We’ve all had the experience of asking someone, “How are you?” We ask it all the time, sometimes without really meaning it as anything other than a greeting. If we ask it sincerely to someone we care about, we may end up having a deep and meaningful exchange.
We might also ask, “How do you feel?” when we know someone is going through a hard time.
However, after I recently told a friend about a particularly stressful situation, she asked me, “Where do you feel that in your body?” I’ve been made aware of this concept before, but it always felt foreign to me. So when she asked me that, I paused, looked confused, and answered, “I have no idea. I don’t feel anything in my body.”
That set me on a quest to see if I could name a bodily sensation that was tied to an emotion.
I remembered that I do feel something in my chest when I look at a particular photograph of my youngest daughter when she was two years old and snuggling up with her grandparents. It’s summer at a soccer game of her sister’s. She is sitting in my mother’s lap, and my father is behind them leaning down. Her grandmother’s arms are tightly wrapped around her small body, and it looks like they are melting into each other. Everyone in the tableau is smiling, but my daughter has the most contented smile, grinning with no teeth showing, her shoulders stretching up to her ears. Every time I come across this photo, I feel an expansion in my chest. Just thinking about that picture right now is giving me the same sensation.
I can feel that same fullness in the area of my heart when my grandchildren call my name and run to me with their arms open. Or when I remember my husband, Harvey, holding our first-born daughter just after she was born.
To discover how I feel anxiety in my body, I decided to do an experiment and place myself in a mildly stressful situation. I began doom-scrolling through FaceBook, reading articles and looking at memes about our current political situation. It didn’t take long for me to feel my pulse increase, a slight tightening in my throat, and a hollowness at the very top of my abdomen. Ugh! But there it was. Evidently, this is how I feel anxiety in my body.
Later that day, after I recovered from my FaceBook experiment, I purposefully sat with difficult memories of Harvey’s worst times with Alzheimer’s disease. I felt my nose begin to prickle and the start of tears. There was a feeling of heaviness in my arms and that same sensation of a hollowness in my abdomen, but lower in my gut.
So my body does tell me what it’s feeling. I can name those emotions, but what if I felt those sensations before I could name them? That’s one of the aspects of listening to your body that is helpful. Every autumn I get a sense of unease for which I can’t name until I remember that this is the season in which Harvey had several psychiatric admissions and the season in which he died. It always takes me several weeks to realize the reason I am feeling uneasy. Now, however, if I pay attention to what my body is telling me, I should be quicker to recognize the cause.
I have a lot more to learn. There are more emotions than the three I’ve named. How does my body tell me that I am angry, scared, or excited? The body has an intelligence, and learning to listen to it will help me navigate my emotional landscape more intentionally.