Hello, Can You Hear Me?

On finally answering after years on hold.

Attributing a body sensation to something outside ourselves is the norm — a cultural habit most of us grew up inside without ever choosing it.

If my knee is sore, it must mean I didn’t stretch right. So I stretch more. Change the workout. Reach for something to numb it.

What we often miss is the opportunity to go deeper. Could this pain be coming from somewhere else — not an action I took, but a decision I made? An emotion I’ve put in a box in the corner of my mind, never processed, never moved through?

Time and again, my body has “failed” me by normal standards. I can’t run anymore. I can’t lift heavy weights anymore. I can’t hike all day or swim laps for an hour, the way I used to.

But through enough of these events I’ve come to a different conclusion. My body’s ability to work, move, carry, and respond to me isn’t a separate system malfunctioning on its own schedule. It’s a direct reflection of my mental and emotional capacity to do those same things.

I was bedridden with long COVID for two years — gasping for breath just to cross the ten steps to the bathroom. I told myself it was the virus. The nervous system. Bad luck.

I wouldn’t understand what that meant for another year.

What I didn’t let myself see, not for a long time, was that my body had stopped being willing to carry a marriage I’d already left years before I could admit it out loud. The better part of two decades, quietly ending, one day at a time.

My body wasn’t punishing me, or making me stop. It was carrying exactly what I could carry everywhere else in my life — no more, no less.

Yesterday, in the middle of ordinary work, I felt a shooting pain in my neck and a pinch low in my back.

Old pattern: I would have blamed my desk chair. My posture. The way I slept.

Instead, I paused.

I noticed I’d been tensing muscles low in my back, holding my body in a new way to compensate — hunching in on myself, smaller than I usually sit. I traced it back, and what I found wasn’t posture. It was fear. I had a live webinar for subscribers coming, something I hadn’t done before, and some part of me had been curling around that fear all morning without telling the rest of me.

This isn’t rare for me. Between autoimmune conditions that flare without much warning and years of learning to listen instead of diagnose, I do some version of this check-in almost daily now. It isn’t complicated, but it can take some time. It’s not a 30-second quick fix.

It looks something like this: I stop whatever I’m doing. I breathe, deeper than feels necessary at first. I quiet my mind enough to actually sense my body, one part at a time and without judgement. When I find discomfort, I ask it plainly “What are you telling me here?” and listen, without judgement, for an answer. Then I ask the real question: is this true for me today, or is this an old, learned response wearing today’s clothes?

I end by talking to myself. Not in the voice I’d use on someone else’s behalf — flat, unhurried, without judgment or emotion attached. Just a recap. This is what I felt. This is what I found when I looked.

Yesterday, what I found was fear, not injury. So I didn’t stretch. I didn’t reach for anything to numb it. I sat with the fear until it had said what it needed to say, and the shooting pain eased on its own within the hour.

I don’t offer this as the newest must-do method. I’ve watched enough people turn a good practice into one more thing to perform correctly, one more way to fail. If any part of this is useful to you — the pausing, the asking, the willingness to wait for a real answer — take what’s useful and leave the rest.

I didn’t stretch yesterday. I didn’t reach for anything to numb the ache in my neck.

I asked it a question instead.

That’s the whole shift, really — not fixing the sensation faster, but asking what it’s for before deciding it means nothing.

Somewhere, right now, you might be doing what I used to do for years. Blaming the chair. The mattress. The weather. Reaching for relief before you’ve asked what the pain is actually translating.

I’m not asking you to believe what I believe about your body. I’m asking something smaller: the next time something in you aches, or stops working the way it used to — before you reach for the fix, what happens if you ask first?

Your body was never malfunctioning. It’s been speaking this whole time. Mine took two years to say what it needed to say. Some days now, it only takes a few minutes. Either way, it’s always been fluent. I’m just the one still learning to listen.