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Mindfulness

Coming Home to Your Body

Here’s why mindfulness begins and ends with the body.

Key points

  • Mindfulness means inhabiting your body and responding to its needs.
  • Kindness, care, and appreciation can transform your relationship with your body.
  • The breath can be a gateway to greater awareness.
  • The body can be a wise guide and teacher.

In his novel Dubliners, James Joyce wrote of Mr Duffy, “he lived a short distance from his body.” Like Mr. Duffy, many of us don’t fully inhabit our bodies. Why should we?

There are lots of norms telling us that athletic prowess, beauty, youth, and perfect health are what make us OK. So we create stories about how our bodies should be, often with a sense that we’re falling short and our bodies have let us down. They are not as athletic, thin, youthful, or sexy as they should be. We’re all a bit scared of getting sick and getting old—or maybe even terrified.

But our bodies do so much for us. Think about this: In an average lifespan, you’ll take about 500 million breaths, extracting life-giving oxygen from the air and spreading it through an incredibly complex system of blood vessels to every one of the more than 25 trillion cells in your body.

You don’t have to remember to breathe; it’s managed deep in your brainstem by networks of neural activity working together to control your breathing rhythm. This tells our abdominal muscles and diaphragm to drive the in-breath and the out-breath. These muscles are powerful because our large brains need lots of oxygenated blood. I bet you didn’t know this: You take a large breath—a sigh—every five breaths or so as the body demands a particularly large amount of oxygen.

Our breathing is tied into pretty much everything in our body: our level of activation, pupil dilation, and all our senses. Our breathing is also closely tied to all our emotions. This has two major implications. Our breath tells us how we’re doing. And intentionally changing our breathing is part of changing our state of mind and body.

Our bodies are a deep source of rich information, a readout of our health and well-being, and much, much more. Our hearts will beat about 3 billion times, pumping blood filled with essential nutrients through our arteries and veins. Our complex immune systems will relentlessly find and neutralize pathogens.

Thanks to your brain, you have an extraordinary capacity for learning. A fetus’s brain grows at an astonishing rate of about 250,000 nerve cells per minute through the course of pregnancy. Babies, toddlers, and children accumulate an incredible amount of new information, as well as the ability to use that information to balance, walk, use language, form relationships, and so on.

Our minds will process an unfathomable amount of input throughout our lives, supported by the three-pound organ that is the human brain. Our adult brain is made up of billions of neurons, sending and receiving information through our nervous systems, some at the same speed as a Formula 1 car (about 360 km per hour), across an estimated 100 trillion or so interconnections.

Stop and really think about your body and mind doing all of this. So, why would you want to come home to your body? Because, in truth, your body is already doing extraordinary things. If you pay attention to your body, really tune in, and become intimate with it, there is so much you can learn. Your body can become your touchstone, teacher, sanctuary, home, and friend.

Mindfulness isn’t about some perfect state of body or mind that transcends real life. It’s about becoming more fully human, and that includes inhabiting your body, noticing its rhythms and signals, and finding ways to respond with care rather than reactivity. It’s about building a relationship with your body that is rooted in kindness and respect.

Right now, your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, and your brain is processing countless signals at astonishing speeds. Your body has carried you through every moment of your life—the highs, the lows, the mundane, and the extraordinary. It is your constant companion.

So, why not come home to it?

You don’t need special equipment or hours of free time to start. Simply pause and take a breath. Notice the rise and fall of your chest and the sensation of air moving through your nostrils. Feel your feet on the ground. Ask yourself, “How is my body right now?” You don’t have to change anything—just bring awareness imbued with kindness and care to your body.

As you begin to pay attention to your body, you may be surprised by what you learn. You may notice how tension in your shoulders reflects the stress of your day or how your breath quickens when you feel anxious. You may also discover moments of ease and comfort you hadn’t noticed before.

Here is Mohammed, a man raising two young children and living with chronic back pain, on his early experiences with mindfulness practices:

My mind immediately went to all the ways my life should be better—a part-time job, more money, less pain, more help with my kids, more help around the house, better gym equipment, my sports team winning a tournament for the first time in a decade! I noticed my mind creating this sense of if only, and when I came back to this moment, my back was OK, a small amount of throbbing, but manageable, and the rest of my body felt good actually.

I could rest in the movement of my breath in-out, and feel a sense of ease, even with this background noise of my mind chattering about all the things I needed to do. My thoughts were just part of the background of this moment, alongside the throbbing in my back, the sense of my feet solid on the ground, my chest as it rose and fell with my breath, and a background pulse of my heartbeat, steady and slow.

Here he is again, much further along in his journey:

I have learned that I can notice the pain in my back and move up close to the unpleasant sensations. When I do this, more often than not, they change—sometimes they get tighter or more spread out. Paying attention brings the sensations into the foreground, and that can feel intense.

If I start to think about the pain, it tends to go to a bad place quite quickly: “This pain has been around so long. I am going to have to live with this for such a long time, and I am not sure I can—it’s too much.”

I try to unhook from the word pain, especially chronic pain. This means I can see the sensations as something I can work with, and I can ask “What do I need right now?”

When I zoom out, I can also hold my whole body in awareness. When my whole body is floodlit, the unpleasant sensations sit alongside parts of my body that are doing just fine, and thoughts and feelings that are about stuff in my life other than the unpleasant sensations.

I am not my pain. That is so important. I have met people in rehab who have become their chronic pain, and I get it, but that is not a good place.

Coming home to your body is a practice for life. It helps you navigate challenges like pain, aging, illness, and stress with greater resilience. It deepens your relationships by anchoring you in the present moment, making space for connection and empathy. And perhaps most importantly, it allows you to live your life more fully, savoring the richness of each moment.

Your body is always here, waiting for you. Why not start the journey home?

This post was excerpted from my book, Mindfulness for Life (Guilford Press, 2024).

References

Extracted from Willem Kuyken (2024) Mindfulness for Life published by Guilford Press.

Website Mindfulness for Life

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