I feel like I'm in a kind of mental cocooning stage again. I am withdrawing from the world to some extent, not completely but more than most people probably 😂
I do this because I have learned to follow my needs, whether they're physical, psychological or social. Usually a mix of these. Sometimes the signals seem hard to understand or to follow, but not in this case.
Very often, actually, it's not that the signals our mind and body send us are hard to read, but that we have convinced ourselves it would be bad to follow them literally, and thus we end up fighting ourselves. Or rather, we haven't convinved ouSELVES, we probably have been convinced by others, maybe our parents in childhood, maybe "shut up and sit still" schooling, maybe abuse, maybe a cult-like group we were in, maybe just the culture in general.
The interesting thing is that in order to test whether and how to follow internal signals, it is absolutely necessary to overcome the nocebo effect – the opposite of the placebo effect. In the nocebo effect, something we assume or expect to have a negative effect on us, will have a negative effect on us for no other reason than we assume it will, not because it is inherently harmful. Like taking a sugar pill thinking it is a medication with common side effects and developing those side effects despite not taking the real medication.
And that happens too when we feel hunger, sleepiness, a desire to retreat, anger, or something as simple as an itch. Dion and me talked about this actually recently in regards to mosquito bites – I was a good little Self Controller and didn't scratch my bites and credited that to them healing relatively fast. Dion did scratch them and had bad reactions, but as we talked about how important it is to listen to our bodies, we discovered that if we scratch while tuned in to our bodies' needs and signals, the bites and bad reactions to them actually started healing faster.
It seems like such a little thing, in a way, but at the same time it was so deeply ingrained in me that scratching always makes things worse and that I had to resist that urge and that it was virtous to resist and that it was my fault for being weak (mislead by the desires of the flesh, even?? I do have a culturally christian background!) if I scratched and things got worse or took longer to heal.
Turns out, that was the nocebo effect and it was caused by my disconnection from my body. Whereas since then, I have practiced being more connected and when my body asks for scratches (via itching), I scratch! As hard and as long as my body asks for it. And it doesn't make the mosquito bites or other issues magically disappear, but it does feel satisfying and it is a practice of connection to my flesh AND the speed of how fast the bites heal has increased.
Mainly I try not to get bitten in the first place, though.
And now this post took a completely different turn than planned, but I'm running with it!
It is related though. Because just like "don't scratch!", the urge to keep pushing myself to do things I don't feel like doing and to push back when I allow myself rest – that urge was also indoctrinated into me by an anti-body worldview that tells me that whatever internal impulse I have, I have to resist and do the opposite and that's virtuous and "healthy".
Turns out, it's not. The more I allow myself not only to follow what my body asks of me, but to do so SHAMELESSLY, the better my health gets! Emotional/psychological AND physical! Which of course is the basis for social and even financial wellbeing, in the end (or so I hope, lol 😂)
So, yeah, resting when I felt the urge to rest, which I've practiced for about a year and a half, was super important. But it's even more important to fully give myself internal permission. To no longer think in the back of my mind that I shouldn't be doing this, that I should be doing something else, that I'm causing my depression by being lazy and that I would feel better if I did more things and that clearly no one needs this much rest and this much food...
It is very hard to overcome these kinds of thoughts and beliefs, because not only are they literally everywhere – even people who genuinely want to build a counter-culture are not at all free of these! – but they appear to be proved right! We test it out and we "give in" to our depressive urge to curl up into a blanket burrito and we feel worse. Next time we go against that urge and make ourselves start doing something we usually enjoy (maybe a hobby) and we start feeling better. For a while at least.
Doing not-what-the-body-wants can be a distraction. And doing what the body wants can evoke a strong nocebo effect. Plus, sometimes – a lot of the times – what the body and soul want is to do some deep healing and we've been taught that that is uncomfortable, painful and even dangerous. We've been taught that that is a sign of sickness!
So it took me a while, several years, to get here even after mentally accepting the simple truth: Listen to your body, it'll help you heal.
It really is true, even when your body asks something that your mind and conventional wisdom have told you to be "obviously wrong", like resting for 10, 12 or more hours a day/night cycle, or eating lots of rich, highly processed food (easy to digest!) or scratching mosquito bites. None of these things are always good, but they are good if they are what your body asks for in that moment.