What is being healthy, really, anyways?
This week, I have been thinking about what it means to be my body in a world that wants me distracted and fitting in,healthy on paper like it’s a number I can track, and successful in the metrics I can show for my success. How is it possible to be constantly asked to move away from feeling in order to be taken seriously in this time? In order for society to see me as successful? What does it even mean to be healthy, is it a number? Is it a feeling? Is it perfect balance and stillness in the state of my body, metrics, performance? Is it something you also are tempted by, to measure your way towards feeling good? Here are my thoughts about that.
Health = good metrics?
We are in a time where images rule our sense of self: how we look like, what we can present to the world is what we are judged on - and what we judge ourselves on, too. We are assisting to the return of a trend that sees the body as the enemy: we are encouraged to loose weight, to track our body in numbers, amount of steps, calories, minutes we slept and the curve of the graphic that shows us the quality of that sleep; we are influenced into buying products that will cut our hunger, feed us without chewing or spending time in eating, inject things in our faces that will freeze our expressions of emotions. Here I will quote a song by Girl Group that perfectly illustrates this quest of being a perfect character, flawless and dis-embodied in a way:
"Do you count steps and calories / And pages read, hours of sleep? / What do I have to pay to see / Your freshly facialled skin unpeeling? / (...) And how much water do you drink?"
We are in a culture obsessed with numbers of ‘health’ over a sensation of health (the so called « self-knowledge through numbers’ described in the The crisis of narration by Byung-Chul Han). But our body... our body is a sensation based creature, one that senses itself to regulate and go get what it needs, not a data center to be monitored constantly to keep it functioning.
We rely on data instead of listening to the language of our bodies, and we learn to forget the meaning of its sign.
How crazy does that sound? Instead of sensing if we feel good or not, we are taught to trust a graphic on a screen. Instead of checking with our bellies - I feel hungry, or I feel thirsty, or I don’t want food anymore - wecheck what our belly is supposed to feel and eat only when it is ‘right’ to do so. This is a war against us sensing into ourselves and trusting our body, it disconnects us from our sensations, impulses and need, to rationalise them, to control them to be picture perfect. Is it something that you can recognise for yourself?
Mistrusting the body
What do we loose in this process? We loose self confidence, and trust that we can take care of ourselves and that we can count on our sensations to guide us through life; we loose enjoyment, play, pleasure in the pursuit of what is ‘right’. We loose the possibility to catch the moment when we need to leave a situation that doesn’t feel nurturing or pleasant anymore, even if it goes against what our minds or society says it should feel like. We loose the possibility to feel and respond to our needs, and become anxious about not doing it right instead.
Trusting numbers instead of sensations fosters suspicion over the language of our body, and this in terms makes us disconnect further from it.
Needs become secondary to Shoulds. Hunger, sleep, connection, need for movement are taken over by rules, skewed priorities and a constant research to quiet down the wild voice inside. And we are deeply unhappy, lonely and at war with the pressure from within to slow down and feel what we try to avoid: our pain, our fear, our wounds that didn’t quite heal yet.
Relearning the language of your senses
Connecting back to your body and learning to understand the language of your sensations again is such an important process to take on, for your health and for your well being in general. It is how I began my yoga journey, and why I kept at it. After years of bending myself to try to look the part, I was suddenly asked, day after day, to search what felt good and right in my body. What movement feels needed right now? How are you feeling inside your body, not just inside your frazzled mind that tries to fix things?
And bit by bit, I learned to trust my hunger again, to trust my anger, to dare to try out something new, to leave relationships and paths when it was time instead of fixing them; and I am still learning to undo the training of years and years of conditioning, which always wants to interrupt my sensations if I don't take care. Bodywork deepened that bond, adding the emotions and symptoms as another guide towards health. My digestion issues disappeared almost completely, my many chronic symptoms as well. I feel like I am healthy because I can listen to the signals of my body and adjust my life to have more energy, more of what feels nourishing, exciting.
And that is my invitation to you: can you listen to the wild voice inside you?
Do you feel like its language is completely lost in translation, you only have messy symptoms pains emotions, and just the feeling of ‘I do not feel good nor healthy’ is clear? This is your first step into learning. Come with your mess, and patiently, with a teacher, a practitioner, your own self study and curiosity, detangle and get clarity about what your body (and your body is you) wants to tell you.
RESOURCES USED:
- this amazing podcast (everything this youtuber does is gold, and I will be quoting her quite a bit on here)
- and this song: She goes, by Girl group. A fun summer bop.
