When Your Body Isn’t the Enemy:
Description
When Your Body Isn’t the Enemy: How Separating “Me” from My Pain Changed Everything
A simple shift in language that lowers stress, calms inflammation, and helps the nervous system heal
There’s a quiet kind of liberation that happens when you stop saying “I am exhausted” and instead say “My body is exhausted,” or “My nervous system is overwhelmed right now.” It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s one of the most loving and intelligent forms of healing we have access to, especially for those of us living with chronic stress, trauma history, illness, or a kind of burnout we can’t quite shake or explain away.
Just this morning, my first morning back from an intense week-long trip, I immediately felt the ache and heaviness in my body. There was that familiar metal taste on my tongue, the taste of cortisol and detox beginning to move through me. And then I heard it, without effort or analysis: “My body is feeling very tired and sore,” and “My nervous system has been through a lot and it needs rest and care.” I know this language, I’ve studied it in my non-duality practice, but to have it come through automatically this morning while feeling so exhausted and drained felt beautiful, and loving. It stopped me in my tracks and instead of beating myself up for how weak my body and nervous system were - I saw them with compassion, and with that capacity saw what I needed to do to support myself. It showed me how much my inner system and awareness of my entire being has shifted, and how I can support this body and nervous system in return, instead of collapsing into them as my identity.
Most of us were never taught to separate who we are from what our bodies are carrying. We fuse our identity to pain, anxiety, symptoms, old coping patterns, and call it “me.” That identity fusion, creates even more pressure on a system that is already in survival mode. When you are fused with the body or the nervous system, you don’t just feel tired, you become the tiredness. You don’t just experience anxiety - you are the anxiety. And when that happens, there’s no space left to care for what’s hurting, because you are stuck inside it.
The body is only a thought. Do not give it the power to define who you are.
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