Episode 155 – How To Listen To Your Body with Celia Cain
What happens when we’re not connected with our body? How does listening to our body help us have a better marriage? With help from my special guest, I’ll answer these questions as well as dive deeper into methods of getting in better touch with our bodies, and as a result, with ourselves.
I got the chance to sit down with Celia Cain (you can visit her website here) – PhD, international mindset coach, healer, and mentor who teaches people recovering from trauma, illness, or pain how to heal themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Celia has helped me understand an entirely new way of listening to my body. As a self-professed nerd (iykyk), I lived in my head for many years, and being in a relationship with my body has helped me in so many ways. Understanding cues from our body is a highly effective way to be in touch with our intuition, which, if you’re like me, balances out the time and energy you spend in your head.
As Celia said, “We have a tendency as a culture to see it as intellect or intuition – you don’t get to have both.”
This conversation makes space for both intellect AND intuition. Through understanding both, you’ll be able to use them to create the marriage you truly want.
What does it mean to listen to your body?
“Listening to your body means that you’re deeply connected to what’s going on with you physiologically, intuitively, and energetically,” Celia explained.
“What we’ve always called energy work is now backed up by scientific studies that are finding these small electrical impulses in the body and tiny bacteria in the gut make huge differences in how you feel and how you behave and exist in the world.
So getting in touch with your body and really listening to it helps connect all these really complex systems. And when something goes out of control, you know when it’s happening and can deal with it much better.”
When I worked in HR, there was a chapter of my life for a few years when I had a permanent knot in my stomach. It was this tension that I carried all the time. I thought it was just my new normal. Only in hindsight did I realize that maybe my body was trying to tell me that the environment wasn’t the best environment for me.
Later, I coached a woman who would come home from spending time with someone she was dating and her body would break out in hives. It took us a while to connect the dots that after every time she saw this person, she got a rash! When we both looked at it a bit more deeply, we realized she didn’t feel fully safe with that person.
The invitation to you is to slow down and pay attention. Notice your neck tension or the knot in your stomach or strange skin reactions. Maybe your body is relaxed – notice that, too. Just notice and create awareness of whatever state your body is in. That’s step one to creating connection.
Why it might feel hard to connect and listen to your body
There are many legitimate reasons why we have a hard time feeling in touch with the cues our body sends us. Trauma, sexual trauma, illness, injury, and busyness to name a few are all reasons we might understandably disconnect from our body. But over time, as Celia explained, those disconnections compound and make us feel even further removed.
This is such a parallel for relationships, because any and all of these reasons for body disconnect are also stressors in a marriage! If we don’t actively pursue reconnection, it gets harder and harder to connect and be present in relationships.
“When I was a young college student, I had an emotionally abusive piano teacher. He would throw things, slam the piano lid down, yell… I’d never had a teacher like that. And I’d been taught to be very reverent towards my music teachers. I didn’t know how to react, how to stop it, so I pushed through until I got sick over and over and over again.
First it was a little cold, then the flu, then mono – finally I left that teacher for another one, but the damage had been done, because the body itself is a lagging indicator. That summer, I got immensely ill with a virus that left me with post-viral fibromyalgia. All from a few months of not listening as an 18-year-old.”
Messages from our body are so powerful, but only if we’re able to tune in.
How to tune into your body and really listen
“The body is not linear in how it progresses and how it thinks,” Celia said.
“We try to push it into linearity and it doesn’t work. That’s when we get frustrated over weight loss, we get frustrated over learning a language. We get frustrated because we think that we should make linear progress, and that is not the way the brain and body work.”
Ask me how many times I’ve seen this in coaching, too! People who have steadily worked on something in their marriage for five years will have two coaching sessions in The Marriage MBA and suddenly feel so much better. It’s not a linear process. The zig zags will always be there.
So I had to ask Celia: how do you start the process of getting connected and learning how to listen to your body?
“If you’ve been divorced from your body for a while, you have this distance between your brain and your body. You’re trying to bring these two things together, but there’s no trust there, especially if that break came from trauma.
So instead of looking at it as all or nothing, going from ‘I’m completely out of touch’ to ‘I’m completely in touch,’ just take one tiny step and deeply listen to what it is you want to do.
It takes practice, in the same way a pianist practices scales. You show up and do the work every single day and you become someone that your body can count on. And when you mess up, because you will mess up, and that’s okay, you forgive yourself. And instead of going off again in the shame spiral, you say, ‘Okay, I will do better starting now.’
If you don’t have time to do a 30-minute meditation or yoga session, you can do a tiny little thing to just spend a moment and ground yourself and say, ‘I’m here for you. What do you have to say? I’m listening.’”
Learn more ways to use intellect and intuition in your relationship with a relationship coach
When marriage or couples counseling isn’t an option because your honey thinks everything is fine or is reluctant to participate in that kind of support, you don’t have to convince them or wait forever for a solution that might never come.
You can stop being frustrated with your partner’s behavior and decide how you want to respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be in your life and in your marriage.
This is the work we do inside The Marriage MBA and you are invited to join us. All the details are here – The Marriage MBA.
The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school. It helps you reimagine marriage, so you can have a relationship that works for you.
What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.
You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for years to come.
If there is a foundation of love in your marriage and you’re ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you. Use the link above to apply today. The application itself is quick and simple, but deep and powerful, and designed to give you more clarity about how you can move your relationship forward.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: