Today is my spouse’s 55th birthday. I turn 55 in about 6 weeks. I’ve always enjoyed that little gap, when he is in “stated age” a year older than I am. So in the next six weeks, I’ll probably remind him he’s got a year on me and ask him how it feels to be over the hill.
Last night, as I stood in the card aisle at the pharmacy, I didn’t see any specifically for the 55th birthday, but there were many for 50, and I thought, “What happened to his 50th birthday? I don’t really remember it.” Then I recalled that it occurred during 2020, and we had other things on our minds that year.
All that led to my thinking about the change that has occurred in my relationship with my own body over the last five years. Like the vast majority of women in my culture, I have had a complicated relationship with my own body: how it feels, how it looks to me and others, how it compares to other bodies, how it functions… Just this week my sister and I were talking about how we were subtly taught to think of our bodies in our growing-up home: you fed it the right foods, you exercised it, you didn’t let “unhealthy” things near it (this included alcohol, drugs, and the body parts of anyone other than a spouse) and then it was supposed to function well. There were expectations of a certain level of functioning.
It was a bit like a contract.
The change for me began when my foot pain flared. It wasn’t the first time; I’d had plantar fasciitis in my late thirties. But this time I couldn’t shake it. I’d begun working in a hospital. Hard floors, lots and lots of steps. Foot pain became the norm.
At first my questions were curative: what will help this go away? And searching led me to the barefoot movement. (That’s not the focus of this post, but if you’re at all interested, I’ll refer you to Anya, whose website helped me tons along the way: https://anyasreviews.com/barefoot-resources/ )
But then my journey turned inward. How did I want to see/think-about my feet? How did I want to interact with my feet? (If that seems like a strange question, hang on.) I began to wonder if there was a way to think of my feet with some gratitude, with some sympathy, and with some encouragement. I wondered if there was a way to work with my feet rather than work on my feet like they were, yep, a machine.
I began talking to them. I was working overnight shifts at that time, and after a stretch of sitting, I would get a page, and I would prepare to stand and walk. The first step after prolonged sitting is the worst when you have plantar fasciitis. “You’ve got this,” I would tell my feet. “It’s going to hurt, but I know you can do it, and after you get warmed up, it will hurt a bit less.” When I had to walk a longer distance, across the suspended walkways connecting the buildings (some on different city blocks), I would congratulate my feet, “Good job! Look at you!”
Then came some gratitude. I found myself thanking my feet, acknowledging the miles upon miles they had carried me, often in shoes that, in hindsight, were harming them. “Oh, the place you’ve taken me,” I told them, getting a mental image of Dr. Seuss’s book.* I apologized for the times I’d mentally berated them for their pain.
Without particularly trying to, this intention to work and be with my feet with kindness, gratitude, and acceptance began to spread to the whole of my body. I had already begun doing yoga, thinking that, yeah, it was probably time to move away from high-impact exercise. Yoga’s pace forced me to slow and actually feel sensations in my body, to listen to its messages to me. I began seeing pain and discomfort in an entirely new way, as my body’s only way to let me know that it was having an issue that needed a response—either to back off on too intense of a movement, to get more rest, to slow my pace, to massage or stretch, to drink more water, to eat differently… My body was letting me know what it needed.
And it needed, beyond attentive care, some acceptance and gratitude. My lower belly wanted to be acknowledged and thanked for carrying children (two of them at once, even) rather than berated for being soft and squishy. My knees deserved accolades for the years of playing high school volleyball (not very gracefully—landing on said knees far too often) and even more years of running in not-great shoes. My heart and lungs—wow, I thought, how had I never fully realized what those amazing organs have been doing every single moment of every single day of my (almost) 55 years?
We humans tend to experience burnout less when we know our work is seen and appreciated. I did a Google search with that phrase and discovered that, just as I suspected, research supports that idea.** I know this may seem weird, but what if the same were true of my knees, my heart, my body? What if my appreciation of and gentle concern for my tricky right knee actually helps it to function better? Could my heart muscle warm a bit and settle in its rhythm when I thank it for its continual service? Does my body stand a little taller when I remember that it—the body—is what allows me to interact with the world, hug and hold my loved ones, smile at strangers, walk in the woods, pet my dogs, chop vegetables, hold a book…?
Or maybe I (the whole of me, body, mind, spirit) am just happier, and so it feels like my heart is happier, my body is more peaceful. I don’t know, but it’s working for me. It’s making me gentler with myself—and not just my body. I am speaking more kindly to my own mind, thanking it for its seemingly crazy thoughts that, I’m pretty sure, are meant to protect me. I am more aware of and more tender with my emotions.
Quite a few years ago now, a friend shared a quote with me, “If your compassion does not include yourself it is not complete.” She didn’t just say it to me once; it came up often. She included it in a card she made me that is now stuck to the bulletin board next to my desk at work.
Self compassion for my body means I have empathy for my body. I acknowledge what it has been through and the possible “why”s behind its pain. In a way, I try on the perspective of my feet, my right knee, my gut. This practice has not made me less compassionate for the vulnerable bodies of the patients I see every day in the hospital and the bodies of my fellow city dwellers; it has made me more compassionate. That’s how self-compassion works. It softens the heart and reminds us that compassion is a valued commodity with enough for everyone.
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/43092/oh-the-places-youll-go-by-dr-seuss
** https://www.workhuman.com/blog/how-recognition-can-help-reduce-stress-and-burnout/
Jen Underwood 