I think one of the best things about this book is the realization that consciousness is a whole-body phenomenon. When something goes wrong with your body, it is a welcome relief to know you can converse with it and find out why your body did this, what it might mean, and what you can do to heal yourself. It is empowering. It is freeing. And it can change your life forever.
Enjoy,
Donna Eden,
author of Energy Medicine
Energy is the language your body speaks.
— Donna Eden
True confession: I am a language geek. When I was twelve, I used to sit for hours listening to foreign radio programs. The rhythms and cadences and sounds would thrill me. The sense that there was a conversation I could almost understand pulled me in. The music of it spoke to me. It filled and satisfied me in ways that the programs in English, talking about boring everyday things, did not.
My mother thought I was crazy. She’d say, “Why are you wasting your time with that? You don’t know what they are saying.” I’d say, “But on some level I do know. I can understand them.” She would shake her head and go back to her housework. And I would dive back into the thrill of the barely understood rivers of sound.
Some years later I studied many of those languages and found I still had that liminal sense of understanding, even when I didn’t know for sure, with my logical brain, what the words all meant. Learning foreign languages felt like I was remembering something I’d known in another life. I wondered if there was some kind of source code underlying the specifics of each tongue that I could understand even if I didn’t know the vocabulary or grammar rules.
It is no wonder that fifty-plus years later I have written a book titled The Language Your Body Speaks. This book is about using the language of energy to take care of yourself, to participate in the conversations between your body, spirit, and mind, and to heal yourself. In the many years since my foreign radio adventures, I’ve had opportunities to track down some of that source code I was feeling, our first language of energy expressing itself, and become more fluent. I’ve spent the last thirty-five years working as a professional energy medicine practitioner and intuitive, helping clients learn to participate more fruitfully in their own body, mind, and spirit conversations.
ENERGY AS A LANGUAGE
Most of us talk about energy in practical terms. We say, “She’s got great energy,” meaning we sense from subtle cues that someone is animated or perhaps particularly comfortable to be around. We say, “I don’t have the energy to argue right now,” meaning that activity is somehow not being funded, emotionally, physically, or even spiritually. We say, “My energy has crashed,” meaning we have run out of fuel. On an intuitive level, learning about the subtle energies that we are composed of and how to positively influence their behaviors makes a lot of sense.
Your body is made up of energies. What appears to be solidly physical — the cells, the bones, the tissue, the organs — is in fact a swirling, moving set of energetic exchanges. Even the chemical processes of your body are energetic at their root: Chemistry is the story of energetic exchanges at the molecular level.
And just under the surface of your awareness, your body, mind, and spirit are using a language of energetic signaling to communicate constantly with one another.
Using a vocabulary of light, sound, vibration, imagery, sensation, and other messaging, your body, mind, and spirit are talking with one another, adjusting your physical self to match your thoughts, influencing your thoughts to recognize the needs of your body, and embodying the urgings of your spirit. There is a grammar to this language: patterns of movement and energetic exchange. Like all languages, the subtle energies that you are made of encode meaning and shape your experience.
Is learning the language of energy really necessary? It is crucial if you want to be able to participate in your own evolving experience and create the life you crave. Imbalance in the body, mind, or spirit communicates through symptoms, feelings, sensations, thoughts, and events. If we miss those communiqués, the body and mind shout louder and discomfort snowballs into illness.
I learned this truth the hard way. My path to becoming a healer included a years-long slide into chronic illness that finally forced me to wake up and listen to what my body, mind, and spirit were trying to teach me.
Chronic health problems showed up early in my life. At first, they took the form of minor ailments, frequent ankle sprains, and stomach upsets. Then my weight ballooned when I skipped third grade and turned to sugar for consolation, after losing my friends. That led to blood sugars careening wildly, leaving me alternately too animated or too crashed out.
Where did all this tumult come from? In part, I was a sensitive kid living in a family rife with unnamed, unacknowledged conflict. My parents were camouflaging difficulties in a marriage that didn’t work. They were just too different. My mother’s core value was “never do anything in excess.” If I got hurt, her response was, “Oh, I’m sure you are fine.” My father, on the other hand, was grandiose and brilliant, though emotionally clueless. His response to my complaints was to brag that he had never had a day of illness in his life. Clearly, he believed that anything true for him should be true for his offspring. Conflicts in style, worldview, and values are common in families. These often give rise to the internal, sometimes invisible existential stress of a soul that feels unrecognized, setting the stage for chronic illness. If Mom was a violin, Dad was a tuba. So how was I to learn to take care of my oboe self and really play my instrument?
As my mom was trying to get me to rosin my bow and tune my nonexistent strings, my father was saying, “We’re both wind instruments, so just go oom-pah, oom-pah, and you’ll get along great.” And there I was, an oboe, filling the tube with phlegm and not knowing enough to shake it out. I was desperately trying to play the music of my soul on an instrument I never learned how to manage properly.
I careened through my early years with weight fluctuations, food obsessions, mild flu-like symptoms, and allergies, and I spent hours under the covers reading and ruining my eyesight. This led to hormone imbalances in adolescence, depression, and chronic dieting and bingeing. And my poor soggy oboe degenerated with bouts of compulsive exercise, rounds of fatigue that might last for months, and behavior that ranged between overanimation and depression. By the time I was nearing thirty, the situation had degenerated into daily migraines and a vulnerability to viruses, parasites, and other beasties that would disrupt my energies’ ability to communicate and function for months at a time. Not a pretty picture!
None of the many physicians I consulted ever found anything medically wrong with me. In fact, most of them implied that it was normal for hormones and moods to swing, or they labeled my issues a function of personality and therefore an emotional problem.
Then finally I ran into a doctor who woke me up with a simple truth. I went to see her with severe digestive discomfort and ongoing exhaustion. She conducted numerous tests, examined me thoroughly, and gave me a diagnosis of blinding clarity: I had “malaise.”
I was furious. Malaise is French for “discomfort.” She charged me eighty dollars to tell me I had discomfort! But like all truths, it wormed its way past my anger to stick in my brain. She said, “Medicine” — meaning allopathic, Western medicine — “has nothing to offer you. I’m going to give you the name and number of a complementary medicine practitioner who might be able to help.”
In retrospect, malaise was exactly what I had. I had no idea how to bring comfort, specific to my particular mind-body, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day. And my body was registering its objections with louder and louder cries for help.