Stop Trying to Fix Your Body

When something in the body hurts, the first instinct is to fix it. A new stretch. A foam roller. A supplement. A ten-minute "release" routine someone posted online. We treat the body like a machine with a broken part. Find the part, fix the part, move on.

I taught that way for years. It works for a while. Then the same shoulder, the same low back, the same tightness comes back wearing different clothes. The body was never the broken thing. The not-listening was.

I've been teaching since 1996. Thirty years in, this is what I keep coming back to: your body has been speaking to you the whole time. The ache, the catch, the breath that won't go all the way down. These aren't malfunctions. They're messages. And most of us have gotten very good at talking over them.

"So listen to your body," people say, like it's a simple thing. It isn't. Most of us have turned the volume down so far that we only hear the body once it starts to shout. The quiet signals went unanswered so many times they stopped trying. The early tightening. The held breath. Listening isn't something you already know how to do. It's a skill. And like any skill, it has to be grown. Slowly, and far more quietly than you'd expect.

Try it now. Find somewhere that feels tight. A shoulder, the jaw, somewhere in the back. Don't stretch it. Don't fix it. Just rest your full attention there for one slow minute. Most people feel something let go that they were sure needed force. You didn't do anything to it. You listened, and it answered. That's the whole practice in miniature.

And it reaches further than muscle. The body that holds your tension is the same one that holds your worry, your hurry, your unspoken no. The belly tightens before the mind finds a reason to be upset. Learn to feel the body early, and you start catching these things at the source, before they harden into a bad mood or a sharp word.

None of this is dramatic. There's no breakthrough to chase, no level to reach. Only a slow return to a conversation you stopped having with yourself a long time ago.

That conversation is what my book Stop Fixing the Body. Start Listening to It. is about. It's one of a few I've put out this year. The others are about long holds, about teaching, about holding a room. But this is the one that lives right here, in the not-listening. It isn't another routine for the pile. It's a way back to the conversation: practical, unhurried, meant to be lived on the mat and off it.

If your body has been trying to tell you something, start with the first chapter. It's free, and it's the most honest place to begin → gabeyoga.com/free-chapter-jdm

(And if you want the others, the long holds and the teaching, the first chapter of each is free too → gabeyoga.com/free-chapter-all-four)