When Your Body Says Yes, But Your Mind Says No

I was walking in our community garden early Sunday morning, enjoying the beautiful sounds of nature waking up.

Suddenly the soothing morning sounds were pierced by a burst of loud music coming from one of the nearby houses.

“Yes sir, I can boogie
But I need a certain song
I can boogie, boogie woogie
All night looooong”

The music was streaming from my yoga teacher’s house. Coming from somewhere on the second floor I heard the unseen Lilli’s cheerful voice: she was singing to the song at the top of her lungs.

As the walking path was bringing me closer to Lilli’s house, my body became overwhelmed by the powerful vibrations of Baccara’s famous 70’s song.

Although the tropical air was warm, the hair on my whole body stood up and my skin became covered with goosebumps. I was flooded with memories from a life very long ago. I also noticed an impulse to sing out loud, which I quickly repressed.

My animal body’s response to music was natural and immediate. The resulting energetic impulse – my life force – wanted to move through me via singing.

And I stopped it.

Judging from the animated voices coming from Lilli’s house, people were singing and dancing there, expressing themselves in joy and pleasure, unfiltered by thoughts or fear of judgment.

My body may have wanted to do the same, but I didn’t let it: within a split second my mind overrode my wild body’s impulse, because it felt embarrassing and inappropriate for me to sing loudly in the street.

A lot of my work is focused on noticing the impulse toward self-expression that is authentic to us, and how that impulse gets blocked, often automatically.

This overriding of authentic self expression – to honor our needs or express our boundaries, to move or to sing or to say something that may not be well received – is at the root of people pleasing.

Our impulses toward openness, connection and vulnerability are over-turned by impulses to contract, to protect or to retreat.

For example, I was taught to control my natural urges from early childhood. My parents took my unruly wildness personally, and felt that my uncensored self-expression reflected badly on them as parents.

As a result, rather than learning to attune to myself and to my needs, I learned how to attune to the needs of others.

I became a very good girl.

I know this is systemic in our society.

We develop a survival strategy to get our needs for attachment and belonging met by controlling our spontaneous impulses.

Thus begins the process of self-abandonment that haunts our adult lives and sabotages our relationships.

Our body, with its conscious and unconscious impulses and patterns, and our mind with its beliefs, assumptions and expectations is what we bring into our relationships.

We think we react and respond to our environment, but really we react based on a complex world of memories, nervous system imprints, and interpretations of our environment from the filters of our beliefs and expectations.

The suppression of authentic impulse in order to control how we are perceived by others is what disconnects us from ourselves.

When we are disconnected from our Self, we go through life on autopilot. We are no longer guided by inner knowing, but by mental constructs and other people’s rules.

When we live gazing out for validation and guidance, we lose our authenticity and block our life force.

And then we blame our partners for the lack of intimacy in our interactions.

Any time I catch myself over-focusing on my husband’s “not meeting my needs” – I’m in the process of losing myself.

Thanks to practicing attunement, I now notice when I’m stuck gazing out, and bring my gaze back within.

I get to know my needs, my feelings, my boundaries, my values, so that I can fill my needs. Sometimes that means I step forward and actually communicate what I need to my husband, if and when I need his involvement and support.

Many people are not aware of this habitual self-abandonment – because it is automatic and can be reinforced by friends, family, even internet content.

The path toward healthy relationships with Self and with others begins with learning self-awareness and self-attunement.

For most of us who spent our lives attuning in hyper-vigilance to the needs of others, this skill of self-attunement can be surprisingly hard to grasp.

I should also say here that the goal is not to let our raw impulses run our lives.

The goal is rather to become the chooser: when is it appropriate for me, according to my needs and values, to honor my authentic impulse, and when it serves my needs better to channel it in other constructive ways.

These essential skills of living from choice are only possible when we learn to self-attune.

These are the skills that I teach in my group and 1-1 work.

PS: 3 DAYS LEFT until I open the doors to BE YOUR #1 – A Self-love Intensive — a brand new program designed to help you learn how to attune to yourself, so you can get to know your needs, feelings, boundaries, and empower yourself to meet them.

Because you cannot build healthy relationships with others while you continue to abandon your Self. You’ll just blame them for your lack of fulfillment, which is not conducive to effective communication.

So if you’ve been feeling the impulse to join, but haven’t honored it yet, now is the time to choose!

Click HERE to join the international community of like-minded humans that’s been forming in the last few weeks.