Kristina's June Note: The Body Is Not a Project

I have a confession to make. For most of my life, I treated my body like a project.

There was always something on the list - something to fix, to track, to improve. The posture that needed correcting. The five pounds that needed dropping. As a former engineer, I looked at every system and asked the same question: how do I make this perform better? So I managed my body the way I managed everything else - with metrics, goals, and a running ledger of its shortcomings.

If you're reading this, you may know the feeling. So many of us - the ambitious ones, the intentional ones, the ones who get things done - have learned to relate to our bodies as one more item on the to-do list, another thing to optimize between meetings and messages. I did it for years without noticing its strangeness: I was trying to manage and control something far more intelligent and far more magical than anything I could engineer.

It took becoming a mother to finally see it.

I became pregnant. I birthed and nourished an entire human being with my body. All of it struck me as faintly insane - magical, impossible, and I still can't fully comprehend it. The body I had spent years appraising in mirrors and managing like a list of flaws turned out to be capable of creating life. Nothing I had ever built came close. And here I'd been treating it like a fixer-upper.

That was the beginning of asking different questions. Not how do I improve this body? But how do I tune into my body’s natural intelligence? And what does it already know?

The answers, once I started looking, were everywhere.

My body knew my child. In the early postpartum days, I would begin to lactate the moment my son was near - before I saw him, before I heard him. My body sensed him and responded, fluent in a language my mind had never been taught.

My body had intuition. We all know the phrase gut feeling. We treat it as a figure of speech, but it turns out to be startlingly literal. The vagus nerve - the long nerve connecting the gut to the brain - carries information overwhelmingly in one direction: roughly 80% of its fibers run from the body to the brain, and only 20% the other way. In other words, your body spends most of its energy reporting up to your mind, not taking orders down from it. The gut isn't a passenger. It's doing most of the talking. "Trust your gut" is, quite literally, sound anatomical advice.

When I slow down the mental chatter in my brain, I can tune in to my body and tap into that gut feeling. Sometimes it's literally in the gut - I feel anxiety gripping my lower belly. But sometimes it's less localized, more like a reaction moving through my whole body. My brain would look at the facts and say yes, but my body felt nooooo. If I followed my brain - because that was what I'd been conditioned to do for most of my life - it would turn out to be the wrong decision. If I followed my gut instinct despite the facts, it would lead to a magical turn of events.

My body also stores unprocessed emotion in my fascia, which is why I can get emotional during a massage or an intense stretch, especially in my hips.

Fascia is a single, continuous web that wraps every muscle, every organ, every nerve - unbroken, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet. And it is now understood to be one of the body's richest sensory organs, threaded with receptors that register stress, stillness, and repetition - by some estimates holding many times more sensory endings than muscle itself.

When we are met with grief or fear, the body braces, the muscles draw in, the breath grows short. Repeat that bracing for months, for years, and it stops being a response. It becomes the default. The research on this is still in its early phases, and I want to be honest about that: there is far more we don't yet understand than we do. But anyone who has wept without warning during a massage, or felt an old sorrow rise to the surface in a deep stretch, already understands this. The body holds on to what the mind hands over for safekeeping.

There is so much to learn from our bodies. They sense, they remember, they create, they nourish. They are not raw material awaiting our improvements. We are housed in the most astonishing architecture in existence, and most of us go through our days apologizing for it.

So this is what I've come to believe: body literacy is not one more thing to achieve. It is the end of achieving. It is, at last, permission to set down the project plan and begin listening to a body that has been superbly intelligent all along.

This is the whole reason Etalon exists: to offer a gentle, daily cue back toward the dialogue your body has been keeping open this entire time.

So this month, we’re sharing a small invitation. The next time you catch yourself managing your body - counting it, scoring it, judging it, just pause, and listen:

What is your body trying to tell you?

Then wait. You may be surprised how long it has been waiting to answer.

With love,

Kristina