School taught many of us to sit still long before we learned how to listen to our bodies.
I’ve been thinking about how early that lesson gets written into us- classrooms, assemblies, desks, lines- the quiet but persistent message that learning, thinking, behaving, even being “good”, all happen from the neck up, while the body is something to be managed, quietened, or ignored.
For me, that never quite landed.
Even as a child, my body wanted to move, to dance, to express without limitation. Not to disrupt or escape, but because movement was, and still is, how I stay connected to myself, how I process what I’m feeling and make sense of the world around me. Sitting still for long periods didn’t bring clarity; it pulled me further away from myself, and the more I tried to override that, the louder things became internally.
There were plenty of moments when that need to move was seen as mistimed, as the wrong moment, the wrong environment, the wrong way of being, depending on the context. The suggestion, sometimes subtle and sometimes direct, was that if I could just sit still, everything would fall into place. Thinking lived in the head. The body came second. Something to control. Something to push through.
Over time, that creates a split.
Learning to live from the neck up, to override sensation, push past tiredness, explain away discomfort, and keep going even when something in you is quietly asking you to slow down, stop, or pay attention. At first, this can look like discipline or resilience. Later, it often shows up as confusion, burnout, or a persistent sense of being slightly disconnected from yourself without quite knowing why.
That kind of disembodiment is subtle, but it isn’t harmless.
When we lose contact with the body, we lose access to early warning signs. Stress shows up late. Boundaries get crossed quietly. Decisions get made that look sensible on paper but feel wrong in practice. You can function like that for a long time, many people do but it comes at a cost.
I’ve learned this the hard way.
Whenever I ignore that pull toward movement, things get louder inside me. My thoughts race, my focus scatters, my body holds tension it doesn’t know what to do with. Thinking harder doesn’t help. Sitting longer doesn’t help. What helps is movement not as an escape, but as a way back into myself, a way of releasing what’s been building without needing to name or solve it first.
Over time, I came to understand that what I’d been reaching for all along was a way of listening. Movement wasn’t restlessness. It was information. A way of staying in relationship with myself before I had the language for it.
Some of the clearest moments in my life haven’t arrived through thinking things through. They’ve arrived while walking, training, dancing, and creating when my body had enough space to speak in its own language. Clarity didn’t come because I found the right answer, but because I stopped forcing one.
This is why being in my body isn’t optional for me now, personally or professionally. Not because it’s a concept or a method, but because it’s been a teacher. The body registers truth early- ease, resistance, energy, fatigue and those signals aren’t inconveniences, they’re information.
Ignoring them has consequences. You can override the body for a while, but it keeps the score. Disconnection doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it whispers, quietly shaping the choices you make and the paths you take, until one day you realise you’ve drifted further from yourself than you meant to.
This is a question of integrity of learning how to listen, not just to our thoughts, but to what the body has been communicating all along, often quietly beneath the noise of explanation.
When we make space for that kind of listening, decisions tend to come from a deeper place. They may take longer. They may look quieter. But they’re usually truer, and they tend to hold.
I’ve trusted that kind of knowing for as long as I can remember. Long before I had language for it, my body was already speaking, already guiding, already insisting on movement as a way of staying connected to myself. So when I first came across Nietzsche’s words,- “there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy”, – they didn’t teach me something new. They named something true to me. It was like Nietzsche pointing to the same place I’d been listening from all along.
That, for me, is the work beneath the work, learning to stay near to that knowing, and letting it lead before the mind rushes in to explain.