Your body holds immeasurable wisdom. It’s constantly sending us signals about what is truly right for us and which areas of our life need change. The tricky part is learning how to listen to and decipher those signals, because in our technology- and social-media-saturated world, there is more noise than ever distorting our ability to hear them.
It’s easy to mistake our cognitive voice for our somatic voice. Anxiety tends to be loud and extremely convincing because its intention is to protect us, and its messages do sometimes hold some truth. There are real benefits to predicting and trying to prevent negative outcomes.
Anxiety likes to look at things from every negative angle: what could go wrong? And there’s often quite a lot that could. It also loves to cling to catastrophic outcomes: if I pursue this business idea, I’ll drain all my money, embarrass myself, lose my friends and family, end up on the street, and then I’ll die. Dramatic, yes, but I’m sure most of us have gone down a similar rabbit hole, leaving us with a debilitating fear that keeps us from building, creating or becoming what we really want.
What the anxious voice fails to consider is: what could go right? Even when something does go wrong, it doesn’t account for the invaluable lessons that come out of it. It forgets our resilience and our track record of figuring things out and moving forward despite setbacks.
Our somatic voice (your gut instinct, intuition, whatever you want to call it) isn’t bound to real-world logic the way anxiety is. It’s guided by energy and true desire. I say “true” because many of our superficial desires also come from our cognitive voice: addictive behaviors, clinging to people, places and outcomes out of fear of losing them, chasing achievements to prove something or please others, and ways to escape or numb ourselves. Superficial desires pull us toward external validation and fleeting doses of dopamine. True desires point toward lasting fulfillment.
True desires often require more dedication, time, risk and simplicity than our technology-addicted brains like. Sometimes a true desire is a quiet afternoon by a lake, watching the water and letting our thoughts and emotions slowly sift through us. Sometimes it’s a creative idea we fear will make us look “stupid,” or that we don’t have the skill or resources to execute fully. Sometimes it’s a hobby with no route to “value,” one that may never be monetized or shared for likes and follows. And sometimes it’s something more complicated and emotionally costly: quitting a high-paying, stressful job to make space for what really matters, leaving a relationship you’ve held onto for years, leaving the hometown you’ve quietly felt called away from, or pursuing a project that may never take off the way you hope.
Our cognitive voice is quick to silence these pulls. You can’t. You shouldn’t. You’ll fail, you’ll go broke, you’ll be alone. But the longer we ignore our true desires, the more disconnected from ourselves we become. For some of us, repeatedly ignoring what matters can leave us feeling more numb, addicted or depressed.
I’ve had many moments in my life when my body’s voice kept asking me to do something that felt terrifying and destabilizing to my anxious head voice: quitting a job that offered security but didn’t feel right, leaving a relationship with someone who was wonderful in many ways but wasn’t what I really needed, pursuing an idea I didn’t feel fully “ready” to execute. And most recently, leaving everything I’d built in a place I love to pursue a completely different way of living, working and creating, opening up a vast ocean of uncertainty.
One of the most recent moments of somatic listening came when the woman I deeply loved told me she needed to flee the US because she feared for her safety and, because of her immigration status, would never be allowed to return. My heart completely shattered. She didn’t ask me to come with her. She wasn’t even sure where she was going, and it felt like far too big an ask for me to leave behind my home, my community and all the artistic momentum I had built in Seattle.
I remember sobbing to my mother at 5am, unable to sleep, filled with a profound grief, when she gently asked, “What if you go too?”
Immediately, I felt the firm grip on my heart begin to loosen. My shoulders dropped; my jaw and forehead softened. My breath deepened into my belly. My body settled into calm.
The more I sat with that possibility, even with all the grief, all the uncertainty, all the immense letting go that a decision like that would require, the more I felt a deep knowing in my body. It was not a choice that made logical sense: leave my good job, my many friends, my artistic community, and dive into the deepest depths of the unknown. And yet I felt a sense of internal expansion. I knew that this experience, however it ended, would change me profoundly and ask things of me I couldn’t yet imagine. For me, staying would have been a decision made purely out of fear, a decision of shrinking rather than growing.
