For years, I thought I understood what “listen to your body” meant. Take a nap when you’re tired. Eat when you’re hungry. Stop when you’re full. However, when a body has been screaming for decades, and you’ve trained yourself to ignore it, there is a significant undoing. A lot of unlearning must take place before you can reach where you want to go.

Understanding Pain

What I thought was just generalized fatigue and back pain became something more specific. I realized, “Oh, actually, I have pain in my L3/L4 area, down through the femoral nerve.” It wasn't sciatica, as every primary doctor assumed before tossing me another prescription for muscle relaxers. Once I started my yoga teacher training and dove into the anatomy side of things, I began piecing together the puzzle. I learned how to trace pain back to its source, identify specific muscles, and address each issue bit by bit. Dry needling and physical therapy became part of my toolkit. I learned how powerful biofeedback could be in calming neuroplastic pain. Bit by bit, I began to tune into smaller pieces instead of trying to fix every ache with a single miracle tool.

The Symptom Imperative

For over six years, my main symptom was near-constant pain in my low back, my right knee, and my right foot. When my back began to quiet its screams, my thigh increased its volume with nerve pain radiating down the inside of my right leg. It tugged at my pelvic bone and psoas muscle.

Enter the magic of the corner of a countertop. Pressing the granite edge into my side helped me find that psoas muscle and realize just how tight it had been. It was probably tight for ten years, thanks to pregnancy and postpartum. Then my right foot pain began to fade as I worked on my foot splay. This unglamorous art of retraining your feet to spread and function like, well, feet, is not just for barefoot hippies. Having healthy, wide, mobile feet can prevent pain, and you can train them. My right foot was nearly pain-free. Victory!

Except… then my left foot started to hurt. My left pinky toe does not even touch the ground when I walk, which had never bothered me before. Apparently, my brain finally had the bandwidth to start screaming about it. Your brain can only yell at you about so many things at once. When one problem gets quieter, the next one in line steps forward.

By this point, I was getting pretty frustrated. I was doing the work. I was listening. Come on, body! I was doing my part! Please settle down! Now entering the stage—mid-back pain. Tightness in the muscles right under my shoulder blades had been quietly overcompensating for my low back and hip weakness for years. I bought a set of massage balls and learned to look ridiculous rolling around on the floor like an animal scratching its back on a tree. Highly recommend! Listening to your body often means looking and feeling a little silly.

Sensory Overload

As I kept tuning in, I moved into a phase that left my family… thrilled, I am sure. My mood and attitude were in tip-top shape (NOT). I had been grounding, practicing mindfulness, and reconnecting with my body. Then suddenly, I was so in tune that I could feel the ground beneath the floor. The main level of our house left me dizzy because I could feel the empty space beneath me. Nothing felt solid except plain old dirt. The wind on my skin felt like sandpaper some days (if you know, you know). Instead of just being cranky from PMS, I could literally feel the lining of my uterus doing its thing (insert all the melting-face emojis here).

There is a price for tuning in. There’s a middle phase where you have all the information but not yet the tools to deal with it. You know that morning dread is your brain, your chemicals, your patterns, but you haven’t nailed down how to level them yet. It is the wildest ride I have ever been on. There have been days I craved the mind-numbing ignorance I lived in for so many years.

Identity Shifts

I remember telling my therapist I was worried about healing and becoming a different person. If you have ever done mind-body work, you know this ties into another term: secondary gains. What if being sick was who I was? I had asthma and allergies as a kid, ulcers and panic attacks as a teen, migraines and debilitating periods as a young adult, and postpartum depression and crippling anxiety as a new mom. Then came burnout, chronic pain, and fatigue in my thirties.

What if I healed and I wasn't funny anymore? At least not with the dry wit that has been my coping mechanism. What if I healed and no one stuck around because I “look fine now”? What if I turned into one of those “positive thinking heals all that ails you” people, constantly bypassing pain and telling people to look on the bright side? Gross. Facing what you might lose if you heal is a hefty, necessary task. You cannot skip it if you want healing that lasts.

