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Learn the Language of Your Body
Learn the Language of Your Body
and Make Friends with Your Inner Healer
Author: Eve A. Wood, M.D. Source
Examining Physical Messages
Often, our body’s symptoms are manifestations of our unrecognized psychic pain—of stress, depression,
anxiety, grief, and fear. When we’re out of touch with our emotional challenges and needs, our bodies feel and
express the problem. We may suffer from sleep difficulties, muscle tension, or shortness of breath. We may
become irritable, sweaty, short-tempered, tearful, hypertensive, or “wiped out.” We can even develop problems
such as headaches, colitis, back pain, cardiac disease, asthma, and esophagitis. Sometimes when we’re
carrying traumas that we don’t even realize exist; our bodies struggle to let us know what’s going on by making
us sick.
Every moment, our physical selves are registering experiences and communicating with us about what’s
happening. When someone smiles at us, our bodies register joy, our blood pressure and heart rate diminish,
and calming chemicals suffuse our systems. We feel good. Yet when another person cuts us off in traffic and
gives us the finger, our bodies register upset. Our blood pressure and heart rate rise; we may get sweaty and
jumpy. We feel bad.
Scientist and author Candace Pert talks about the molecules of emotion that affect every cell in the body.
Hundreds of chemical messengers (informational substances) are registering and communicating emotional
experiences throughout our bodies all the time. Whether we recognize it or not, we’re physically feeling things.
Sometimes our minds can’t, don’t, or won’t register the emotions that impact us. When this disconnect gets
large enough, we may feel sick. Our “illness” may take us to the emergency room or to our family doctor. After
a thorough assessment and a bunch of tests, we might even be told that there’s nothing wrong—in other
words, nothing can be found on an exam, x-ray, or blood panel to explain our distress.
But something is wrong: We’re ill. We feel bad because something is going on, and our bodies are trying to let
us know what it is. It’s our job to learn the language of our physical selves, to determine what’s amiss, and to
allow our symptoms to guide us in finding our unique path to wellness. We can all do this, and I’m going to
show you how.
Let me give you some examples of what I’m talking about. I’ll start by telling you something about how my body
talks to me, and how I’ve learned to heed its lessons.
Developing Awareness: My Story
Many years ago while I was in a residency training program to become a psychiatrist, a psychologist was
teaching our class about psychological testing, which is a system of structured questions and exercises
designed to be administered and scored to provide help in understanding brain function and diagnoses in
patients. He told us that a new computer-based tool had just come out, one that would spit out a psychological
profile of anyone who completed a several-page questionnaire. He offered us residents the opportunity to be
evaluated in this way so that we could see what we thought of the tool. My whole class chose to do it, and we
got our results back the following week.
My profile said that I was a stable, well-adjusted person with an optimistic outlook and a clear sense of self and
my goals in life. But it also reported that I had a propensity for somatization—that is, at times I’d feel my
distress through physical symptoms such as headaches or stomach pains. How odd, I remember thinking. I
have no awareness whatsoever of doing this. But I hadn’t yet learned the language of my body.
The teaching stayed with me, and I began to pay attention to what my body might be telling me that I was
missing. I started to appreciate the wisdom in my physical responses to life occurrences. I found that I’d get
headaches or stomachaches when I was operating from a place of guilt, or when I was trying to do what I
thought I should, instead of what I wanted to do.
Each time this occurred, I challenged myself to change my behavior and thus eliminate the symptom. I learned
to do it so well that eventually the need for the physical sign went away, and I rarely do anything from a place
of “should” or guilt today. On the infrequent occasions that I begin to be drawn in that direction, I start to feel ill
or unsettled. At that point, it’s my job to stop, look at the situation, listen to myself, and then shift gears.
My body has talked to me in other ways over the years. It has, for example, taught me a lot about how to take
charge of my needs in my family life. I’ve been in a stable, happy marriage with the same man for almost 25
years, but my husband, Rick, and I have been through some challenging times, just as most couples have who
stay together long enough.
