Don't Ghost Your Body: Listen to your Body Cues

Body literacy, or the skill of listening to and interpreting information coming from your body, might seem relatively new, but it’s not new to humanity. 

Body literacy is one of the oldest forms of human intelligence. 

We all know how to tell when we have to pee, when we’re hungry, when we’re thirsty, hot, cold, tired, relaxed. We all have some sense of what it’s like to receive a bodily cue and interpret its meaning.

Many of us also know what it’s like to receive a cue from our body, perhaps that we’re hungry or tired, but rather than listen to that cue and giving our body what it needs, we ignore the information our body has given us and push through what we’re already doing to complete whatever task we’re on, get where we’re headed, attend the social engagement, or continue scrolling. 

We’re experts at overriding cues from our bodies,

so much sot hat many of us actually make jokes about this: “I’m always tired, it’s just part of life,” we might say to our friends with a chuckle, “I really feel like staying in but I told them I’d go tonight.”

Our bodies are literally designed to be able to interpret our surroundings, get our bearings, and respond to our environment based on what’s perceived through our senses and our nervous system, in order to keep us safe, functioning and alive. 

However, with the way we live and spend more time indoors and on screens, we are less often receiving stimulation from nature and the physical environment to let our bodies know they’re safe. This encourages us to think and use our rational brain as our only source of safety, rather than learning to feel and be sensually aware. 

Because we prioritize mental activity over feeling and sensing, we’re often cutting off our body’s ability to know that we’re safe, which affects not only our ability to connect with others and remain regulated, but also our ability to experience pleasure. 

Cut Off From The Neck Down

One of the main reasons we become disconnected from our pleasure is because we live in a state of “being cut off from the neck down. "Hear me out. 

Think of how often you engage your mind in a day. 

Between scrolling on your phone, replying to texts and emails, reading, watching TV or Youtube, sitting in class, talking with friends, family, or partners, listening to music, podcasts or audiobooks, thinking and thinking and overthinking, our minds are constantly engaged, stimulated, and often, quite overstimulated. 

On the contrary, think about how often you’re actually fully engaged with your body. 

Of course, we’re always using our bodies; we walk to the store, we eat, we stand up, we maybe go to the gym. But how often are we actually aware of what’s going on in our bodies? How often can we actually feel what it’s like to be in our body, in the present moment?

Many of us can move through an entire day without ever actually being present in our body. 

Do you ever walk or drive somewhere and realize when you arrive that you don’t even remember the process of getting from Point A to Point B because you were so in your head that you weren’t conscious of what your body was doing while you traveled? I call this “teleporting,” because we literally aren’t present for the process of traveling, we may as well have teleported. 

This same phenomenon happens all the time though; we can be on a beautiful hike or surrounded by friends and be completely elsewhere mentally, so much so that we don’t even feel what it’s like to be immersed in the nature we sought out for the hike, or the warm feeling of being with outfriends. We get to the end and think, “what even happened? It’s all a blur, I don’t remember that hike/hang-out at all.”

This is a very reasonable response to the world we’ve grownup in, so try not to judge yourself if you just read that and thought, “Yeah, that’s me.” It’s completely normal to exist overwhelmingly in our heads, because the world we live in prioritizes mental activity over anything going on n the body. 

Much of what we’ve been taught about our relationship to our body, is that the body is this “thing” that we just have to overcome to be productive, intelligent, successful, wise. 

We use rational thinking to convince ourselves that our body is wrong when we get a “gut feeling” about that person that asked us out, or we go to the party when our body is begging us to rest. 

As we continuously override the communications our body sends to us, the neural pathways that connect body sensation to meaning-making in the brain get weaker. We lose language when we don’t use it, and so does our body. 

As you can imagine, this can really impact how we engage in intimacy and sex.

Body Literacy and Sex

It’s been found that 80% of our body signals are sent from the body to the brain, and only 20% the other way around.  

When we live cut off from the neck down, we become disconnected from the insight that body cues can inform us of, like whether or not we are attracted to someone, whether or not we feel seen and safe in someone’s presence, and if we actually want to be engaging in intimacy and/or sex with the person in front of us.

Even when we do truly desire the intimacy or sex we’re engaging in, if we’re cut off from the neck down, we often have a hard time receiving and truly feeling the pleasure and connection available to us in an intimate experience. Without connection to our bodies during sex, we end up going through the physical act without being present during the experience, like we’re teleporting to the end. 

As mentioned above, our body is designed to be able to get a sense of our environment and determine whether or not we’re safe based on the sensory information available. 

As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s only once we determine that we’re actually safe that we experience sexual desire and arousal. And, it’s only once we’re able to hear and understand our bodies that we can recognize pleasure. Pleasure lives in the body!

So, if you’ve found yourself feeling disconnected from sexual desire, sex, or pleasure in general, the best way to strengthen the relationship between your body and your mind is by developing the ability to interpret the body’s signals. We must develop Body Literacy!

Feelings can be physical! Click here to read more on how your nervous system gives you cues.

Written by Taylor Neal
‍Embodied Counsellor and Trainee Sexologist

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