Your body wants to talk to you

Yesterday, I felt my heart rising while working on my computer. Again, today my heart beat did exactly the same. Although I could not tell what triggered it, I knew it was real. For this reason, I concluded that my heart was trying to tell me something important.Therefore, I decided to investigate a bit deeper. I closed my eyes while allowing some breathing time. I let go of my presently task and went to my inner world. Firstly, I found 2 important clues: my body was with tension, and my mind was scattered.

Since I was alone in the office, I decided to do a few body stretching on the floor to help me with the body tension. Concentrating on my breathing and paying attention to the body I found myself slowly but surely, more relaxed. My thoughts where calming down and by the time I have returned to the computer I was in a clear state of mind. Only 8 minutes has passed.

Although, I still cannot pin point the cause for my heart beating faster, I have identified two benefits of stopping what I was doing: my focus was restored and my body was at ease. Similarly, there were two main challenges within the process of listening to what my body was trying to tell me. The first one being to stop what I was doing. Breaking through the urged to continuing working while at the same time hoping the uncomfortable feeling would go away was indeed challenging. Yesterday, I ignored the signals of my body. Today I know better and therefore I was willing to do something different. In my case, closing the eyes was good enough to stop doing what I was doing. The second challenge was to overcome the fear of looking inwards. I was at work, and looking inwards would leave me exposed and vulnerable. To break through this challenge is to shift the self-talk from saying: -I do not have time for this, or someone might see you, how embarrassing-, to saying: let’s explore, I wonder what is happening. What helped me here was curiosity, the curiosity to explore my inner world was stronger than all the self-talk excuses for not trying it.

Today, I stopped doing what I was doing to pay attention to my inner body language. The different between today and yesterday is curiosity. It took one small step, such as closing the eyes to initiate the 8 minutes’ journey to achieve a clear mindset. It might be reasonable to say that an action can alter your thoughts.

As it happens, those 8 minutes were well invested working time. A clear mindset, makes me more productive and focus. Similarly, it enhances my performance and creativity. A clear mind restores my inner balance and therefore brings calm to my space. As my mindset is clear I can communicate more efficiently to others and therefore relatedness grows around me. The things that need to be done have now a hierarchy order that offers me control of what can be done today or tomorrow.

Today I feel gratitude towards my heart, because it has encouraged me to find a moment to restore and regain clear mindset.

Have a great Friday and do practice working with your body – mind – spirit relationship. It is all yours!

Annick Doza