now trust her to be honest with me.
How did I get there? I tuned in, I learnt everything I could about my body, her triggers, how she communicated and I listened, I got to know her like you'd get to know an animal you loved or a child. I watched how she tried for me every day, but when I placed hurdles in her way sometimes she couldn't compete, I understood that she wasn't like everyone else and just because others could do something didn't mean I could, I found different ways of doing the things I wanted to do that felt right for my body and I also trusted that if my body said no if I was honest with myself it was probably because I didn't really want to do it in the first place, I was probably just trying to be super human. When I started to let go of the body hatred I had and used my energy towards love, when I started to focus on how I could work with my body rather than fight against her and when I started to trust that if I treated her the best way I possibly could she would be there for me that's when I started to let go of the fear I'd felt that she would let me down.
And then I get injured, and noticed a different reaction to the past, I found myself asking what I has to learn form this rather than looking at why I had been let down, instead of getting angry at the fact I had to miss training and spend a night in hospital I asked the question what was I doing to cause my body to have to shout at me, what was I doing to cause my body to have to stop me, and I realised I was about to jump into my old rhythm of busy, I was about to get going again, which is not what I want to do but what my habit is, so her breaking was a form of self love, it was her way of stopping me take that path, that's an awesome friend to have if you ask me.
But there's a still a new form of trust I now need to work on, trust in a part of my body that feels weak now, trust that it will support me and won't cause me pain. And how do you build trust in that body part? Like anything it takes time, it takes awareness and it takes patience, I have to listen to it, I have to respond to what it says and I have to give it a chance to heal, only then if I tune in and send love to my knee will I know that I will be able to trust it once more. I also have to trust that it will get better when it feels that I am ready to slow down, and until then I will be moving slowly because my knee hurts.
So its another lesson of slowness, of holding back rather than pushing, of self exploration and self love and for seeing the long goal rather than short term gain.
What's your body trying to tell you but you refuse to listen too, what illness or injuries do you keep getting thrown? How can you change your narrative to your body and help it to heal? Do you see yourself battling your body or working with it? Do you trust your body to know what's good for you or do you still think you know better?
