For the past several years, I have been doing some serious soul-searching.

What started as questions about my own life became a much deeper journey.

I have researched, read books, talked with people, met incredible people from all over the world, prayed, meditated for countless hours, practiced yoga, hugged trees, listened to rivers, watched wildlife interact, and, perhaps most importantly, watched children play.

I have spent a lot of time simply observing life.

The more I looked, the more everything seemed to come back to one simple idea:

Listening.

Listening to our bodies.

Listening to our hearts.

Listening to the world around us.

Listening to that quiet voice underneath all the noise telling us who we are and what matters.

Somewhere along the way, we learned to stop listening.

When the Noise Gets Loud

From the moment we enter this world, we begin receiving messages about who we are supposed to be.

We are given a name, a family, expectations, rules and definitions of success. We learn what we are supposed to look like, what we are supposed to eat, what we are supposed to study, what kind of job we are supposed to have, how much money we are supposed to make and what our lives are supposed to look like.

Some of those things are necessary for living in a society.

But somewhere along the way, the messages can become so loud that we forget to ask some pretty important questions:

What do I actually think?

What do I actually feel?

What does my body tell me?

Where is my heart?

Becoming an Expert on Yourself

We are taught to become experts at almost everything except ourselves.

When we get sick, we go to the doctor.

When we want to eat better, we go to a dietitian.

When we want to get fit, we hire a trainer.

When we want to quiet our minds, we find a teacher.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. Knowledge matters. Experience matters. Experts matter.

But there is another expert who often gets left out of the conversation:

The person actually living inside the body.

Nobody else has lived in my body for my entire life.

Nobody else has felt every ache, every burst of energy, every moment of exhaustion, every breath, every hunger signal, every feeling of fear, excitement, stress, peace or joy.

That does not make me the expert on every medical question.

It makes me the expert on my experience.

My body deserves a seat at the table.

I deserve a seat at the table.

Your Body Is Your Home

That realization changed the way I thought about health and life.

Yoga, meditation, breathing, movement and stillness taught me something I had somehow forgotten:

My body is not simply something to control, fix, punish or reshape until it meets someone else’s definition of acceptable.

It is the place where I experience this life.

It is my home.

And if I don’t have a relationship with the place I live, how can I expect to have a healthy relationship with anything else?

Listening Doesn’t Mean Blindly Following

Learning to listen does not mean believing every thought or obeying every sensation.

It means becoming curious.

It means noticing.

It means learning the language of your own body.

Sometimes the answer may be to rest.

Sometimes it may be to move.

Sometimes it may be to eat.

Sometimes it may be to change what you are eating.

Sometimes it may be to see a doctor.

Sometimes it may be to ask another question.

Sometimes it may be to say no.

Sometimes it may be to say yes.

The point is not that the body always has the answer by itself.

The point is that we stop pretending it has nothing to say.

Maybe we don’t need to immediately fix everything we feel.

Maybe sometimes we simply need to become quiet enough to hear it.

Slow down.

Pay attention.

Get curious.

And listen.

Your body has been talking to you the entire time.