“When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.”
– Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
In all my years of body-centered training, I heard things like “listen to your body,” “respond with kindness to your body,” and “love your body” on the regular. One thing I don’t ever remember hearing:
“Trust your body.”
Even in the world of somatics, we were taught to lead from the mind to the body, not the other way around.
In Reclaiming Body Trust: Break Free from a Culture of Body Perfection, Disordered Eating, and Other Traumas, Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant write about rebuilding our relationship with the body based on balance, respect, and trust. They write:
Much of what we are taught about living in a body is focused on doing things to and on the body as opposed to for and with the body. You do not need to overcome your body nor do you have to dominate it.
This is absolutely the case in traditional fitness and diet culture, but perhaps surprisingly it holds true even in the realm of body-mind practices. If I want to perform a movement like a yoga pose, I give myself detailed instructions to get my body to do it. For example, this might be running through my head: “Stand with the outer edges of the feet parallel, press down into the big toe mounds, shift the weight into the left leg, lift the right knee, pull the right toes toward the shin, push out through the right heel….” You get the idea.
Yet as I create and lead classes beyond the prescriptive practices I was trained in and as I learn a new sport myself, I’m finding that there is a different way: trust your body.
If you’ve never done a front kick or a two-handed backhand, you will need some instruction to get started but it’s not about keeping that instruction on a loop in your head. Instead, give your body an image and a feeling, then trust it to figure out the details.
In The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey writes
“...the physical body, including the brain, memory bank (conscious and unconscious) and the nervous system—is a tremendously sophisticated and competent collection of potentialities. Inherent within it is an inner intelligence which is staggering. What it doesn’t already know, this inner intelligence learns with childlike ease. It uses billions of cells and neurological communication circuits in every action. No computer yet made can come close to performing the complex physical actions accomplished by even a beginning tennis player, much less a professional.”
So, if there is something you want to learn to do with your body – say, a dance move, or a pickleball shot, or how to make dumplings —experiment with approaching it this way:
First, watch someone competent do the move. Look for details. Notice body position. But also soften your eyes and take in the overall “feel” of the movement.
Second, do it a bunch of times yourself. Maybe start slowly, or without a ball, or doing just part of the movement. This might be bumpy at first but the key is to keep your attention on your body position and what you are doing rather than the result. Is your foot pointed or flexed? Is your paddle pulled back high or low? Is your thumb pressing into or cradling the dumpling? Then, look for a feeling when you get it and when you don’t. It’s those feelings that teach the body, not the words.
Sometimes an image helps give you the feeling (slide your arm into a coat sleeve; angle your paddle edge like you were going to peel an orange with it; hold the dumpling like you are holding a raw egg).
Once you’ve felt the feeling of the move, then ask your body to duplicate the feeling. Your mind might get all tight and want to tell you all the steps and details. But trust your body and ask it to do it again. It takes practice, of course, but it is an effective and less frustrating way to learn a physical move.
Trust is built within the context of a relationship – with a friend, a child or with your body. Gallwey suggests that,
“...[F]or many of us, a new relationship needs to be forged with [the body]. And building new relationships involves new ways of communicating. If the former relationship was characterized by criticism and control, the symptoms of mistrust, then the more desired relationship is one of respect and trust.”
In our thinking-centered culture, it’s easy to get caught in the idea that words and information are the way to learn something. The intelligence of the body, however, actually responds to images and feelings. See it. Get the feeling. Trust your body.