From Suffering to Peace

Matthew, a gentleman in his late sixties, is someone I have know since childhood who was once notorious for not taking care of himself. He preferred to drink beer over water and thought green vegetables were for herbivores, not humans. At one time, he loved to play soccer, and yet he severely disregarded his body, treating it as little more than an appendage to move him around the soccer pitch or to and from the pub. He had trouble holding down permanent employment.

Then, in his midforties, Matthew developed pain from years of bad circulation in one foot. This was made worse by smoking, drinking, and his poor diet. However, he ignored both the pain and the signs that it needed medical attention. Eventually, the pain got to be too much, and he went for treatment, but unfortunately he reached out too late. The infection and circulation problems had festered so long that gangrene had developed, and his leg needed to be removed from the knee down to stop the damage from spreading. This tragedy was particularly sad given that it was preventable, if only Matthew had listened to the signals of his body and taken appropriate action.

Unbelievably, Matthew did not learn his lesson and failed to start taking care of his body. Some years later he developed a similar circulation issue in his other foot, and astoundingly, he neglected the warning signs from that infection, too. Once again, he developed gangrene in the remaining leg, and the limb had to be removed from the knee down. What a double tragedy!

However, the good news is that, after this second surgery, Matthew listened to this wake-up call and began to change his old habits. He quit smoking, and though he couldn’t go back to playing soccer, he developed a lifelong passion for coaching high school soccer teams, even into his late sixties. He later found a decent job and became happily married, all of which transformed his previous life of neglect.

I’m often in awe of the level of disregard people have for their own bodies. Some mystics say that the body is a temple, yet we often treat it as a chemical dump or a garbage bin. We expect high performance and optimal functioning, as if our bodies were sports cars, yet we give them dirty fuel and little maintenance. We neglect our need for adequate sleep, healthy food, and exercise, and then we complain when our bodies don’t work properly! I’ve coached clients who worked sixteen-hour days for months, even years, in high-demanding corporate jobs, and eventually collapsed with fatigue and became unable to work at all. Others starved themselves with inadequate nutrition or ignored their need to rest because they thought self-care equals being lazy.

Mindfulness reveals our relationship to experience and in particular to our own body. We often only pay attention to the body when it hurts or is hungry and tired. Then when the body does grab our attention, we treat it like an annoyance. Yet as with anything, if we want our body to be well and to thrive, it requires careful attention, maintenance, and care. This cannot be done without awareness. With careful attention we can track our physical experience so we can learn to live in harmony with our body and stay attentive to its needs. In the same way we lovingly care for our children, pets, and things we cherish, we need to care for our body, our physical home, without which nothing is possible.

When I first started practicing meditation, I was also hopelessly disconnected from my body. Trying to sense my body as my mindfulness teachers instructed felt like trying to explore an unfamiliar, unknown foreign land. As a young student, I thought I could ingest copious amounts of alcohol and drugs and still have my body perform fine the next day. My habitual approach was to push my body, work too hard, and override my own need for rest and replenishment. These patterns ran deep and were supported by the culture I lived in.

In England, when I was growing up, any limitation of the body was judged as weakness, and the common response to any difficulty was to “toughen up” and just “get on with it.” After I came to the United States, I absorbed the prevailing unhealthy work ethic, which encouraged people to work long hours and ignore imbalance or fatigue. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Once I started to hear my own wake-up call — after feeling the negative fallout from ignoring my body’s needs — I slowly discovered through practice how invaluable self-awareness is for listening to the body’s needs and learning to live within its limits. Research now suggests that, not surprisingly, cultivating mindfulness leads to healthier choices and actions, especially in relation to our body. In one 2010 study, researchers found that increased practice of mindfulness in everyday life predicted people’s engagement in healthy activities, such as physical exercise, eating fruits and vegetables, and improving self-efficacy — all of which support a healthier body.

What is your particular relationship to your body? Do you treat it in the same caring manner you would treat a friend, a loved one, or a beloved pet? Do you have an intimate connection to your body and its needs, or do you ignore them? Do you listen to your physical limits and heed the signs that tell you when to rest, sleep, or eat? Mindfulness of the body can help develop this sensitive attunement. It helps us listen to the body’s needs and challenges. The reality of being human is to be embodied, and bodies are vulnerable to aging, sickness, and ultimately death. This physical vulnerability cannot be avoided, and so learning to tend to our body becomes a beautiful path of self-care.

For instance, Jenny was a successful corporate executive in London. She had been a marketing consultant for several European corporations for twenty-five years. During that time, she had juggled international travel while raising a young family, but she eventually divorced and became a single mother, which added to her stress. As she buckled under the stress of one particularly challenging job, she started to feel her life force draining. She found it harder and harder to refuel, and the demands of her corporate job and of parenting did not allow her any respite. So she just kept pushing through because that was her habit. Up till then, pushing past her limits had allowed her to succeed.

Then, in her late forties, after years of pushing her body too hard, she finally crashed after one time too many. She became overwhelmed with chronic fatigue, where every muscle ached, and she barely had enough energy to pull herself out of bed to say good-bye to her daughters as they left for school. This was humbling, and it forced Jenny to radically shift her sense of identity. She went from an always competent “go-getter” to someone who had to slow down, rest, and do very little. She had no choice. Her body had pulled the plug. However, as often happens when life shakes us enough to listen, Jenny slowly picked up the pieces of her life and learned how to connect with her body and live within its capacity and limits. This meant letting some things go, changing jobs, doing less, and learning to nourish her body and spirit. Gradually, her strength returned. And after learning to cultivate a mindfulness practice, she eventually developed the self-awareness to stay attuned to her physical needs.

As the examples in this chapter show, when we fail to listen to our body, calamities can happen. Yet these are avoidable if we learn to attune to the body and hear its broadcasts. The challenge is that we often don’t like what it has to say, so we ignore it, suppress the messages, and carry on as if whatever is wrong will just go away. As we all find out eventually, the body bats last. It will always have the final word. When we listen, we can save ourselves so much hardship. But it requires humbly accepting the body’s limits and honoring its capacity and needs.

• PRACTICE •

Body Scan — “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, Knees and Toes”

A body scan is a practice that supports embodied attention. This technique helps develop a fine-tuned awareness of each part of the body. It brings awareness to areas of our physical experience that are often inaccessible, are simply ignored, or go unnoticed. In short, the practice is to slowly move your attention through each part of your body, starting from the top of the head and continuing down your face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, torso, hips, legs, and eventually to your feet and toes. This may take up to twenty or thirty minutes to do once, or you might do several sweeps through your body that each take only five minutes. Take time to be curious about each part of your body and about the subtle sensations that lie within each area.

As you begin, note where you feel sensation and where there is an absence of felt experience. Then at times direct your attention to outer sensations — like the feel of your skin, the touch of clothing, and so on — and at times to inner experience, like temperature, tingling, vibrations, pressure, heaviness, itchiness, and so on. As your awareness moves through your body, pay attention to any sensations of discomfort, contraction, or pain, and notice if you can be present to that experience. See if it is possible for those places to soften or if you are able to relax any contraction around them. Stay curious and sensitive with awareness, as if you were a biologist exploring the body experientially for the first time. See if you can let yourself be surprised by what you find. Shift from visualizing the various parts of your body to sensing the actual immediate sensations.

Once you have directed your attention through the body, then be present to the experience of the body as a whole. Notice if the body feels more alive or vital as a result of your awareness of it. As you end the practice, see if you can feel this quality of attunement and embodiment throughout your day.

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