Listen to your body

A few posts ago I wrote that I only really eat when I am hungry, that I don't eat for the sake or eating and that I don't have a routine when it comes to food.  This idea taps into something much deeper that doesn't just affect when and what I eat.  I treat my body like it's not really part of me, which may sound weird at first but let me explain.  I like to treat my mind and my body as being two spirits, two separate entities, they sometimes get along, sometimes they don't.  I like to treat my body like I am a guest within it, that it has a mind of its own and that it does its own thing and that I'm here to guide it rather than controlling it.  There is a mentality of symbiosis that persists for me through everything I do in terms of my health and my over all well-being.

To that end, I eat when I am hungry, I try and cool off if I feel too warm, I try and warm up if I feel too cold, and I sleep when I am tired amongst many other things.  That last one as I have said before is something I have struggled with ever since I was a child.  Insomnia has always been a part of my life and there was a time when I was obsessed with fighting against it but as I have grown older, whether I just don't have the energy or whether it has come about because of some great revelation I don't know but either way I have come to accept that if I can't sleep then I am not going to sleep so I may as well get up and do something.  To that end I do feel like I sleep better when I can get it now than I did when I would lie in bed all night staring at the ceiling before passing out from exhaustion.

It's taken me a while to get here but I listen to what my body is trying to tell me.  The more you start to think about this mentality though the more I think most people realise it makes sense.  Your body does a lot without you having to tell it, your eyes blink, your lungs breathe, your heart beats, none of these things are consciously controlled, although some can be when you focus on them, a lot of them can't be controlled consciously.  In that regard the divide between the part of you that is mechanical and the part of you that is spiritual is self evident.

I've wrote about past experiences with food and drink, notably the tequila story that left me throwing up for half the night and which led to my body to react quite violently when I tried it again a while later.  The response demonstrated an awareness and a recognition, that my stomach in some way, maybe not in a literal sense, thought to itself "Oh no not that again, out now!" and threw it back up.  That feeling though extends beyond negatives through to positive experiences too, your heartbeat stopping or skipping a beat when you see someone you have really fallen for, the butterflies you get when you are around them, and those experiences you have where you are overcome with joy or excitement when you're on a roller coaster or something else with great speed and you feel a rush that comes from your body's reaction more than your mind.

I don't know how long I will be here for, life can be short.  In this life I only get one body and it has to last me as long as it can.  I treat this body like I am a guest in it because I recognise that I can't control everything it does.  I can tell it where to go, I tell it what to do, but I can't control how it reacts to so many things and this isn't just true for me this is true for everyone.  Your biological processes are out of your conscious control.

It might sound weird to you but it's what works for me, and given all of the health problems that I have had in the last 2 years I've come to the realisation that my own mind probably doesn't know what's best for my body so I should trust it more, let it tell me what it wants, and it does have ways of letting you know if you do stop and pay attention to it.  Most biological responses are simple enough to understand when you take the time to learn about them.  I guess in many ways this is like the line you draw between those who can drive a car and those that know how it works and how to fix it, or those who just use a PC and those who can actually fix them when something goes wrong, there's a deeper understanding of what is happening, and an appreciation that all these things, cars, computers, and human bodies, are machines, the former made from metal and wires and the latter made from flesh and bone, but still a machine.