The Mind-Body

Photo by Valeria Reverdo on Unsplash

In yoga you hear talk of the mind-body, this concept that your body and mind are integrated into a single unit. An infinity symbol, a figure of eight swirling around and back into itself, around and around and around. The body provides feedback for the mind, the mind speaks back to it in an endless conversation.

You might have heard that the stomach is your second brain. The enteric nervous system that regulates our gut uses the same chemicals and cells as the brain to help us digest and to alert the brain when something is amiss, and the gut microbiota influences our body’s levels of serotonin, our happy hormone. I would not have described myself as a happy teenager. In fact, as a teenager I experienced a persistent, mysterious vomiting illness. The first notable time I remember this happening was during my junior certificate Geography exam. I had to stand up and run out of Mr Breslin’s classroom, barely making it outside the door before spewing a chunky mess on the corridor. The vomiting would be repetitive for about half a day, until my stomach was so empty and pained from wringing itself out like a dishcloth, that the entire next day I would be bed bound.

This mystery vomiting revisited me on a school trip to Torremolinos. My grandfather was dying at the time, though my parents were not telling me that this was happening, I knew something was going on. Equally stressed out by the teenage plight of trying to seem cool, I was aggrieved by the fact the other girls in my year were spending the nights in Torremolinos sneaking out of the hotel to bars and a gay club called Sparkles, and smoking cigarettes on the blackness of the beach at night. The vomiting struck me down, causing me to miss out on these audacious nights out, and subsequently I didn’t get detention when the teachers discovered the girls had been out drinking and venturing to bars. I did however have the displeasure of one of the teachers managing the group trip barking down the phone to my parents that I just wasn’t making an effort, and they were sorry about my grandfather dying but I needed to try a bit harder to enjoy the trip.

My mum brought me to the doctor to investigate, thinking that maybe I had an ulcer. I did a variety of tests which showed nothing was wrong physically, but no one thought to bring me to a therapist to explore my high functioning anxiety - I was mentally crippled but still managed my day to day life pretty well. I was an overachiever as a child, well behaved to counter my sister’s intellectual disability and my brother’s distressing misbehaviour, getting in trouble at school, mitching to go off and graffiti local walls. My parents would come back from my parent teacher meetings looking like they’d been to a day spa whereas when they spoke with my brother’s teachers their brows would be furrowed and mouths downturned by the experience.

The vomiting I had was exceptionally ill-timed, which was the biggest indicator that it was down to anxiety. The most inconvenient of times was the day of my sister’s brain operation. We were walking to the hospital apartments which we were due to stay in for the duration of her surgery, and I remember walking past distinguished looking white brick houses flanking private parks, and vomiting colours along painted black railing. While my parents accompanied my sister to the hospital for her surgery, I holed up in the rented apartment, clutching my cramping stomach and watching the clock there, while my parents watched another clock face, time ticking forward as the surgery progressed. Each moment, each precise cut another complex origami fold in the paper of the life she would live after this. No matter what happened with my stomach brain, it paled in comparison to what was happening to my sister’s skull brain.

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My biggest source of anxiety as a girl was always related to food and my body. From the age of five, I remember sitting beside my playschool best friend in the car and wondering why our legs were different sizes. I always had a more muscular, sturdy, ‘big-boned’ build than my sister who had bird like limbs as a young girl. It wasn’t until I was ten or eleven that I started becoming concerned about what I weighed. My mother has been an advocate of Weight Watchers and Slimming World for decades, and had always watched her weight regardless of her petite stature. We were raised on slimline milk and ‘low-low’ butter at home. She introduced me to counting calories, writing down what you had eaten, and I remember accompanying her to a Weight Watchers meeting. I stepped onto the bathroom scales at home in what was the beginning of a long and difficult relationship with my weight, with my body, with diet culture and with demonising food.

