There’s no denying that we are sensory creatures. I could be 85, and the rich, salty taste of brisket and riced potatoes would still send me right back to evenings spent home alone on the couch while my parents gallivanted off to their grown-up parties; and whenever I hear “Disturbia,” I’m always catapulted back to freshman year pregames in the halls of Cedro.
The point is that our brains make associations without our even noticing. Every day, we see and listen and taste and smell and feel a thousand different things. Our web of neurons and synapses, muscles and fibers are constantly working to process an overload of external and internal stimuli and give us feedback. It’s a pretty cool mechanism: when we’re cold, we shiver; when we’re hot, we sweat. Adding an even greater degree of complexity, more often than not, it’s not just a physical response we record, but a mental one too. So that a Thanksgiving meal is more than just a gustatory sensation, it’s also an emotional imprint.
This is all to say that our bodies are incredibly powerful instruments. Yet despite their wisdom, we don’t give our bodies enough credit. How many times do we pause and take in our internal physicality and emotions? Our heart is always beating and our lungs are constantly taking in air, but subtle changes in these kinds of everyday actions are huge clues to your physical and mental state. Notice your posture, your breath, your energy level. The tension hiding in your shoulders or your jaw. The rate at which your fingers tap away at the keyboard. Are you fiddling with your hair, bouncing your foot, getting distracted, picking your nails? Pimples? These are all external manifestations of our body’s inner state. It’s trying to tell us something.
Where it gets tricky is that we’re rational creatures as well. Without fangs or sharp canines or armor-like skin, humans climbed to the top of the food chain. Stanford, in particular, is a community of academic thinkers, dominated by those who have used sheer mental grit to get ahead. And for us worshippers of reason, how the body communicates information doesn’t always register. We’re frustrated when we can’t provide a ready explanation for our feelings. “Why am I crying?” or “I don’t know why I’m so tired” or “Sorry, I’m so out of it.” When it’s not convenient to feel a certain way, rather than respecting our body, we apologize for it. Reason should guide your response to a feeling, not the other way around. You can’t simply use your head to coax your body to feel differently. It doesn’t work like that. No one can outsmart Mother Nature.
Last Friday, I participated in an incredible experience that was all about noticing how the body physically reacts to an emotionally charged situation. We replicated an exercise that had been conducted in South Africa in order to help heal the wounds of apartheid. After breaking up into pairs, we were assigned roles. Person A would say the words, “You hurt me,” and Person B would respond with, “I’m sorry.” That same dialogue would repeat, over and over again, as we varied intonation and body language to make up for the fact that we couldn’t change the words.
All of us were shocked by how viscerally and intensely the exercise affected us. Some cried. Everyone wanted the exercise to end. We all needed time to process what had happened. Whether we wanted to or not, we had all superimposed our own psyches onto the words we were saying, provoking physical reactions that hit us out of nowhere.
The exercise was both incredibly uncomfortable and incredibly illuminating. No amount of rational thought could explain our reactions. I can’t describe what might have been going through the other 14 students’ heads. We had to go off of our physicality alone to process it.
The body is an infinite source of truth, even though its truth may not be “rational” or “logical,” per se. Emotions aren’t like equations. They aren’t clean or straightforward, they’re messy and don’t immediately add up. But that doesn’t make emotional information any less valid. Tuning into our bodies opens us up to insight that no degree of rationality could. You can intellectualize all you want, but sometimes, it’s no replacement for something as simple as sitting with your emotions.
As my mom said, sometimes you need a good cry. We all need to heal, both emotionally and physically. When you allow yourself to listen to your body and process your feelings, there’s a much better chance it won’t leave a scar.
Leslie would love to hear about your reaction to this column at labrian “at” stanford “dot” edu. Just make sure not to start your email with “You hurt me.”