On several occasions when my husband wasn’t dealing with his own issues adequately and his behavior was
compromising my well-being and that of our family, I developed weird physical symptoms. There was a period
when I had such severe pain in my feet that it hurt to walk or stand. A full medical workup found no
abnormality, and I eventually realized that my body was saying, I can’t stand this anymore. I can’t keep walking
this road. Something has to change or I’ll need to leave this relationship.
On another occasion, I developed severe chest pain that was diagnosed as mild esophagitis. Although the
abnormality did show up on an endoscopy, I knew that it was a result of my reaction to my husband’s behavior.
The pain would come and go, day by day, in response to how comfortable I felt with what Rick was doing to
address his problems. My body was saying, I can’t stomach this. I can’t take this in. Enough is enough.
I learned to use these messages from my inner healer to guide me in self-care and marital communication. I
spoke and lived my needs. Eventually, my marriage improved and the symptoms resolved.
Our bodies store and remember our histories. Every one of our cells is involved in this process. So, as I sit
here writing about these challenging times in my own life, I am actually re-experiencing—in a much milder
form—the foot and chest pains I just described. Although my marital problems are long gone, and my husband
is on the other side of avoiding challenge, the experiences have become a piece of my personhood. They live
in my heart, soul, brain, and body, and your system works the same way. Your body knows, remembers, and
has a lot to teach you about how to take charge of your emotional life.
I want to share one more example from my life before I tell you about some patients. This one concerns the
language of body memory. When I was in my residency training, I did a rotation under a particularly critical and
nasty supervisor. Dr. Jones was the head of a department in the hospital and everyone had to put up with his
treatment to get through a required rotation. I found my two months under him to be among the most traumatic
of my training years. When they were over, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Never again would I have to deal
with Dr. Jones.
Some years passed, and I graduated and set up my own private practice. Then one day as I was seeing
patients in my office, a phone call came in. Between appointments, I checked my voice mail. As soon as I heard
Dr. Jones’s voice on the recording, I felt anxious. Unsettled, I listened to his brief request that I give him a call.
What did I do wrong? I found myself thinking. I then immediately reassured myself: There’s nothing he can do
to hurt me now. My body had stored the trauma of dealing with this man, and I had to use my mind to talk back
to the fear. But the sensation was also there to warn me: Stay away from that guy.
I mustered the necessary courage to call Dr. Jones back. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that he was
calling to offer me a job—and my pleasure in being able to politely (and self-protectively) decline the offer!
I want to share a few additional clinical vignettes—examples of different ways our bodies tell us our stories—
from my practice. As you read each one, think about your own body’s language. How do your cells and organs
talk to you?
Worrying Herself Sick: Sandra’s Story
I was having coffee with a colleague when she said, “I’m really worried about my friend Sandra. Something is
really wrong with her. She has all these neurological symptoms—numbness, weakness, and pain. She had to
take a leave of absence from work. She’s been hospitalized and evaluated at several medical facilities, but no
one can figure out what’s wrong with her. Would you be willing to see her?”
Concerned and perplexed, I responded, “Of course.”
As I sat with Sandra the next day, she described a significant disconnect between her spiritual life and her
work. “I hate my job,” she said, “but I don’t know what I want to do instead. My spiritual practice is totally
separate from everything else I do.” As she told me her life story, I kept getting the sense that she wasn’t really
in the picture. She’d had many interesting experiences, but very few of them seemed to reflect her choices,
passions, purpose, or even interests. They sounded more reactive to others than driven by self-knowledge or
drive. She was anxious and very self-critical.
Sandra also described her neurological symptoms and the extent of her medical evaluation. She had
numbness, weakness, pain, and sensitivity in her arms and legs that would come and go. It didn’t follow the
usual distribution of any neurological illness. She described the pain as mini-explosions all over her limbs. I
thought, Something is pushing to get out, screaming to be heard.
As I sat with Sandra and immersed myself in listening to her story, dreams, symptoms, and pains, my inner
voice began to scream, There’s nothing neurologically wrong with her! Her workups had been exceptional; it
was her story that was shouting to be heard. Her body had forced her to pause—to stop doing what she had
been—so that she could examine and fix her life.
