When my literary agent Michele first read Mind Over Medicine, she told me that it changed the whole way she thought about her health. She said, “Before reading your book, Lissa, I honestly thought my body was none of my business. Now, having read it, I know, without a doubt, it is.”
Many of my patients feel the same way. A woman struggling with a health condition once confessed to me that she thought of her body like she thinks about her car. She’s not a car expert, so when her automobile breaks down, she takes it to her auto mechanic, who repairs it and hands it back to her—fixed.
She had the same attitude about her body. When it broke down, she’d hand her body over to a body expert—a doctor—and pray that the doctor would be skilled enough to fix her.
Is Your Body Your Business?
Is that how you think about your body? Do you believe your body is none of your business? As a physician who spent twelve years of training and ten years of practice learning to become a body expert, I used to believe I knew your body better than you do. I now know that, while I may have a better understanding of the arteries in the leg and I may wield a scalpel more expertly than you, nobody knows your very unique body better than you, and nobody is better equipped to prevent or treat illness than your brilliant inner doctor, which I call your “Inner Pilot Light.”
Your Inner Pilot Light is that part of you that knows what’s true for you and can help you align your life with that truth. When you make life choices that are out of alignment with your truth, the body reacts with physical symptoms that, left unchecked, become disease.
Think back to a time when you knew you were out of alignment in your life. Maybe you were out of alignment in a big way—cheating on your spouse or embezzling from your company or abusing your child. Or maybe you were out of alignment in more subtle ways—selling out your integrity in a soul-sucking job or drinking yourself to sleep every night or staying in a relationship with someone you didn’t love. If you can remember how your body felt during those times, chances are good that your body didn’t feel so hot. You may have had headaches or gastrointestinal distress or a flare up of a skin condition or allergies. Or you may have just felt fatigued. But I’ll bet your body was signaling to you that you were off course.
The Body Compass
Our bodies are brilliant that way. They act as compasses, letting us know when we’re headed in the right direction and when we’re not.
When Martha Beck and I were training doctors in the Whole Health Medicine Institute, Martha led an exercise to help us get in touch with our body compass.
Heading South
Martha asked us to recall a time in our life when things went really wrong, inviting us to close our eyes and go to that very dark place in our minds and then locate the feeling in our bodies. We then named those feelings—“acid stomach,” “constricted throat,” “clenched chest,” and so on.
Try it. What do you feel? Now give it a name. That feeling is your body’s way of saying “You’re headed due South! Head the other way, pronto!”
Heading North
She then invited us to visualize a moment when everything was going brilliantly right and to locate that feeling in our bodies. We named those feelings too—“butterflies in chest,” “wide open throat,” “belly full of light.”
Try that too. What do you feel? That feeling is your body’s way of saying, “Due North! Go that way!”
Using Your Body to Make Decisions
Trying to make an important decision? Ask your body compass. Now that you know what due South and due North feel like, see if you can register the more subtle variants. Martha suggests using your body as a metric, with due South being -10 and due North being +10. When a new opportunity arises, check in with your body. What reading do you get? Is it a +4? -2? Or a completely neutral 0? These somatic sensations can help you make the right decision every time.
When the Body Manifests Physical Symptoms
The body compass exercise registers subtle physical sensations that wouldn’t usually get labeled as symptoms or illness. But what about when you get full-fledged symptoms, like a headache, reflux, back pain, nausea, or, as I shared in my personal experience, vertigo?
Are you in touch with what your body is trying to tell you? Can you identify the root cause of your physical symptoms—something deeper in your psyche or something out of alignment with your Inner Pilot Light?
Let Your Body Be Your Guide
Next time you experience physical symptoms, ask your body what it’s trying to communicate. Not sure what your body is saying? In Mind Over Medicine, I include an exercise intended to help you interpret what your body is telling you.
Do you have experience listening to your body’s signals? Share your stories here.
Learning to listen,
Lissa Rankin
Lissa Rankin, MD is a mind-body medicine physician, founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute training program for physicians and other health care providers, and the New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself. She is on a grassroots mission to heal health care, while empowering you to heal yourself. Lissa blogs at LissaRankin.com and also created two online communities—HealHealthCareNow.com and OwningPink.com. She is also the author of two other books, a professional artist, an amateur ski bum, and an avid hiker. Lissa lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and daughter.
BUY DR. LISSA RANKIN’S BOOK BELOW:
*Photo Credit: Roland Urbanek via Compfight cc
