I am watching closely now what is happening in the world when it comes to our health. This includes Big Tech becoming the doctor of the future, vaccine passports, mandatory medicine, the censoring of alternative approaches and more. We are living in times where we run the risk of bypassing our humanity in a quest for the supposed infallibility of the technologies and of those slated to make billions in profits off of our increasingly sick population.

We also run perhaps the biggest risk of all by believing the fantasy that something outside of us will guarantee health, wellness and happiness. With not much effort, by the way, on our part. Instead, a kind of passive approach to our health and well-being that does not require much; other than to extend an arm, take a pill or schedule a tele-doc appointment. All while being told, “This is what you must do.”

How can we be expected to know how to care for these bodies of ours? After all, we’re not experts. We couldn’t possibly know what to do.

While there are many, many layers to how it is that we will be caring for ourselves over the coming years, I would like to propose that at the very heart of any authentic and humane discussion of what happens with our bodies be the irrefutable requisite that sovereignty is at the center of any discussion, policy enacted or delivery of care we engage with. A definition of this word recently offered to me by a wise woman sums it all up:

Sovereignty is rulership over oneself.

My god, can you imagine it? Can you imagine, as the dictionary writes, “freedom from external control?” In other words, a lifelong path of claiming total rulership over your body and its health as the core of what we do individually and collectively. With this as the starting point, we cannot go astray. We cannot be confused by mixed agendas or glitzy new technologies. We cannot get spell-casted by the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies. We cannot be strong-armed by hospital insurance codes or public health fear tactics trying to scare us into action.

But. And there is a big but here. To have this level of sovereignty at the center of our lives is to recognize the current paradigm that tells you, “You are a child who needs a parent/expert to tell you what to do. You do not possess the authority to decide for yourself.” This is not something that is easy to see in yourself, but it can be gotten to by paying attention to how you talk about your body and who decides what happens with it.

Listen for statements like, “My doctor put me on…” or “I didn’t think I really needed it, but he said…” Pay attention to how often you have a sense of something happening in your body that gets silenced in the presence of your doctor. Be on alert when you don’t say something for fear of irritating or angering your doctor. And then, learn to be honest with yourself when you catch yourself being relieved by not having to be the one to make the decision because it feels like it’s so much safer and more of a sure bet to just do what they tell you to do.

Sovereignty and freedom go hand in hand. There is no freedom without rulership over your own health choices. And there is no rulership without a felt sense of your right to be free of external authority governing the very territory of your own body.

This is what is before us now and has little to do with a healthcare plan and everything to do with each one of us growing up enough to become the one who claims the leadership role in matters of our own health and well-being. This does not mean that we go it alone. But it does mean that we partner with those who place our sovereign human nature above all else because that is what is so at the deepest and most fundamental levels of what is real and what is true for a human being.

And because that is what we have decided we are worth.

When I was pregnant with my first baby, I wanted help being with the experience fully and naturally. I was new to figuring out how to trust my body, and I knew I needed to be with someone who already believed that childbearing was a healthy and natural experience that I was built for; one that would serve as a powerful initiation into motherhood.

At the time, I read two things that continue to inform my relationship with my body, and what it is that I hope to impart to others. The first being that midwife means “with woman.” I immediately felt a deep resonance to those two “little” words. They felt like they held a code to something so very, very true. Imparting a simple and basic tenet that as we move through all the experiences of life in a body, more than anything, we need someone willing to be with us. Someone who knows down to their bones that we have it within us, and that at times of great transition, we just need a little help.

In essence, someone who helps us to know that we are not alone and trusts that we can do whatever needs doing.

The second thing I read was a story of a midwife who said that when a woman thanked her too profusely after the baby was born, she knew she had inserted herself too much into the experience, so she would go back and reflect on where she had gone wrong. She said she never wanted to steal the experience from the mother by making herself the doer of what the woman had actually done herself; knowing that that new mama was going to need all the self-trust she could muster to bring that baby into the world.

This perspective is not alive and well in the world we live in. Instead, we are undermined at every turn when it comes to trusting these bodies of ours. We are told to listen to the experts, and to follow the science. We get our ideas about what to eat and how to feed our families from the commercials we see on tv and from which foods are affordable to us as a function of government subsidies; not what these bodies would naturally choose.

