Your Body Is Not a Vehicle.

I want to start with something honest.

For most of my adult life, I treated my body as a means of getting through the day.

Something to fuel.
Something to push.
Something to manage when it caused problems.

If I was tired, I pushed through. If I felt anxious, I tried to calm it down. If something didn’t feel right, I looked for a rational explanation. My body was there to get me where I needed to go. A vehicle, really. Sophisticated enough to require maintenance, but fundamentally in service of everything else. The work. The relationships. The responsibilities. The image of being someone who had things together.

It took me a long time to understand that my body wasn’t simply carrying me through my life. It was participating in it. And it was giving me information I wasn’t always prepared to hear.

The Anxiety I Kept Trying to Manage

For years, I carried a persistent feeling of anxiety. It was there when I woke up and there when I went to sleep. It showed up in the middle of things I loved, which was the part that confused me most. If nothing was wrong, why didn’t I feel better? So I did what capable people often do. I managed it. I pushed through. I developed ways of functioning around it. And I repeatedly told myself to pull it together and keep going. The anxiety stayed.

Looking back, I can see why. There were people in my life at the time whose presence consistently made my body feel unsafe. Not dramatically. Not in a way that gave me a neat piece of evidence I could put on a table and say, “There. That’s the problem.” It was subtler than that. A persistent sense that something wasn’t quite right. And here’s the part that matters. I knew. I wasn’t unaware of what my body was telling me. I simply wasn’t ready to act on it.

I had reasons. Good reasons, at the time. I hoped things would change. I believed I could manage the situation. I wanted a different outcome. So every time the signal arrived, I overrode it. Not because I couldn’t hear it. Because hearing it clearly would have required a decision I wasn’t ready to make. Eventually, I stopped asking myself how to make the anxiety go away and started asking what it was telling me. That changed the relationship completely.

The anxiety wasn’t a problem I needed to defeat. It was information I had been repeatedly dismissing. And when I finally began to listen, something shifted. Not overnight. But gradually, the anxiety began to lose its grip.

“Pull It Together” Is Not a Neutral Instruction

When I think about that period now, I notice how much self-talk accompanied it. Pull it together. Keep going. Not now. Deal with it later. These instructions felt like strength then. They kept things moving. They allowed me to function. They helped me remain the person who could be relied upon. But repeated often enough, they also created a particular relationship with my own internal experience. The message underneath was simple: This isn’t useful right now. Carry on. Don’t let this interfere. And eventually, you stop noticing how quickly you override yourself. The tension arrives, and you carry on. The exhaustion arrives, and you carry on. The discomfort arrives, and you explain it away. The body gives you something to notice, and the mind immediately finds a reason not to. That doesn’t mean the mind is the enemy. It isn’t. Thinking is one of our greatest capacities.

The problem is what happens when thinking is used to dismiss information before we’ve even considered it.

Your Body Is Information, Not an Authority

This is an important distinction for me. I don’t believe we should blindly trust every sensation our body produces. A racing heart doesn’t automatically mean danger. A tight chest doesn’t automatically mean something is wrong. An uncomfortable feeling doesn’t necessarily mean we should walk away.

The body can respond to what is happening now, but it can also respond to what it has learned before. That is why body awareness is not about abandoning reason. It is about bringing another source of information back into the conversation. The body is continuously registering what is happening around us. Breathing changes. Muscle tone changes. Heart rate changes. Attention narrows or widens. We orient towards something, or away from it.

Often these shifts happen before we have consciously formed an explanation. That doesn’t make the body infallible. It makes it worth listening to.

There is a difference.

What Happens When You Stop Overriding the Signal

This is where body awareness becomes more than noticing tense shoulders. It becomes a different kind of attention. You notice the sensation. You don’t immediately label it. You don’t immediately try to make it disappear. You don’t immediately build a story around it. You stay with it for long enough to ask a better question. What is happening here? What changed? What was happening just before I felt this? Is this familiar? What does my body seem to be responding to? Sometimes the answer is surprisingly ordinary. You’re tired. You’ve taken on too much. You haven’t had a moment to yourself. Sometimes it’s relational. You’re around someone and find yourself becoming unusually careful. Sometimes it’s emotional. Something you’ve been avoiding has finally caught up with you.

And sometimes the sensation is simply a sensation. Not every feeling needs a meaning attached to it. That, too, is part of learning to listen.

Body Literacy Changes the Relationship

In the work I do with women, I often see how quickly the override happens. The signal arrives. Then comes the instruction. Keep going. You’re fine. It’s not a big deal. You don’t have time for this. The override can happen so quickly that the woman doesn’t even realise she has made a choice.

That’s why I think body literacy begins here. Not with another technique. Not with another thing to add to an already full life. With noticing the moment you leave your own experience. The moment you move away from what you’re feeling and towards managing it. That moment is information too. Over time, something changes when you begin to notice these moments. You become more familiar with your own patterns. You start recognising the difference between tension and fear, between anticipation and intuition, between genuine tiredness and the exhaustion that comes from holding yourself together.

You don’t necessarily become better at controlling yourself. You become better at understanding yourself. And that is a very different kind of capacity.

Coming Back Into the Conversation

I don’t think the goal is to listen to your body instead of your mind. I think it’s to let them have a conversation again. For a long time, I treated my body as something that needed to cooperate with my life. Now I see it differently. It is part of how I understand my life. The signals aren’t always instructions. They are information. And information deserves to be heard before it is dismissed. Perhaps that is what I was missing all those years. I wasn’t failing to manage my body well enough. I was asking it to carry on while repeatedly ignoring what it was telling me. Sometimes the first step isn’t changing anything.

It’s becoming quiet enough to notice what you already know.

If This Resonates

This is part of the work I do inside Come Home to Your Body. We look at the patterns that have taught you to override, contain, or move away from your own experience, and begin to build a different relationship with what your body is communicating. Not body versus mind. Body and mind, working together.

If this topic resonated with you, you may also enjoy

• Calm and Regulated are Not the Same Thing
• You Don’t Really Stop Thinking
• The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling

Yvette Puchert works with women who understand themselves well and are still waiting to feel different.

They have usually done the work. The therapy, the reading, the years of self-reflection. They can name their patterns, trace where they come from, and explain why they respond the way they do And something still feels unresolved.

Yvette’s work begins where insight stops. She works at the intersection of the nervous system, the body, and emotional patterns, helping women understand not just why they do what they do, but why knowing that hasn’t been enough to change it.

Her background is in corporate environments, so she understands how responsibility accumulates, how the pressure of being reliable becomes something the body carries long after the moment has passed, and how capable women often become the last people anyone thinks to check in on.

She works with women who are ready to stop managing themselves from the outside in, and start working with what is actually there.