Daily Practice ·
Listen to your body today: the practice of the three messages
Your body sends signals before your mind reaches a conclusion. This practice teaches you to receive them, understand them, and use them to decide better.
By Pedro J. Pérez
There are days when tiredness appears with no apparent cause, your back tenses for no reason, or a decision that seemed simple becomes heavy in your chest. We usually treat it as a nuisance: something that must be corrected as soon as possible so we can keep functioning. But those sensations are not noise: they are information that arrives before reasoning.
Your body processes many more variables than your conscious mind can handle at once. That is why it warns you before you know how to explain why. A decision that opens you up usually feels like space; one that betrays you usually feels like closure. Learning to read those signals is a form of practical intelligence you can train today, at home, with nothing special.
This practice does not seek to eliminate discomfort, but to listen to it before silencing it. Give it a few minutes and treat its messages with the same seriousness with which you treat your accounts.
The practice Duration: 12 minutes
Stop and take inventory
Sit in a quiet place and close your eyes. For two minutes, scan your body from head to feet without trying to change anything: notice where there is tension, where there is heat, where there is discomfort or emptiness. Do not judge it or correct it. Just register it. If you get distracted, return to the point of the body you were checking.
Name each signal
Choose the two or three areas that have caught your attention most. For each one, ask yourself silently: what is happening in my life that resembles this? For example, a tight throat can accompany something you have not said; a closed stomach, a situation you have not finished digesting. For three minutes, let words or images appear without forcing them. Write down what arises in one sentence per area.
Ask what it comes to tell you
Take the most intense signal and ask a direct question: "What do you come to tell me?". Wait without answering immediately. For two minutes, breathe slowly and let the answer arrive as an intuition, a word, or an image. Do not look for a perfect explanation; a clue is enough. If nothing arrives, write "I don't know yet" and move on: recognizing that there is a message is already progress.
Test openness and oppression
Think of a decision you have pending today or this week. Imagine you have already made it and observe your body for one minute: do you feel space, lightness, broad breathing? Now imagine the opposite option and observe for another minute: do you feel closure, weight, tension? Write down which option produces openness and which produces oppression. Do not decide yet: just gather the information.
Choose a gesture of response
Before finishing, choose one small, concrete action that responds to the message received. It can be saying something you keep silent, resting for fifteen minutes, asking for a conversation, or postponing a decision until tomorrow. Write it in a single line and commit to doing it today or tomorrow. The body does not only ask to be heard: it also appreciates a response.
To reflect on today
What has your body told you today that your mind had not yet put into words?
To finish
Listening to the body is not abandoning reason: it is adding a source of information that arrives earlier and that tends to be honest. When you treat its signals as messages and not as enemies, you decide with more perspective and save yourself the wear of ignoring yourself. Today you have begun to train that dialogue; tomorrow it will be enough to open it again for a few minutes.