Listen to your body, see reality

When you were a kid, you had to learn how to walk. You had to learn how it felt to balance your weight on two feet in order to stand and then how to balance your weight on just one foot as you took a step. You had to be very aware of your body and what you were doing in order to learn this. Similarly, you had to learn how to use the toilet rather than a diaper, which involved listening to your body in a whole different way. When I had surgery this past January, my abdominal muscles were cut, which altered the way my abdomen felt, including my bladder. I had to relearn what it felt like to have a full bladder so I knew when to use the rest room. I had to relearn what it felt like to have an empty bladder so I knew when I was done. I had to listen to my body and become aware of it in a way I wasn’t used to before. This wasn’t the first time in my adult life that I had to learn something new about my body.

I had to learn what it felt like to be hungry.

My family rarely wanted for food. There was usually enough, more than enough, really, for had we eaten only when we were hungry, our refrigerator and pantry would have been more full than they were. We ate, often. We all repressed our emotions and ate in order to keep them down. We ate snacks between meals and after meals. We ate plenty at the meals, too. As soon as I was uncomfortable, I ate, whether that uncomfortable feeling was due to the emotional turmoil, actual hunger, or whatever else was going on in my life. When I was 6, I weighed 60 pounds, and I gained 10 pounds a year after that, until I was 16. I weighed 160 pounds, and I didn’t want to keep gaining weight like that. I would have weighed 200 when I was 20, 220 when I was 22, and I didn’t want my life to be like that. So, I had to eat less and increase my activity. I still gained weight, because I was still eating more than I needed. I was still eating even when I wasn’t hungry.

It wasn’t until I started to learn what it felt like to be hungry that I was able to take real control of my weight, though I admit that I am still learning. I still eat more than my hunger needs, though I am working on eating only when I am hungry.

What does your body tell you? Do you listen to it? Do you rest when you need to rest? Do you drink when you are thirsty? Do you eat what your body craves? Some (and I have been guilty of this often) will eat something sweet when they are craving salty, and keep eating, wondering why their craving won’t subside. Do you stretch and move your body to keep out the kinks and the stiffened joints? Listen to your body.

Is this another one of those “be the change you want to see in the world” things? Is this just another one of the “improve yourself first” things? No! This is vital. For you to create the Future, you must build upon the present. You cannot make changes in the future. It hasn’t happened yet. Everything you do must be done in the present. In order for it to be effective, in order for it to truly create the Future, it must be built upon reality. And to build upon reality, you must see reality.

Reality can be tough to see. You don’t want to see the cheating spouse, the extra thirty pounds, the abusive sibling, the dead end job. It’s so much nicer to make believe that these things are better than they are, or worse than they are so that you get sympathy and can concentrate on them instead of the rest of your life. But, to change the way things are into the way things can be, you must first see things the way they are. Your body is a good place to start.

Don’t believe me? Let’s say you have a friend who wants to lose 20 pounds. Just about every American has at least one friend who wants to lose 20 pounds. What does your friend do first? She weighs herself. Why? So she knows where she starts. It wouldn’t make sense to try to lose 20 pounds without knowing when “20 pounds less” is. In order to find out where your target, your goal, your Future is, you need to know where you are starting.

Do you want there to be less racism in the world? How will you accomplish that? How will you know what methods are effective? If you don’t know how much racism there is in the world currently, how will you know when you have less?

Do you want there to be more peace? Same questions. Do you want there to be more or less of anything? You need to know when you have accomplished your goal, and for that, you need a starting point. You need to know the present, the reality in your life, in order for you to make effective changes.

You can make changes without seeing reality. We’ve all had friends who have made the same mistakes over and over, thinking that they were doing something different. They date what is in truth the same person over and over, because the outer trappings are different. They go from one dead end job to another, thinking that because the situation is different that there is a real difference between this job and the previous one. They aren’t seeing reality. They’re seeing what they want to see. And they make changes to change what they see, but it doesn’t change reality.

See reality to create the Future. Listen to your body to see reality.