How I Practice Mindful Interactions with My Body
The way I choose to interact with my body has an impact on my eating disorder recovery. So, it's crucial to make sure that I practice mindful interactions with my body, rather than using harmful words or behaviors to abuse my body and interrupt the healing process.
What I've Learned About Practicing Mindful Interactions with My Body
Last week in a counseling session, my therapist asked me to describe the current relationship I have with my body. I thought for a moment, then answered, "We're not on horrible terms. I acknowledge my body's presence, but I would not call us friends. I feel that we're two separate beings—we move in the same direction, but we rarely connect with each other."
She half-smiled, knowingly, as therapists often do, then challenged me to pay more attention to how I interact with my body on a consistent basis. What am I communicating with the words I use to talk about my body? Do the actions I take bring my body care and nourishment, or do I ignore the basic needs that will help my body thrive? Is our relationship mutually beneficial, or is it full of disconnection and mistreatment?
I left this therapy session with all of those questions to parse through in the days to come. But now that I've had about a week to reflect and examine more in-depth, I can see the value in practicing mindful interactions with my body. So in the video below, I want to discuss a few practical, actionable techniques I am currently using to make these mindful interactions part of my eating disorder recovery.
3 Practices that Help Me Cultivate Mindful Interactions with My Body
Do you find it healing and restorative to practice mindful interactions with your own body? What are some techniques that work for you in this area? Please share your insights, experiences, or feedback in the comment section.
APA Reference
Schurrer, M.
(2021, October 12). How I Practice Mindful Interactions with My Body , HealthyPlace. Retrieved
on 2024, August 31 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/survivinged/2021/10/how-i-practice-mindful-interactions-with-my-body
Author: Mary-Elizabeth Schurrer
This is wonderful! What a thoughtful response you provided to begin this beautiful dialogue. It's amazing how easy it can be for us to overlook or discount the communication we have with our own bodies. Imagine, if we said or did some of the things to friends that we say/do to ourselves. Would they still be our friends? This mindful awareness can be such a helpful tool in really beginning to cultivate a new relationship with our bodies.
Hi Lizanne,
Thank you so much for the insightful comment. You are so right—in many causes, how we communicate and interact with ourselves is poles apart from how we treat our friends or loved ones. It's absolutely worth keeping in mind that how we relate to our own bodies can have a long-term impact on both our mental and physical health.