“There’s nothing neurologically wrong with you, Sandra,” I said, voicing my inner wisdom after sitting with her
for two and a half hours. “You’re not in your own story. Your body is telling you that you need to stop, take
stock, and figure out how to take charge of your life. You need to bring what matters to you together with what
you’re doing, and I can help you do so. You’re going to be fine.”
Sandra began to cry with relief; her inner healer had been recognized. “I know you’re right,” she said. “I’m just
so anxious and overwhelmed.” Her physical complaints were masking her generalized anxiety. She was scared
and confused, not neurologically ill.
“You need to stop focusing on the symptoms,” I said. “The more you worry about them, the worse they’ll get.” I
taught her a thought-stopping technique to use whenever she began to worry. You, too, can learn this tool
from my Stop Anxiety Now Kit (published by Hay House), or my first book, There’s Always Help; There’s Always
Hope.
I explained that whenever she began to experience the symptoms, she needed to say, “There’s nothing wrong
with me. I’m just anxious. What is my body trying to tell me?” She could also use some anti-anxiety medicine
briefly to take the edge off her worries if she couldn’t easily get them to settle down, or if she had trouble
pulling herself out of the negative thought loop. The physical manifestations would be quieted, but the real
work—the process that would eliminate these signs all together—involved figuring out how to heed the
language of her body. We had to determine what she needed to do to take charge of her emotional life.
Recognizing the truth in my explanation, Sandra began to quiet her body with the thought-stopping technique,
anxiety management, and self-exploration. She was soon able to return to work and start examining the pieces
of her current life that suited her and identify the ones that needed to be changed. Although Sandra isn’t
finished with her long-term work, she’s on the way to wellness, and she’s come to see her symptoms as
messages from her inner healer. They’re to be welcomed, not feared.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from 10 Steps to Take Charge of Your Emotional Life, by Eve A. Wood, M.D. Published by Hay
House, it is available at online and retail bookstores.
and Make Friends with Your Inner Healer
Author: Eve A. Wood, M.D. Source
Examining Physical Messages
Often, our body’s symptoms are manifestations of our unrecognized psychic pain—of stress, depression,
anxiety, grief, and fear. When we’re out of touch with our emotional challenges and needs, our bodies feel and
express the problem. We may suffer from sleep difficulties, muscle tension, or shortness of breath. We may
become irritable, sweaty, short-tempered, tearful, hypertensive, or “wiped out.” We can even develop problems
such as headaches, colitis, back pain, cardiac disease, asthma, and esophagitis. Sometimes when we’re
carrying traumas that we don’t even realize exist; our bodies struggle to let us know what’s going on by making
us sick.
Every moment, our physical selves are registering experiences and communicating with us about what’s
happening. When someone smiles at us, our bodies register joy, our blood pressure and heart rate diminish,
and calming chemicals suffuse our systems. We feel good. Yet when another person cuts us off in traffic and
gives us the finger, our bodies register upset. Our blood pressure and heart rate rise; we may get sweaty and
jumpy. We feel bad.
Scientist and author Candace Pert talks about the molecules of emotion that affect every cell in the body.
Hundreds of chemical messengers (informational substances) are registering and communicating emotional
experiences throughout our bodies all the time. Whether we recognize it or not, we’re physically feeling things.
Sometimes our minds can’t, don’t, or won’t register the emotions that impact us. When this disconnect gets
large enough, we may feel sick. Our “illness” may take us to the emergency room or to our family doctor. After
a thorough assessment and a bunch of tests, we might even be told that there’s nothing wrong—in other
words, nothing can be found on an exam, x-ray, or blood panel to explain our distress.
But something is wrong: We’re ill. We feel bad because something is going on, and our bodies are trying to let
us know what it is. It’s our job to learn the language of our physical selves, to determine what’s amiss, and to
allow our symptoms to guide us in finding our unique path to wellness. We can all do this, and I’m going to
show you how.
