The Culture of “Pushing Through”
Pushing through or “victory over my puny, vulnerable body” is a concept that has probably existed forever. We all know about the Spartans who ran great distances to serve a purpose and had no patience for “deformed” babies. In a way, the body that often is in conflict with or simply not in agreement with the lofty goals of the mind has always presented us with the conundrum of its limitations. And the more a person disagrees with the idea of limitations, the greater the incentive to prove to oneself that they can be overcome. At some point , of course, the body simply trips over itself and reminds us that we need to pay attention. Sometimes, in painful irrevocable ways.
The world of sports is often overtly in disagreement with the humanity of the body. In many other areas of our life as well, the messages to ignore or overcome the needs of the body are loud, perhaps less overt. Pausing to listen to one’s body is often identified with “weakness” and we learn to disregard its voice until the message becomes imperative through an internal medical issue or something actually breaking. The body, like food, represents something in this battle to “overcome” and the body suffers as this representative.
The truth is that the body is a very complex and highly adaptive machine. Listening to the body we live in and responding or collaborating effectively is a skill that has to be cultivated over a lifetime. Why is this important? And what would that look like?
Apart from the physical definitions we worry about and struggle with, in a deeper way, the body is the keeper of and the storage space for our stories and feelings. The nervous system in the little body of a child is gathering feelings while it does not yet have the cognitive capacity to process and integrate the experiences that are happening to it. Babies live in their bodies quite organically but quickly adapt to what their important adults expect of them. Adaptation is not always positive. One can adapt to not ask for help when one learns that help is not coming or asking for help comes with a cost. The Anorexic body does not die in spite of extreme neglect, it simply adapts to more and more extremes. In fact the Anorexic body is a miracle of adaptation.
Attunement is a skill beyond words - a capacity to tune into the inner feelings of the other without talking, nervous system to nervous system. It requires stillness, calmness and profound listening. Introception - the capacity to sense feelings inside the body. The capacity to monitor internal organs and know when one if feeling hungry or stressed or okay. This is not a given. Many people live away from their bodies and feelings and expect others to do so. It is especially significant when we have caregivers who have these expectations. All of us experience life initially within the crucible of the atmosphere our caregivers create. The caregivers are magical Gods and the space is the Universe to a little person. In these early years, even when we have no words and cannot speak, the body collects. When people undermine the significance of these initial years or question the relevance of the past, it tells us that they have learnt to dismiss these initial experiences for some reason. When one dismisses the past, there is not much reference to stand in the present or walk into the future. Whether we choose to approve or dismiss, the body silently collects and stores memories and experiences. We all know this and many of us try to run away from our bodies and the feelings it holds through substance abuse or eating disorders or just dissociating.
The Body is in reality, our best friend. Trying to talk to us all the time, trying to share the information it holds all the time - if only we would stop being afraid, stop running away and pay attention. It will travel with us faithfully from birth to death, providing us space and carrying our being. It would be incredibly disrespectful if we were to compete with our best friend and always try to conquer, rather than be considerate and listen to what it has to say. Pushing through requires ignoring vital messages that increase in desperation - eating when I feel like am going to faint or die, keep exercising though I feel weak, hungry or pain, ignoring pain till something breaks.
We have learnt to be afraid of our body and nutrition. Most of society has forgotten that our body can tell us what we need to know. We look outside, listening keenly to the cacophony of all the noise that comes to us through our phones, misunderstanding and misusing the word “healthy”, searching compulsively for somebody outside our body to tell us what our body requires. We have learnt complicated vocabulary and calculations to tell us when we should be hungry and when we should eat. Eat early, eat late, don’t eat, eat vegetables, eat proteins, eat meat, don’t eat meat. We curate the body endlessly to compensate for other areas of self-doubt - desperation to belong at any cost, sometimes a way of punishing myself for my shortcomings, the voice of a disapproving parent echoing in my head - “I am not good enough, nothing is good enough, if only I lost 5 lbs or 10 or 15”.
The conundrum is that all this information swirling around us requires a good filter to be useful. The filter is usually made up of two things - what I learned in my family of origin and the ability to listen to the messages of my own body without interruptions. Messages from our family of origin are incredibly important because we idolized our parents before we learned to doubt them and the impressions we internalized about ourselves in this context are imprinted in our conscious and subconscious selves. We are not born judging ourselves or comparing. We learn that along the way. Small children are the most “intuitive” people we can find. They live in their bodies unconsciously till attention is brought to it either through people or experiences or through the major upheavels of puberty. The messages we recive during these times - “It will be okay” or “Be careful, eat carefully, don’t trust” penetrate deep into our vulnerable psyches affecting us till we consciously examine them. We take these messages, add our own life experience to them and end up at peace or in eternal distress with our bodies. Messages that teach us to be wary of the body and treat it like an object to be feared and conquered take us away from listening to the messages our bodies send. This is a profound handicap as it sets us on a pathway of listening to others rather than ourselves, trusting hte voices and messages of others and having no clue what our own body is trying to tell us , all the time. And we are trapped in the storm of outside voices. It sets us up for an eternal battle with our own biology htat we can never win. Desperation fuels more rigidity and rigidity fuels more desperation.
Listening to the voices of your own body and learning to trust internal feelings takes patience, time, listening and expert help. People almost always arrive to therapy after an injury or medical event has interrupted their way of life. In the beginning, there is a battle for the old way of life till the client understands why things have to change, the handicaps of the old way and the rewards of the new way. The goal in this case , is not winning competitions or comparing but ease of mind from fear and the joys of a life with flexibility and emotional freedom.
