Are you inadvertently making your body the enemy?

What if it’s your most untapped resource…

Most of us have a complicated relationship with our bodies, even if we rarely say it out loud. We notice the fatigue that creeps in mid‑afternoon, the tension that settles into the shoulders, the fog that makes it hard to think clearly. And almost without question, we treat these sensations as problems to solve or obstacles to push past. The body becomes something to manage so we can get on with the “real” work of the day.

But I keep wondering what would happen if we flipped that frame entirely.

What if the body is not the thing getting in the way? What if it is the crucial resource we have been overlooking?

I have been working with a woman I’ll call Eva, and she has been describing her days as if she is moving through mud. Everything feels heavier than it should. She is doing work she believes in, but the pace has been grinding her down. What made it harder was the frustration she felt about feeling that way. She knew she was treating the work like a slog, and she was frustrated with herself for doing that. It created internal friction that drained her even more. The last time she felt this depleted was a decade ago, right before she left her job.

I asked her to tell me about a time when she was doing work she genuinely loves. As she described the moment when someone finally understood something for the first time, everything about her shifted. While she talked about mentoring and teaching, her face brightened, her posture lifted, and a surge of energy made her suddenly magnetic. I found myself leaning in, growing more curious with every word.

The contrast was unmistakable (remarkable). Same person, same conversation, yet an entirely different experience.

Her body was not trying to sabotage her. It was trying to tell her something she had not yet admitted to herself.

We are taught to ignore signals like that. Fatigue means push harder. Tension means toughen up. Feeling drained means fix your routine. But the sensations we label as problems are often the body’s way of offering information. Sluggishness, anxiety, the quiet dread before a certain meeting, the sudden drop in energy around a particular task are not character flaws. These are clues.

The essence of somatic intelligence is learning to work with the body’s signals instead of overriding them, especially when the mind thinks it has all the answers.

Lately, as spring continues to unfold, I have been thinking about how deeply we misunderstand this season too. We tend to imagine spring as a burst of energy. Renewal. Momentum. A fresh start. There is often pressure to feel awake and motivated, as if we should already be operating at full capacity simply because the calendar says it is time.

Real spring rarely arrives with the burst of energy we imagine. It comes in slowly. The ground softens bit by bit, the air shifts almost imperceptibly, and everything wakes up in its own time. It is the start of an energy arc rather than the height of one, a season where we are returning to ourselves, still thawing so we can begin again.

Maybe that is why I have been paying closer attention to mornings, especially the first twenty minutes before the day begins to make its demands. Reaching for your phone right away creates a subtle tightening, a feeling that the day has already started without you. But if you begin by writing a few pages, moving slowly, or letting the day come to you through sensation rather than information, something else emerges. There is more steadiness, more grounding, and a sense of being in tune with your own body before you tune in to anything else.

This is what I mean by thinking about energy differently. Most people assume energy is something you either have or do not have. Enough to get out of bed, or not enough. Enough to get through the day, or not enough. But energy is also relational. It depends on how you meet yourself. When you begin the day with a jolt of information, the body feels startled. When you begin the day with something sensory or nurturing, the body feels supported. It feels included. It feels like it has a place in your life.

Eva eventually decided she would finish the work she was in the middle of. She was not going to abandon it, but she also stopped pretending her body’s signals were irrelevant. She did not bury them under productivity tricks or try to force herself into a better mood. She stayed curious. She listened. And that honesty created the alignment and assuredness she’d been missing as she moved through her days. She made a practice of clearing away barnacles—the subtle, sticky distractions that add drag over time.

We all know what it feels like when something gives us goosebumps. We do not need to analyze it, we simply recognize that it means something. The body often recognizes truth long before the mind catches up. We have access to that kind of knowing all the time, but we have been trained to treat it like background noise.

So this spring, I am less interested in detoxing or optimizing. I am more interested in listening. Listening before deciding something is wrong. Listening before saying yes. Listening before pushing through. Listening before assuming the body is in the way. Because it is not. It is the ally we have been ignoring.

And since everything around us is still waking up, it might be a good moment to ask yourself: What is your relationship with your body’s signals at work? Do you tend to push through, or pause and listen? Where might you begin again, this time leading with head, heart and body?