When my children were young, but old enough to venture out in the world beyond my reach, I knew I had to teach them something they could carry with them wherever they went. Something that would help them stand in the face of too many choices and too many life-depleting options. So, when they were old enough to know dessert was being offered at a party and ask me for it, I would ask them, “What does your body say?”

Many of us take care of our bodies based on what the mind wants and says. And too many of us respond to our bodies based on what others have told us, or how we have been brainwashed to believe what our bodies should look like and feel like. The body speaks a different language than the mind. It does not care that the meeting you are in makes it inconvenient to have a need like, thirst, hunger or elimination. The body knows nothing about the mind’s decision to be model thin. And it cares not for your decision to sit in front of a screen for hours despite it’s protests. The body needs what it needs when it needs it.

How might your life change if you began checking in with your body, asking its opinion around the choices you are making. Might you eat differently? Go to bed when you are tired? Slow down? Learn to say “no”? Notice that the way you medicate yourself is making you sick? The wholeness that we all yearn for must include the body in all that we do. Can you imagine beginning again, like a small child? Starting over in a way that recognizes your most basic and fundamental needs and actually responding to them? In other words, “What does your body say?”