And the decision wasn’t ultimately about blindly following this love. It was more about taking a leap of faith in myself. Traveling the world, dancing, teaching and creating had always been my dream, but I was always waiting for someone or something to give me permission or hand me a direct opportunity. This moment was the catalyst for realizing I needed to give myself permission: to let go of the familiar, embrace the unknown and go boldly in the direction of what I truly wanted for myself.
What it feels like in the body
Looking back, I can see how clearly my body was speaking. The somatic voice often shows up as an opening, a settling, an expanding, goosebumps, a smile, tears. But the tears should feel like a release rather than a contraction.
Anxiety, by contrast, tends to feel like bracing: a tight chest, shallow breath, a clenched jaw, a drop in the stomach, a mind racing to build its case. It is fast and loud, and it tells a story.
I don’t think every feeling of expansion means “yes,” or every tightness means “no.” But noticing what happens in my body can help me distinguish fear of the risk from the deeper feeling that I’m abandoning something important in myself. These signals aren’t a verdict; they’re information to listen to.
There is also often a great deal of grief that comes with following your somatic voice, because it can require letting go of things that felt stable, comforting, or that allowed you to stay numb to your emotions. Grief and fear can show up right alongside the expansion. What matters is whether, underneath them, your body softens or stays closed.
A practice for listening
You don’t have to wait for a life-changing decision to practice. Here are a few ways to start, whether you’re weighing something big or just curious what your body has to say.
1. Slow down first. Anxiety is loud, so give your body a few minutes to catch up. Sit or lie down, put a hand on your belly or chest, take several slow breaths, and feel your feet or the surface supporting you. You’re not trying to get an answer yet, just to arrive.
2. Take each option for a walk. Bring the choice you’re weighing to mind, then spend a minute or two with each path as if you’ve already chosen it. Picture the details: where you’d wake up, who’s there, what the days look like. Then notice your body. What happens to your breath? Your shoulders, jaw, stomach, chest? Does it open, settle and warm, or tighten, brace and go flat? Do this for each option, and give yourself a moment to reset between them.
3. Write without editing. Set a timer for ten minutes and write from prompts like:
- If I weren’t afraid, I would…
- What my body keeps trying to tell me is…
- The thing I keep talking myself out of is…
- What would it cost me to stay the same?
Don’t aim for good writing and try not to stop yourself from anything that comes to mind. Let yourself just dump your unfiltered thoughts onto the page. The goal is to get ahead of the voice that edits.
4. Talk it out with someone you trust. Notice what happens as you speak. Do you light up, get animated and talk about possibility, even if it’s alongside fear? Or do you physically shrink, grow quieter or more monotone, and only talk about points that “make sense”? Sometimes the body answers before the words do.
5. Follow the daydreams. What small thoughts and daydreams keep cropping up, the ones you’re so used to silencing with “I can’t” or “that’s stupid” before they’ve had a chance to breathe? Keep a running list. You don’t have to act on any of them. Just notice which ones keep returning, and what they might open, expand or transform if you let them.
6. Give it time. A spike of panic is loud, urgent and usually passes. A deeper knowing tends to be quieter, steadier, and keeps returning. Fear and excitement can also feel alike in the body, so don’t rush to decide in the middle of either. Come back to your practice over several days and notice what quiet messages stay consistent and what sensations come up in your body. Does your breath deepen? Do you sit up straighter? Do your shoulders relax? Do you feel a sense of expansion or shrinking?
A continuous practice
Building a relationship with your body’s voice, your inner knowing, your intuition, whatever you want to call it, is not a one-time decision. It’s a continuous practice of courage. I still remember the moment my shoulders dropped and my breath moved into my belly at 5am. It wasn’t an answer I could have reasoned my way to. It was my body, quietly, telling me which way was leading me toward becoming more myself.
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