Instead of someone being with us when we visit our primary care doctors, we are “done to” in our 12-minute office visits where routine tests are administered by a likely harried and robotic nurse and inserted into a computer. Then we wait, alone, for the doctor to arrive and more often than not, a prescription for a pill handed out, when what we most need is the patient presence of someone we trust.

To trust our bodies begins with knowing that we deserve better. That we deserve someone being with us in times of challenge. That we are not a number or a commodity to be filed away in some orderly fashion so that the reports all come out right for the hospital administrators and insurance companies.

If, like me, you are done with this, it is time for you to claim your humanity, and the preciousness of your existence. Time to align with those who have created a sacred vow to be “with” us through it all. But to do this, you must learn to feel. Feel when you are being done to. And then you must allow some part in you to rise up and claim that you are worth more than this. No matter what they say. No matter your own thoughts that might say, “This is all there is.”

Truly, you are precious enough for someone to choose to be with you through all the challenging moments of life in a body.

There are so many ways to be with the information your body is giving you. For instance, you can ignore a sensation or a recent change; denying what it is you are experiencing. You can drop into the grips of fear as you imagine worst-case scenarios. You can choose to medicate yourself with all kinds of things from food to pharmaceuticals so that you don’t have to feel what you’re feeling.

Or, you can be willing to learn the language of your own body. In order to do this though, you must be willing to recognize the Intelligence that resides within it. This includes seeing the symptoms and the sensations of your body as an essential language. Communications that offer you important information about your life. This is vastly different from seeing symptoms and sensations as beyond you, inconvenient, or as punishment and evidence of wrongdoing.

I once heard a physician say that if you spent enough time with someone, they could tell you what was wrong, how they got there, and what they needed to heal. Wow! Can you imagine that level of connection with yourself? A kind of intimate alignment with the truth of what was happening for you, while also serving as guidance in every facet of your life. For that is the beauty of being with the body in this way. What you figure out here, you take with you into the rest of your life. 

Believe it or not, it is possible for you to know yourself at this level. But it takes effort. And commitment. A commitment to learn how to choose to stay in your body and to hear what it has to say. No matter what. This means allowing yourself to be wherever you are, and to begin wherever you find yourself with the symptoms, physical states and sensations that are present.

This will not be easy to do, especially initially. As a culture, we love to pathologize, catastrophize, commodify and vilify the body and what it is doing. We make our bodies wrong and tell ourselves that every physical problem we have will lead to dire consequences. Or we commodify the body, believing that health is the same as looking young according to some fantasized and unachievable technological image of perfection. 

But if you’re looking for something else, listening to what your body is saying requires, first and foremost, that you are actually in your body. Otherwise, how will you know what it is communicating? How will you accurately decipher the messages it is sending you? Learning to locate yourself within your own body can be as simple as asking, “Where am I? Am I here?” I know many of us would say, “Of course I’m here!” But are you? Too often our bodies are in one place and our minds in another. Split in this way, we live separate from ourselves and from the very body that is offering us a way to be here and experience the living of our lives.

Once you’re in your body, you have access to a language that is different from the thoughts, beliefs and conditioning of the rational mind. This language is a continuous stream of information in the form of urges, needs, sensations, states and symptoms that speak to you every moment of every day. Taken together, they offer the framework of a necessary and adaptive approach to life that allows you to adjust, stop, do something, not do something, know something, survive, and ultimately thrive. A true gold standard for navigating the world beyond the prejudices of the times and the restraints of our past conditioning.

Does it make any sense to you then that you would want to ignore or medicate these messages away?

If this resonates, consider getting into the habit of pausing once a day. Take a long, deep breath and ask yourself “What am I feeling right now in my body?” Pay attention to things like the body parts involved and the quality of the sensations. Forget about trying to fix it or even figure it out. This is not about imposing worries or preconceived ideas on top of what is happening. Instead, it is about allowing the body the right to express what it is expressing while you listen as deeply as you can. 

This one simple practice alone helps you begin to build a framework based on the reality of the signs and signals of your body, as opposed to the fears, the worries, the Internet searches and the tyrannies of a mind that just can’t stop itself from generating a disconnected and disturbed relationship to the body. Don’t fight this. Let the mind be, while you turn your attention to what it is that is actually happening in your body. Give yourself the gift of being with yourself as is. From there you will kno exactly how to proceed.

Adapted from my book Trusting Your Body: The Embodied Journey of Claiming Sacred Responsibility for Your Health & Well-Being