The reason I so strongly advocate attuning to and aligning with the body’s wisdom is because it is typically the missing piece in our quest to achieve vibrant health. Our bodies contain a record of our entire history. Our body is the home within which we live, and within which we experience life, and the quality of our existence is dependent on the quality of our consciousness (mind), and our body’s ability to remain open, engaged and responsive to life’s constant change. We have been conditioned from infancy to bypass the body’s wisdom and value our intellectual intelligence above all else, including the body’s inherent intelligence which is providing us with vital feedback in an effort to get our attention and our care.

However, all healing wisdom traditions such as Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine encourage each individual to become deeply attuned to their feeling senses in order to detect subtle signs (or significant) signs of imbalance and make the correct adjustments to realign with balance and inner equilibrium. Too much cold, heat, wind, stress, incorrect diet, sleeping habits, excessive exercise, lack of it, incorrect routine or an inappropriate workload and environment can all contribute to disturbing our constitution, and if we continuously override our body’s attempt to communicate displeasure and continue to adopt habits and behaviours which work against our needs, overtime, more serious expressions of mental, emotional and physical imbalance can occur. Therefore, learning to listen to the body is a vital practice which is necessary for us to develop if we are investing in reclaiming our health and transitioning from one season and phase of our life to the next with greater ease and greater vitality to engage with our full potential.

Somatic therapy helps us connect to extremely subtle sensations within the body and work through dense layers storing unresolved emotions to reclaim our health and peace of mind. Similarly, somatic nutrition helps us revolutionise our relationship with our body and with food by examining why we crave specific foods that might not be aligning with, and what our body actually requires based on our specific blueprint of health. Unresolved underlying emotional issues can result in eating problems, eating disorders, chronic anxiety, low appetite, fatigue and on-going gut issues which can further exacerbate a dysfunctional relationship with our body, and we can be driven to turn towards foods or behaviours that add insult to injury, rather than supporting us to untangle ourselves from negative cycles, minimising our ability to derive pleasure from our food, and how it makes our body feel.

Both Ayurveda and somatic work recognise the importance of realigning each individual with their inherent requirements, and learning to become somatically aware empowers you to make the right decisions for your health in each and every moment, rather than stumbling through your weeks, months and years with digestive discomfort, inflammation, migraine flare ups, skin conditions and other reoccurring or on-going health concerns which you can’t seem to resolve. In applying Ayurveda and somatic nutrition to your life, you might begin to recognise that instead of craving coffee, your gut is communicating the need for a warming, invigorating turmeric latte. Or instead of reaching for a cold sandwich, you might begin to recognise that your body's yearning for a warming broth flavoured with healing spices and plant extracts to help build better gut health which is the foundation for strong health. When we build awareness of what we require, and how to support these requirements through correct nutrition and routine, we begin to work with the body to assist our healing. Everything in nature is designed to heal, including our body, and when there are no obstructions in the way of our healing, symptoms of imbalance naturally begin to diminish. However if we are invested in eating habits and behaviours that work against our unique constitutional needs, then the pathway to healing can be significantly obstructed without us realising it. We might be making our very best efforts to move forward, but unknowingly sabotaging our progress by adopting routines and preferences for foods that exacerbate imbalance and obstruct the path to healing.