Tend the body first

A couple of weeks ago I had a really shitty night’s sleep. 

I had gone to the chiropractor the day before. It was my first adjustment in a while and only my second visit to this practitioner. 

As the evening and night wore on, my body continued to feel increasingly worse—worse than before the adjustment. The discomfort woke me up around 1:45am and it was a good couple of hours before I was able to fall back to sleep. Even then, my sleep was disrupted as I tossed and turned trying find a comfortable position. There really wasn’t one.

In the morning, my body still hurt. On top of that, I could feel a sense of anxiety and pressure rising up and settling as tightness in my chest. 

I was feeling the pressure of wanting (needing) to get a lot done that day because I had committed my time that weekend to helping my husband stain the deck. And I was feeling anxious about how I was going to balance my needs without letting him down.

Being the task master that it is, my mind wasted no time in telling me to get up and get to work. My body, however, wanted to soak in the hot tub. And so, the mental negotiations began. “If I do X, then I can hit the hot tub. After the hot tub, I’ll tackle Y and then eat some breakfast.” 

But the message I was receiving from that wiser part of myself was clear: 

“Tend the body first”

So that’s what I did. 

After a soak and some food, my body felt a lot better. And, bonus, my mind was more at peace.

I was still crazy tired but tending to my body allowed me to tend to other things that day. Less than my mind had planned but more than I would have accomplished if I hadn’t tended to my body first and continued doing so throughout the day. 

In our culture, we do an abysmal job of respecting our bodies. We treat them like servants when in fact they’re benevolent sages. Unfortunately, we rarely take the time to listen to and heed their wisdom. 

I know why. Because doing so often means doing the opposite of how we’ve been conditioned. Culture says: “Keep moving! Pull yourself up by the bootstraps! Suck it up! No pain, no gain!”

Your body says: “Rest. Wiggle your toes in the grass. Read the book. Take the bath."

And that scares the shit out of us because if we stop moving and producing, we fear we won’t start up again. We fear “falling behind.” 

What if the truth isn’t that by stopping you’ll fall behind but rather that by stopping you’ll end up further ahead? 

Consider it. 

And while you’re pondering, check in with your body. Is there a message it’s sending you? Are you resisting it or embracing it? If you’re resisting the message, ask yourself why.