Let me give you some examples of what I’m talking about. I’ll start by telling you something about how my body
talks to me, and how I’ve learned to heed its lessons.
Developing Awareness: My Story
Many years ago while I was in a residency training program to become a psychiatrist, a psychologist was
teaching our class about psychological testing, which is a system of structured questions and exercises
designed to be administered and scored to provide help in understanding brain function and diagnoses in
patients. He told us that a new computer-based tool had just come out, one that would spit out a psychological
profile of anyone who completed a several-page questionnaire. He offered us residents the opportunity to be
evaluated in this way so that we could see what we thought of the tool. My whole class chose to do it, and we
got our results back the following week.
My profile said that I was a stable, well-adjusted person with an optimistic outlook and a clear sense of self and
my goals in life. But it also reported that I had a propensity for somatization—that is, at times I’d feel my
distress through physical symptoms such as headaches or stomach pains. How odd, I remember thinking. I
have no awareness whatsoever of doing this. But I hadn’t yet learned the language of my body.
The teaching stayed with me, and I began to pay attention to what my body might be telling me that I was
missing. I started to appreciate the wisdom in my physical responses to life occurrences. I found that I’d get
headaches or stomachaches when I was operating from a place of guilt, or when I was trying to do what I
thought I should, instead of what I wanted to do.
Each time this occurred, I challenged myself to change my behavior and thus eliminate the symptom. I learned
to do it so well that eventually the need for the physical sign went away, and I rarely do anything from a place
of “should” or guilt today. On the infrequent occasions that I begin to be drawn in that direction, I start to feel ill
or unsettled. At that point, it’s my job to stop, look at the situation, listen to myself, and then shift gears.
My body has talked to me in other ways over the years. It has, for example, taught me a lot about how to take
charge of my needs in my family life. I’ve been in a stable, happy marriage with the same man for almost 25
years, but my husband, Rick, and I have been through some challenging times, just as most couples have who
stay together long enough.
On several occasions when my husband wasn’t dealing with his own issues adequately and his behavior was
compromising my well-being and that of our family, I developed weird physical symptoms. There was a period
when I had such severe pain in my feet that it hurt to walk or stand. A full medical workup found no
abnormality, and I eventually realized that my body was saying, I can’t stand this anymore. I can’t keep walking
this road. Something has to change or I’ll need to leave this relationship.
On another occasion, I developed severe chest pain that was diagnosed as mild esophagitis. Although the
abnormality did show up on an endoscopy, I knew that it was a result of my reaction to my husband’s behavior.
The pain would come and go, day by day, in response to how comfortable I felt with what Rick was doing to
address his problems. My body was saying, I can’t stomach this. I can’t take this in. Enough is enough.
I learned to use these messages from my inner healer to guide me in self-care and marital communication. I
spoke and lived my needs. Eventually, my marriage improved and the symptoms resolved.
Our bodies store and remember our histories. Every one of our cells is involved in this process. So, as I sit
here writing about these challenging times in my own life, I am actually re-experiencing—in a much milder
form—the foot and chest pains I just described. Although my marital problems are long gone, and my husband
is on the other side of avoiding challenge, the experiences have become a piece of my personhood. They live
in my heart, soul, brain, and body, and your system works the same way. Your body knows, remembers, and
has a lot to teach you about how to take charge of your emotional life.
I want to share one more example from my life before I tell you about some patients. This one concerns the
language of body memory. When I was in my residency training, I did a rotation under a particularly critical and
nasty supervisor. Dr. Jones was the head of a department in the hospital and everyone had to put up with his
treatment to get through a required rotation. I found my two months under him to be among the most traumatic
of my training years. When they were over, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Never again would I have to deal
with Dr. Jones.
Some years passed, and I graduated and set up my own private practice. Then one day as I was seeing
patients in my office, a phone call came in. Between appointments, I checked my voice mail. As soon as I heard
Dr. Jones’s voice on the recording, I felt anxious. Unsettled, I listened to his brief request that I give him a call.
