Let Your Body Guide You

Photo by Chris­t­ian Haugen

There I was, at the moment of a big deci­sion. Should I trust that I could turn my world upside down with­out injur­ing myself or lis­ten to the voice in my head and play it safe. I stood in front of the wall, oth­ers watch­ing, my mind rac­ing, weigh­ing my odds to make an intel­li­gent deci­sion. Then I did the unthink­able: I turned my brain off and let my body take over.

The sit­u­a­tion hap­pened last night at my cross­fit class. The work­out involved a hand­stand against the wall. I don’t think I’ve ever done one suc­cess­fully, and haven’t even attempted one in over 25 years! The thought of throw­ing my legs over my head and using my still-healing back to sup­port myself was daunt­ing, to say the least. As I watched oth­ers give the maneu­ver a try, it just didn’t seem doable for me.

The safe option would be to skip the exer­cise and sub­sti­tute another activ­ity. I wouldn’t have to worry about falling on my head, twist­ing an ankle, or mak­ing a fool of myself in front of every­one. But I didn’t join cross­fit to do ‘safe’. Safe can be done at home.

I watched the instruc­tor one more time demon­strate where to place my feet and hands and how to kick my legs over­head. As I went through the motions in my head I real­ized that if I tried to think my way through the process it just wasn’t going to hap­pen. Just like Luke Sky­walker in Star Wars decides to turn off his com­puter aided instru­ments and use the force to blow up the Death Star, I was going to have to turn off my mind and trust my body.

I took a deep breath. A sec­ond later I was upside down. It was a strange and thrilling expe­ri­ence at the same time. After a small pushup I brought my body back to its more famil­iar ori­en­ta­tion. I had done it. I felt good. I trusted my body and it had come through for me.

This les­son, let­ting the body guide,  has appli­ca­tions in all aspects of life. There are times we need to stop think­ing and pay atten­tion to how we feel. In a world where most of our time is spent sit­ting at a desk, we all too often lose touch with our bod­ies. We become detached cere­bral enti­ties. The result is not only weaker bod­ies (Exhibit A right here) but also the ten­dency to try and deal with every­thing intel­lec­tu­ally. Think­ing through a sit­u­a­tion is a good thing, but it doesn’t fix every­thing. Some­times we just need to check in with our bod­ies, and let them guide our minds.

If we enter phys­i­cal move­ment into the problem-solving equa­tion more often, my guess is we will often dis­cover that the solu­tion to our trou­bles isn’t men­tal at all. Give it a try. It might just turn your world upside down.