Your Body Knows

I Forgot About My Body

On Saturday I walked out of a strength and conditioning class shaking and grinning. I’ve taught aerobics, I run, I’ve been a personal trainer, but 100 degrees, high tempo squats with weights, and then a bunch of Pilates teasers tested me. Somewhere in the middle of it, between the burn and laughing at myself, I felt something I had been missing for months. My body. I could feel all my muscles again, my joints, my breath.

It has been, as many of you know, a year of tests. I built Lumine, did some major consulting work for big companies and a regional healthcare system, I moved and moved again, and started going through the motions with my workouts and walking my dog. My own app was telling me to push it and do new things. I finally listened.

I have been thinking about that feeling ever since, because I know I am not the only one who drifted away from herself.

We Stop Listening

Maybe, like me you have spent decades listening to everyone else. Your kids, partner, boss, parents, clients, dog all need you (all the time?). You became extraordinary at hearing what other people need, often before they knew it themselves. Somewhere along the way, the one voice you stopped tuning in to was your own.

And when you did speak up, too often you were told it was nothing. In the Women Living Better survey, 49 percent of women who sought care for perimenopausal symptoms described the experience as negative or dissatisfying, and only 18 percent described it as positive. In another Women Living Better survey, 63 percent of midlife women said they had not felt like themselves half the time or more over three months.

Nobody handed us a map, and then we were told the territory was in our heads. So we learned to override. Push through the fog at three in the afternoon. Ignore the pull toward bed at eight. Skip the walk because there is no time. Each override is small, and together they teach your body that you have stopped listening.

What Your Body Has Been Saying

Your body has been talking the whole time, in a language older than any app. The afternoon fog is the end of a ninety-minute ultradian wave asking for a pause. The craving for something warm and heavy is the season, as I wrote in November and the Turning of the Light. The restless nights before a full moon have been measured in sleep labs and in communities without electric light, which I wrote about in Exhausted Before a Full Moon.

Each of these is information, and all of it is yours. Intuition is largely pattern recognition built over decades, and by midlife you have fifty years of data on yourself. That is expertise.

The Answers You Already Have

Here is what I believe more strongly every year. You already know. You know which people leave you lighter and which leave you drained. You know the food that makes you feel steady and the food that makes you feel heavy. You know when you need to move hard and when you need a long walk in the woods. You knew before the doctor’s appointment, and you knew before the job ended.

What has been missing is a few minutes each day to hear it. For me, that started with one line on my phone each morning: today is a great day, and I make things happen. It grew into a practice of checking the sky, my sleep, my energy, and my plate, and asking what the day was asking of me. On Saturday the answer was a hard class. Some days it is a slow walk and an early night. The practice is the listening.

Lumine Is a Way of Listening

That practice became Lumine. Each morning it reads the day, the season, and the moon, and offers one movement, one meal, and one mindset attuned to them, shaped around your body and your goals. It is a light for each day, and you are still the one walking the path. If you missed it, the first part of this story is You Are the Path.

See today’s card at luminemethod.com

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