Why Go Through the Body to Improve Your Relationship With Yourself?
114. Why Go Through the Body to Improve Your Relationship With Yourself?
You know you have a hard time loving yourself, having a kind inner dialogue toward yourself and can’t manage to change.
Or you’ve already tried telling yourself positive affirmations, showing yourself that you love yourself but the effects don’t really last and you’d like to know how to improve your relationship with yourself in a lasting way?
In episode 114 of S’ouvrir à l’amour I’m going to explain why I think you need to go through the body to improve your relationship with yourself.
You know that you have a hard time loving yourself, having a kind inner dialogue toward yourself and can’t manage to change.
Or you’ve already tried telling yourself positive affirmations, showing yourself that you love yourself but the effects don’t really last and you’d like to know how to improve your relationship with yourself in a lasting way?
Why does improving your relationship with yourself go through your body?
For me there are 4 main reasons:
- Because your body (its appearance, its state of health) is the reflection of the treatment you have given it and therefore yourself over several years whether it’s how you take care of it, what you tell yourself (your inner dialogue), what you have let others do.
- Because depending on the state of dysregulation of your nervous system you may even have difficulty feeling love for yourself, knowing what you need or not. This means you have reached a state of disconnection.
- Because the difficulty loving yourself having a good relationship with yourself, was passed on to you by your past experiences that made you think you weren’t worthy of being loved and these past experiences also dysregulated your nervous system.
- Because if you feel a lot of uncomfortable emotions or you don’t like your body it’s hard to be at peace with yourself.
Your Body Is Screaming What It Needs
The beauty/appearance of your body is an indicator of your state of health for many holistic medicines such as Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, anthroposophy: eczema, acne, a bloated belly, your skin tone…
And these medicines go further by attributing an emotional state to it. So the state of your body is really the result of what you have nourished yourself with physically, emotionally and mentally over several years.
So instead of trying to “guess” what you need to improve in your relationship with yourself, let your body guide you. Look at its appearance, distinguishing temporary changes (state of your skin, your hair, your eyes, weight) from longer-term imbalances (weight, functional state of the body, etc.), give it the care it needs (start with the temporary changes) and observe how it changes.
Let’s take the example of Ayurvedic medicine:
Ayurvedic medicine distinguishes 3 types or doshas (vata, pitta, kapha) and your vikriti (your current temporary state) from your prakriti (your state at birth). 3 emotional difficulties are attributed to these 3 doshas when they are out of balance: a person with a dominant vata type will be more prone to anxiety/rumination, a person with a dominant pitta type will tend to be more perfectionist, to do too much, and a kapha person will have more difficulty motivating themselves/connecting to their joy. In Ayurveda, you first work on recent imbalances (temporary changes) and then gradually work on longer-term imbalances.
For the podcast I give you a rough indication:
- If the “problems” you have in your body concern your body from the neck down to the feet (for example your weight, the look of your skin, your belly…) it means you need to work mainly on your physical health.
- If the “problems” you have in your body concern mainly your scalp/hair (hair loss, dandruff, irritated scalp, headaches) it means you need to work mainly on your mental health.
- If the “problems” you have in your body concern mainly your face (pimples, wrinkles, dry skin) it means you need to work mainly on your emotional health.
Start with the area that has had the most recent change and work your way back to your state of balance.
The State of Your Nervous System Can Prevent You From Feeling Love for Yourself
Depending on the level of dysregulation of your nervous system (its default state, its level of dysregulation and what activates it), it can be impossible for you to connect to your feelings and emotions, and so lacking love for yourself is not a problem of willpower but a problem of physiology (often it’s dorsal vagal activation).
The solution is therefore to first reconnect to your body and its needs.
Part of Opening up to love is to teach you how your nervous system works, to know the states of your nervous system and above all to identify how these states show up in you, to identify what dysregulates you and what regulates you to gradually regulate yourself and reconnect with your body.
You can listen to more tips to reconnect to your body in episode 58 and more tips on self-love in episode 28.
Your Past Experiences Influence Your Default Regulation State and So How Easily or Difficultly You Will Relate to Yourself
I often say that the way we relate to ourselves is the reflection of the way we have been related to in the past.
These Outside "Voices" Become Your Inner "Voices
For example if you received conditional love from your parents (I have to get good grades to be loved, I have to do X for my parents to love me), then as an adult you will give yourself little right to make mistakes, you will tend to be a perfectionist, have a harsh inner dialogue and have difficulty connecting to your being (body, emotions) because doing is more important.
In these cases work on your past is necessary to change what you think you must “be” in order to be in relationship/loved by others. And these experiences are also saved in your body, in your nervous system.
I explain this to you in episode 89 on attachment styles and in my free webinar on “HOW TO FREE YOURSELF FROM THE PATTERNS THAT KEEP US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?”
For you
FREE Webinar "HOW TO FREE OURSELVES FROM THE PATTERNS THAT PREVENT US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?"
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As this difficulty in your relationship with yourself originally comes from your relationship with others, I offer this work in the program Opening up to love.
Your Uncomfortable Emotions Make It Harder to Feel at Peace With Yourself
Your emotions are your girlfriends in the sense that they are the inner barometer of what is going on inside you in your relationship with yourself and in your relationship with others (see episode 12 on emotional responsibility).
The more intense and varied they are, the more it’s an indicator that you haven’t listened to yourself for years, a bit like a girlfriend you haven’t listened to for years.
To welcome your emotions you also need to go through your body because an emotion is first a physiological response of your body following a perception.
Then you need to understand what mechanism generated this emotion to understand what the message of this emotion is:
- Is it your inner dialogue / your subjective perception of the situation?
- Is it a survival mechanism that has been reactivated?
- Is there a need to change a situation to meet your need?
Finding peace within yourself will require you to welcome and respond to all your emotions so that the relationship toward yourself calms down and this once again goes through the body.
Going further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book Opening up to love, available in all bookstores.
And if you need help learning all this, you can join my program Opening up to love, the fruit of my 8 years of practice. You can choose the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporal approach to deprogram your nervous system’s automatic patterns and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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