In my last post I explained that “tuning in to the body channel” means becoming aware of how your body is responding to internal processes (for example, thoughts, emotions, urges, intentions) and to external experiences.  I gave you a brief introductory exercise so you could explore for yourself. This time I go over three ways tuning in to your body can support personal growth and recovery:

• Enhancing self–awareness
• Finding new resources for managing emotion
• Opening a channel for healing

Enhancing Self–awareness

In Part I, I listed some big advantages you gain by “tuning in to the body channel.” I said that your body will always supply you with accurate information about your feelings, even when your conscious mind is denying them, ignoring them or just can’t figure them out. I also reported that your body is the first to know; it “gets” your feelings faster than your thinking brain can. What’s the use of this kind of awareness? Why is more better?

First, awareness of body responses is one more way of knowing yourself, of knowing who you are. Many of you with eating disorders have spent your lives focused outward to what others think, feel or want, usually at the expense of knowing and valuing your own inner workings, your own needs and desires. The body as truth–teller gives you a particularly direct line into how you feel, what you want or need, and how you uniquely experience the world. These ways of knowing yourself become important building blocks for a strong personal identity, which in turn is crucial to the development of self–confidence and self–direction.

Second, as I pointed out last time, awareness offers the gift of choice. You may find, for example, that beneath that urge to binge is a large knot in your stomach. When you sit with that knot a little longer, you become aware that you’re angry at your mom because she just didn’t seem to be listening to you. Knowing that this is what’s “eating” you allows you to decide what you’d like to do about your feelings. Do you want to talk to your mom about the incident? Go over it first with a friend? Write about it? Take a walk to clear your head and quiet your feelings? What does your body tell you about how each of these options feels?

Finding New Resources for Managing Emotions

“Managing emotion” is whatever you do to handle uncomfortable feelings when they come up. Before recovery, you probably relied on your eating disorder symptoms to do that job. Uncomfortable emotions may still be a major trigger for slips and relapses. When your emotions feel unmanageable, you’re threatened with being overwhelmed by them.

Hopefully in recovery you’ve been developing more and better resources for managing your emotions. You write, meditate, talk to friends, do yoga, pray, speak to yourself in a reassuring way, or other practices. You may have already explored some ways you can engage your body to help you when you’re in emotional distress; for example, you simply observe your breathing, or you purposely take slow, deep breaths into your abdomen until you feel yourself begin to calm down. Or you may have learned to tune in to your feet solidly planted on the ground to experience support in the face of difficult feelings.

Here’s a small exercise you may wish to try as another way to engage your body’s help, remembering to stop if any step makes you uncomfortable:

1. Think of something that’s bothering you. Nothing too big—this is practice!
2. Notice where you feel the “bother” in your body.
3. Now look for a part of your body that isn’t bothered. Perhaps you feel your distress as a pressure in your chest, but you notice that your legs are quite neutral, or even relaxed.
4. Give yourself plenty of time to explore the relaxed feeling.
5. When you’re ready, check back into the sensations in your chest. Have they quieted at all?
6. Try going back and forth between the relaxed or neutral body part and the distressed part at least several more times, spending longer in the relaxed part and perhaps just touching the distressed part briefly. Notice what happens.

(This way of working with your body is representative of an approach called Somatic Experiencing, one of many body–based therapies.)

Opening A Channel for Healing

Although the past is factually in the past, many past experiences can live on inside us because of the emotions they continue to stir up. As we’ve now established, all such emotions have corresponding body sensations. And as we’ve also established, body sensations that can be stirred up can also be quieted and calmed. (Of course, the more complicated the past experience, the more fancy footwork it may take to discover what you need to quiet things down.)

When you quiet down the body state stirred up by a past experience, you quiet the associated emotions at the same time. And you’ve taken a big step toward neutralizing and resolving that experience so it can take its place in the past. You can apply the same approach to neutralizing distress associated with present experiences or to future events that feel threatening; for example, giving a presentation, breaking up with your boyfriend or taking the next step toward healthy eating.

Most of this work is best learned and practiced with a professional who is trained in body–based approaches, particularly if you’re dealing with a history of trauma.  Often people who have despaired of “putting their past into the past” have found working through their bodies opens up new and unexpected possibilities for healing.

For most of us in this culture, tuning in to ourselves means knowing what we’re thinking, perhaps also knowing what emotions we’re feeling. We’re seldom taught to consult our bodies for significant non–health–related information. Bodies are things to be maintained—fed, bathed, clothed, exercised—in return for which they’ll take us where we want to go. Of course, if you have an eating disorder, the body is also something to be pummeled and disciplined into submission.

If you limit yourself to this set of uses (and abuses), you miss out on some powerful ways your body is prepared to support and assist you! This includes helping you with eating disorder recovery. To get what your body has to contribute to personal growth and recovery, you have to be able to “tune in to the body channel.” This means paying attention to how your body is responding to present experience, past memories and learnings, and future plans or expectations.

If you’d like to check out how this works right now, try the following experiment, remembering to stop if anything about it makes you uncomfortable:

1. Start by dropping down into your body. You might do a simple check in, beginning at the top of your head and working down to your toes, just observing what you find. Where might you feel settled or relaxed? Or just neutral? Where do you sense tension or constriction?
2. Now think about something that really annoyed you recently. How does your body respond? Where does it respond? For example, does your jaw tighten? Does your stomach knot? Or your fist clench? Responses may be obvious or subtle.
3. Next think of any accomplishment that made you feel proud. Notice what your body does when you tap into this pride. For instance, does your chest expand? Does your spine straighten? Or might you feel lighter? Again, notice responses may be more obvious or more subtle.

Virtually every experience has a corresponding body response. When you learn to tune in to your body responses, you tap a source of information about yourself that is every bit as useful as knowing what you’re thinking and feeling.

(For some of you, being in your body for any reason feels out of reach or unacceptable. This is particularly likely if you have a history of trauma. If you are someone for whom deepening body connection feels unsafe or unreachable, for whom numbness or shut–down feel like the only safe or known option, you may find it useful to work with a professional who understands how trauma becomes locked into the body. The work to reclaim body connection can be slow going at first. But the payoff for your patience and effort will be well worth it.)

Here are two big advantages of tuning in to the body channel that will interest you. First, your body never lies about what you’re feeling. It will tell you accurately about feelings your conscious mind is denying or ignoring. When you become aware of what you’re feeling, you can make conscious choices about how to respond. Second, your body is the first to know. It sizes up experience and reacts before your conscious mind can pull its thoughts together. Knowing accurately and knowing early can be great gifts, for example when you’ve been accustomed to acting first (think eating disorder symptoms) and asking questions later.

In my next post I go over specific ways body awareness can help in eating disorder recovery.