Brain

"Feeling in touch with your body" makes me think of new agey spirituality and self esteem exercises. It's a weight loss tip in a women's magazine; one of those under-the-guise-of-health-but-we-know-you-really-just-want-to-lose-ten-pounds articles. It's a strategy, and incidentally one that I happen to think is incredibly healthy and effective.

Feeling detached from your body is also a strategy. Telling myself that I was not my body, I was not the legs that wanted to stop moving forward or the arms that hurt to reach, was how I stuck with the internal monologue 'I'm going to get through this. Somehow this has to end and I have to be fine.' There was pain and then there was me, sitting up in my brain and trying not to internalize and identify with the sensations, channeling Brain from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I have to think that staying in your head is a fairly common pain management technique. It's a strategy, and it can be effective, but I think it takes time and work after the pain to become healthy again.

Running is something that has helped me to get back the feeling of connectedness with my body. Even slowly and fairly unathletically, one cannot run without engaging an overwhelming majority of body parts. I was thinking about all of this this morning as I hit the 40 minute mark of my (one hour) run. I was feeling really loose and my muscles all felt aerated. I remember feeling this feeling every time I've ever really stuck to a serious exercise program. It's a nice reminder that our parts are all there for a reason, and that bodies were made to move, and to accomplish.