Tuning into Your Body

Tuning into your body is good work, but it’s still work. And like any deep work, it comes with challenges you might not expect. Here are three of the big ones broken down for you:

The symptom imperative is a term from mind-body medicine, especially Dr. John Sarno’s Tension Myositis Syndrome work. It describes the tendency for new symptoms to appear as old ones resolve. The brain uses pain, tension, or other symptoms as a distraction from emotional stress. When one symptom no longer works as a distraction, it may create a new one.

What it looks like: Low back pain fades, but suddenly your knee starts aching. You heal from plantar fasciitis, and your shoulder tension ramps up. Emotional symptoms can shift, too. Maybe your anxiety lightens, but you start feeling intense fatigue.

Why it’s actually a good sign: It means your body is responding. The fact that symptoms change shows that your nervous system is moving, not stuck. Each new flare is another opportunity to uncover the root cause and build resilience.

Reconnecting with Your Body

When you begin reconnecting with your body, your brain literally lights up with new sensory input. This process, called interoception, helps you sense internal states like hunger, muscle tension, and heartbeat. But after years of dulling those signals, suddenly feeling everything can be overwhelming.

What it looks like: Feeling the ground beneath the floor, and it’s dizzying. Wind on your skin feeling like sandpaper. Not just knowing you have PMS but feeling your uterus lining doing its thing. Waking up with morning dread and knowing exactly which chemicals and patterns are behind it, without yet knowing how to calm them.

Why it’s actually a good sign: Your body is reestablishing communication lines. Yes, the middle phase is noisy, and yes, it can be disorienting, but it’s also proof that you’ve switched those signals back on. Over time, you’ll learn which ones require action and which are just passing through.

The Impact of Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself, doesn’t just change habits; it can shift how you see yourself. As you resolve old pain patterns or regulate your nervous system, your sense of identity adapts, which can feel unsettling.

What it looks like: Wondering who you’ll be without chronic illness as part of your story. Worrying that healing will make you less relatable or change your personality. Realizing that your history, from asthma as a kid to postpartum depression, migraines, and chronic pain, has been a constant backdrop to your life, and now that backdrop might change. Fearing you’ll lose support once you “look fine.”

Why it’s actually a good sign: It means you’re growing. Letting go of an identity tied to struggle creates space for new ways of living. It can feel disorienting, but that’s part of becoming someone who lives from a place of wholeness rather than survival.

Listening to your body isn’t just about bubble baths and stretching. It’s about staying the course when the process feels inconvenient, overwhelming, or uncomfortable. Trust that this hard work is good work. Because in the end, the goal isn’t a perfect, pain-free body. The goal is a body that can carry you through the life you were made for.

Healing Will Ask More of You Than You Think

Because we've ignored much more of ourselves than we realize.

Fatigue, anxiety, hormones, sleep debt, nervous system regulation… Cut off one head, and Medusa grows three more. If you do not know this is coming, the process feels like an unfair game of whack-a-mole. You clear one thing, and three more show up. But when you expect it, you stop taking it as a sign you are failing. Instead, you start seeing it as proof you are moving forward.

It is messy work. Sometimes it will feel like you are doing everything “right” and still getting handed new symptoms, new emotions, and new questions you did not plan to wrestle with. But this is the deep clean. The closets you have been stuffing full for years are finally being emptied. Yes, it looks worse for a while, but that mess is progress.

Make the space and time for this work. Block the hour for the appointment. Choose the walk instead of the scroll. Give yourself permission to rest and permission to feel. Listening to your body will not always be comfortable, but it will always be worth it. This is how you build the kind of life you can actually live in. One where your body can carry you through the work you were made for, the people you love, and the moments that matter.

Want to explore tuning in? Jump into a series with me this fall ...