Just Listen

I took a week of vacation last month, and for nine days I lived as if I had no commitments, no responsibilities, no worries. I slept late, took naps in the afternoons, then stayed up all night. I ate when I was hungry, slept when I was tired and basically thought of no one's needs but my own. It was wonderful.

For about four days.

On the evening of the fourth day my body said, "Enough." I had a yoga class that night. I laid down on the floor to do a pose that I've done probably a thousand times, but when I got up, the room started spinning. I sat quietly with my back against the wall until I could stand up. The next pose we did involved standing and bending over backwards, and as soon as I started to lean my head back I knew I couldn't do it without falling over. Unnerved, and a little scared, I left before class had barely started and went home.

I ate a sandwich, went to bed early, and spent the next day quietly, trying not to move my head too much, afraid of setting off another dizzy spell. It was the evening of the second day before I felt normal again.

It's obvious that there were several contributing factors to what happened to me that night. The temperature was over 100 degrees that day, the air conditioning was broken in the yoga classroom, and I hadn't eaten anything since an early, light lunch. Several people offered possible explanations for my dizzy spell--hypoglycemia, heat stroke, low blood pressure, brain tumor (that last one was mine). But mainly, I think my body was telling me it felt off-balance. And I hadn't been paying attention.

It's luxurious to wake up on a Saturday or Sunday morning and be able to turn over and go back to sleep. But sleeping until noon one day, then getting up at 6:00 a.m. the next doesn't do our bodies any favors. Experts tell us that it's best to stick to routine from one day to the next, sleeping and waking at approximately the same time each day, if possible.

I was waking early in the morning, but staying in bed until I went back to sleep, because that was one of the main things I wanted to get out of my vacation--a chance to sleep. Then when I finally got up, I would go out and run errands, going from the air conditioning to the heat and back several times a day. Once I had been up for a few hours, it was all I could do to stay awake, and I would come home and fall asleep again in the middle of the afternoon. I thought this was what my body needed, but now I'm not so sure.

The other thing I wanted to experience on my vacation was to remember my dreams again, dreams that had been elusive for weeks. When I stopped doing exactly what my selfish brain wanted me to do and started doing what my body was telling me to do--get up fairly early in the morning, stay awake all day, eat on a regular schedule, and go to bed at a reasonable hour, my dreams were suddenly there again, every morning, like clockwork.

Two weeks later, I haven't had a recurrence of the dizziness. And I'm still remembering my dreams. Once I started listening to my body, I was rewarded for it.

In Journey to the Heart, Melody Beattie writes,

What is toxic to one person may not be toxic to the next. What my body wants and needs may be different from what yours wants and needs today. The answer is in listening--listening to your bodies, listening to what they're saying, how they're reacting to the people, the substances, the world around us. Listen. What is your body telling you?