Your Body Knows: Health As A Pathway To Transformation

I used to wear a smartwatch every day. At some point, I started noticing a sharp ache in my left wrist. I chalked it up to overuse from planks or push-ups. Then the pain crept into my shoulder. During a workout, I mentioned it to my brother, a brilliant trainer and massage therapist who specializes in orthopedic rehab. “It’s your watch,” he said. He was right—I noticed on the days I left it off, my wrist felt better.

I started reading the research on electromagnetic frequencies and their interaction with the body and it made sense. My wrist was telling me something long before my brain caught up.

The Intelligence Below Your Neck

In a culture drowning in health data, it is easy to lose touch with your own body. These days we check our wearable smart ring or app to find out how we slept, if we walked enough, or how our stress levels are—but our bodies already know. And we’re not in tune with them.

Your energy. Your digestion. Your mental clarity. These are messages from your most ancient and accessible center of intelligence, if you’re willing to listen.

This isn’t about demonizing EMFs or the data that we now have access to, I personally love it. But the risk is we’re subbing out our self awareness. We have become addicted to figuring out everything—including the health of our body—from the neck up, rather than tapping into what leads to real transformation: listening to the body and trusting its guidance and its wisdom.

Your Most Sacred Relationship

In a world that either pathologizes or idolizes the body, I invite you to release the programming that says you must both fear and sculpt it, and remember that your body is something to be in sacred relationship with. It is your teacher. As with all relationship transformations, curiosity is the gateway. And acceptance is the key.

Many years ago my grandfather, a wildly successful chemical executive, was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer and a very aggressive tumor. He was told he had a matter of weeks to live. Rather than emotionally freezing and reacting to his diagnosis as “the truth”, he took it on as a necessary course correction. He knew it was an opportunity for increased self awareness. My grandfather chose not to rush into a highly prescriptive pharmacological treatment plan. I am sure he was scared but he refused to let that be his default response. Instead, he got curious. He asked, “What is this diagnosis asking me to look at?”

He took some of the guidance of his medical doctor and western protocols but that wasn’t where the real healing was found. His diagnosis became an intimate relationship with a master level teacher. He knew he had to learn from the experience. His healing journey was mystical. He was living on sacred land in Cerrillos, New Mexico. He was already a practitioner of indigenous traditions. He asked his medicine man for guidance which led him on a path that included sweat lodges, a goat’s milk fast, a macrobiotic diet, and confronting the grief he had carried since he was four years old, when his two-year-old sister drowned right before him. That traumatic encounter with the loss of his sister sent him spinning on a pathway of success. Through deep and guided self reflection he realized the development of this very aggressive tumor had to be named. He named it Activity, it represented decades of accomplishment all attained to avoid feeling.

His cancer was not some random physical event. It was emotional. Spiritual. Generational. His willingness to look for the lesson altered everything, for him and for generations following him.

My grandfather did not die from inoperable prostate cancer. In fact, he is documented in case studies for longevity with his diagnosis. Ultimately, my grandfather died of old age. He allowed his body to be a wisdom teacher and it was.

Creating Your Story of Health

Your relationship with your body is one of the most obvious places inherited beliefs show up. Unless you have consciously rewritten the script, your body is carrying seven generations of beliefs, stories, and agreements—spoken and unspoken—about health, value, and worth.

What was your family’s conversation about health? How about the body, or body image? When you imagine your older self, do you look and feel like your parents? Your grandparents? Are you happy with the image you see? How might you want to write a new narrative about health and body?

Witnessing my grandfather’s healing journey when I was 13 years old fundamentally altered my relationship with my body and my health. I became empowered. I knew I was not merely a victim of labels, diagnoses, or symptoms. I am in a co-creative relationship with my body and my health.

We each carry stories that shape how we relate to our bodies. Maybe:

• You were raised in a house that demonized sugar and worshipped supplements
• You rejected health dogma because it felt like control
• You are in a body that doesn’t match the metrics
• You assume you will get certain diseases because of your family history
• You are obsessed with being ‘healthy’ yet regularly live in fear

The beliefs you were raised with likely shaped the way you feel about health in some way, but you get to choose your health story. Your body is always giving you information, and you can be the great interpreter of what your body is wanting you to know.

Being in right relationship with your body will change your life. Not just because you will sleep better or digest more easily, but because you will begin to trust yourself again.

Here is what I want you to know:

• Your body is not a project to fix
• You do not need to be perfect; you need to be present
• Your body is a partner to be in relationship with

Whole Body Awareness: A Practice to Come Home

Do not wait for a diagnosis to start listening. Do not wait until you are burnt out, bloated, or breaking down.

Listen deeply. Trust that your body knows what you need right now and that it is communicating with you all the time.

It could be a sacred appointment you keep with drinking water throughout the day. Or skipping a second glass of wine because you want to feel good in the morning. Or perhaps walking every day because you love your future 77-year-old self enough to move now. Giving yourself what you need is less about discipline, and more about devotion to the body you are getting to experience this life with.

Whole Body Awareness is the practice I return to again and again to reconnect with my body’s wisdom. It is a practice of sensing the present moment through your body—no matter where you are or what is going on.

Here are the three steps:

1. Take a deep breath and bring awareness to your body, noticing sensations. Use words that end in ing to describe those sensations:

Do you feel a tightening? A pulling? A buzzing?

Bring your awareness to where in your body you are noticing those sensations. Is it in your chest? Or your hands? Perhaps your neck?

No need to justify or explain why you’re experiencing the body sensations you are experiencing.

2. Notice what feelings are present and identify at least two of these five core feeling states:

• Anger
• Sadness
• Joy
• Fear
• Creativity

Stay in your body. And don’t go rogue, stick to this list of five feelings. Trust me.

3. Notice your next thought. It doesn’t have to make any sense. Pay attention, what thought is here now?

That is the full practice. Notice your body sensations, your feeling states, and your next thought.

Within those three steps is the wonder of Whole Body Awareness. This practice brings you into the now. It slows reactivity. It reestablishes trust. And it reminds you: you can always get present to what’s here, now.

Step Into Transformation: Your Body Is the Doorway

Health is not a project. It is a partnership. Your body is not something to manage—it is something to trust. When you listen deeply, you remember: clarity, aliveness, and wisdom live below the neck.

Start now. Start with your body. It already knows the way.

I created a free Whole Body Awareness meditation and worksheet to help you return to that knowing. Many of my clients find that with just a few weeks of practice, they move through the steps instinctively. I use it every day—sometimes every hour.

Get access to the meditation and worksheet here.