As a child I was relatively active, taking weekly swimming lessons but finding more enjoyment in musical pursuits like singing and playing piano. As a teenager, I completely abandoned swimming, mortified by my lack of breast development, my thick bones and what I perceived to be a flabby body. I would write down in a notebook what I would change about my body if I could, pining for the impossible thigh gap, wishing for skinny arms, I wanted to be skinny more than anything in the world. I tried starving myself, but would always end up bingeing. I tried the Special K “just replace two meals a day with cereal” diet. I plunged my fingers and a toothbrush down my throat but couldn’t hold them there long enough to actually get anything up. I was a failure, I was fat, and I hated myself, bullying myself mentally, every hour of the day. The vitriol I spewed from my mind towards myself was more putrid than any bile I could or couldn’t get up. It didn’t help that my views of my weight were compounded by my parents’ attitude, particularly my mum’s trickle down diet culture. My father turned to me in the car one day and told me I should probably lose some weight in that backhanded way someone says “I don’t want to offend you but” and proceeds to say something to offend you. I tell myself that my parents’ attitudes were not their fault, but more so a sign of the times. In the nineties and early noughties skinny was everything, and everything I was trying to be. I so desperately wanted to lose weight. I just didn’t know how to.

I was sixteen and found myself on a family hiking holiday to California, where because of the heat and exercise I lost half a stone; seven pounds over three weeks. This was new to me - we had eaten more than I usually ever would, but I lost weight…by moving? One of the hikes around Yosemite was seven hours up and down a waterfall, at one point I felt the fevered sway of a faint threaten me. But I managed. And perhaps this was a turning point in my relationship towards exercise. At seventeen some of the ‘puppy fat’ fell off and I started incorporating more vegetables into my diet. At college I discovered forms of movement other than the torturous team sports popularised at school. I started exploring pilates, and the university gym, and I actually started to enjoy how I felt after moving my body, but my primary motivation was the same. Get. Skinny.

A Japanese doctor Dr. Masaru Emoto researched on the concept of intention and words having an intrinsic impact on physical matter. He exposed water to certain words then froze the samples to microscopically view the formation of the ice crystals. He claimed emotional “energies” and “vibrations” could change water’s physical structure. His studies showed that water exposed to positive speech and thoughts created visually “pleasing” ice crystals, and that negative intentions yielded “ugly” ice formations.

Our bodies are made up of 70% water, and the brain itself is made up of approximately 85% water. In that case, if intention and words impact the physical structure of water, when I was bullying myself, the water in my brain and body was absorbing that criticism and changing shape. I called it ugly, and so it was ugly to me. I didn’t eat well and so my body couldn’t properly create the environment I needed in my gut to be happy. My body-mind was utterly miserable.

It wasn’t until I started shifting my perception, understanding that food isn’t inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, that moving my body helped me feel good in my mind, that the eyes I saw my body with changed. I started to realise the strength of my musculature. I started noticing how my body felt when I ate healthily, and understanding the nutritional value of the food I was eating, how it was helping my cells to repair, preventing disease and giving me ample energy, feeding the happy hormones in my stomach. I realised that a thigh gap was not a worthy goal.

Today, the relationship I have with my body continues to evolve and I’m in a much, much better place. When I see photos of myself as a teenager, my heart squeezes with compassion for the girl I once was. The years of self-disgust and wasted years without self-compassion in my youth were a result of me trying to be someone I wasn’t, and instead of listening to my body I was internally yelling at it. I realise now I was using food to try and control an uncontrollable life, and my body was speaking back to me. My mind-body still remembers those fears and anxieties, and the self-judgement flares up from time to time. Now I marvel at the mystery and power of my body, the strength that I possess, how every cell within me is teeming with life and energy. Every time I finish a yoga practice now I intentionally use it as an opportunity to create an internal dialogue embedded with self-compassion. I pause, sending gratitude to my body for everything it does for me to keep me alive. I listen to my body, and it listens to me.