The Body Doesn’t Lie–Interpretation

So much could be said about this phrase: The body doesn’t lie. Indeed, a whole blog could be written about this statement alone. But I’ve got to start somewhere, so I’ll try to bring it home.

I know someone (the Paradigm Scribe) who has taken on more than he can chew. How does one manage a full-time Master’s degree, putting out applications for work, submitting essays for publication, writing the unimaginable sum of two thousand words a day, keep the wolves at bay, and still keep a happy home? One could just as easily ask: How do you eat an elephant?

One Bite At A Time

Which brings us to the Scribe’s personal problem. He complains that he’s taken on too much, that the courses he’s on are causing stress. And now he feels that he’s on track for an emotional break down. Fine and good. Let him stew in his own juices for awhile while we examine his environmental situation.

The physical temperatures around his home have hovered near 100 degrees for over three weeks. In the last two months solid, he has taken a 2,300 mile trip complete with breakdowns, missed schedules, a grueling 18 days of work, both creative and physical, that have demanded no more than five hours of sleep a night, has been forced to learn new skills, has a loved one who was in surgery – and as if this weren’t bad enough, has forgotten to take his medication at least eight times during those two months. He has also neglected to walk and run as has been his habit for nearly four months.

Then he feels like he’s having a nervous breakdown and – and here’s the catch! – he blames it on his schedule or classes or heat or – just about everything else but what it truly is: he is physically taxing his body and not let it go.

Interpretation:

All this is well and good – and normal behavior – but, getting to the point, he runs the risk of interpreting his physical situation and translating it into an emotional one when it doesn’t really exist.

This is a tricky concept to convey, so I’ll reiterate. The danger is not that he’s ruining his body – though that is a possibility – the real danger is that he is going to interpret his physical deterioration with his attitude about his studies, his career, his job, his life, his marriage, and so on.

His physical deterioration was being interpreted/translated/transposed as a mental one. We often times feel bad (don’t kick the dog) and make the assumption that it’s related to our attitudes.

The Body Doesn’t Lie.

But often times interpreting what’s going on physically effects our reasoning capacity – We want to blame something so we can fix it. What to do? Understanding this nature within us: to attribute physical conditions with our personal attitudes, is often enough to take a step back and take care of the true matter at hand – our health. The Paradigm Scribe simply needs to get back on a healthy regimen, get his normal rest, eat his healthy best, take his meds (if that’s what he’s supposed to do), walk and get back to physical shape. If the other things are still overwhelming, then he should attack those problems the way one would eat an elephant – one bite at a time.