What did I do wrong? I found myself thinking. I then immediately reassured myself: There’s nothing he can do
to hurt me now. My body had stored the trauma of dealing with this man, and I had to use my mind to talk back
to the fear. But the sensation was also there to warn me: Stay away from that guy.
I mustered the necessary courage to call Dr. Jones back. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that he was
calling to offer me a job—and my pleasure in being able to politely (and self-protectively) decline the offer!
I want to share a few additional clinical vignettes—examples of different ways our bodies tell us our stories—
from my practice. As you read each one, think about your own body’s language. How do your cells and organs
talk to you?
Worrying Herself Sick: Sandra’s Story
I was having coffee with a colleague when she said, “I’m really worried about my friend Sandra. Something is
really wrong with her. She has all these neurological symptoms—numbness, weakness, and pain. She had to
take a leave of absence from work. She’s been hospitalized and evaluated at several medical facilities, but no
one can figure out what’s wrong with her. Would you be willing to see her?”
Concerned and perplexed, I responded, “Of course.”
As I sat with Sandra the next day, she described a significant disconnect between her spiritual life and her
work. “I hate my job,” she said, “but I don’t know what I want to do instead. My spiritual practice is totally
separate from everything else I do.” As she told me her life story, I kept getting the sense that she wasn’t really
in the picture. She’d had many interesting experiences, but very few of them seemed to reflect her choices,
passions, purpose, or even interests. They sounded more reactive to others than driven by self-knowledge or
drive. She was anxious and very self-critical.
Sandra also described her neurological symptoms and the extent of her medical evaluation. She had
numbness, weakness, pain, and sensitivity in her arms and legs that would come and go. It didn’t follow the
usual distribution of any neurological illness. She described the pain as mini-explosions all over her limbs. I
thought, Something is pushing to get out, screaming to be heard.
As I sat with Sandra and immersed myself in listening to her story, dreams, symptoms, and pains, my inner
voice began to scream, There’s nothing neurologically wrong with her! Her workups had been exceptional; it
was her story that was shouting to be heard. Her body had forced her to pause—to stop doing what she had
been—so that she could examine and fix her life.
“There’s nothing neurologically wrong with you, Sandra,” I said, voicing my inner wisdom after sitting with her
for two and a half hours. “You’re not in your own story. Your body is telling you that you need to stop, take
stock, and figure out how to take charge of your life. You need to bring what matters to you together with what
you’re doing, and I can help you do so. You’re going to be fine.”
Sandra began to cry with relief; her inner healer had been recognized. “I know you’re right,” she said. “I’m just
so anxious and overwhelmed.” Her physical complaints were masking her generalized anxiety. She was scared
and confused, not neurologically ill.
“You need to stop focusing on the symptoms,” I said. “The more you worry about them, the worse they’ll get.” I
taught her a thought-stopping technique to use whenever she began to worry. You, too, can learn this tool
from my Stop Anxiety Now Kit (published by Hay House), or my first book, There’s Always Help; There’s Always
Hope.
I explained that whenever she began to experience the symptoms, she needed to say, “There’s nothing wrong
with me. I’m just anxious. What is my body trying to tell me?” She could also use some anti-anxiety medicine
briefly to take the edge off her worries if she couldn’t easily get them to settle down, or if she had trouble
pulling herself out of the negative thought loop. The physical manifestations would be quieted, but the real
work—the process that would eliminate these signs all together—involved figuring out how to heed the
language of her body. We had to determine what she needed to do to take charge of her emotional life.
Recognizing the truth in my explanation, Sandra began to quiet her body with the thought-stopping technique,
anxiety management, and self-exploration. She was soon able to return to work and start examining the pieces
of her current life that suited her and identify the ones that needed to be changed. Although Sandra isn’t
finished with her long-term work, she’s on the way to wellness, and she’s come to see her symptoms as
messages from her inner healer. They’re to be welcomed, not feared.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from 10 Steps to Take Charge of Your Emotional Life, by Eve A. Wood, M.D. Published by Hay
House, it is available at online and retail bookstores.