Your Body Dialogue
The “Body Dialogue” is something I wrote about in the Miracle Ball Method book. It’s the back-and-forth communication between mind and body. That description sounds simple, but the reality is both deep and complex. This communication happens in milliseconds. It’s open to interpretation, and it always ends with a response.
Communication is an important part of any relationship. We rely on it at school, in our families, at work, and so much more. The way we communicate not only tells others a lot about us—it also elicits responses in others. Your body is also responding. What most of us don’t understand is we are always communicating with our body. By using a new Body Dialogue, inserting new directions for your body, we learn our body is extremely adaptable and will change and flourish.
You can improve the most difficult of challenges when you understand a process your body will do naturally. Let’s start this communication.
Do it different, changing the dialogue.
Words matter. The way we say something carries meaning, and every word is interpreted. That’s also true when it comes to our own body. Our body has its own way of speaking to us. It can’t send us an email—it speaks through physical feeling. Those feelings can be quite clear and well defined. Unfortunately, most of us have a general sense of their body at best. We know what feels good and what doesn’t. Being more specific with what you notice enhances communication between body and brain. Your body will have more to work with.
And that’s the hard part of any conversation: the listening. With our body, there are two roadblocks:
- Understanding that it is communicating.
- Learning how to respond.
How does your body speak to you?
Most of us pay a lot of “lip service” to the idea of the body communicating. Too often, I see people putting words in the body’s mouth. In other words, we interpret what we want the body to be saying—based on what others have told us or what we expect. That leads to inaccurate misinterpretations about how our body actually functions. It prevents our body from giving further feedback.
Don’t be surprised if you feel very little. Our bodies are like any relationship; it gets stale when people don’t keep it interesting. Your body dialogue is a conversation. The more one side hears the other side you can usually work things out. But when one side does all the talking, the other side shuts down, things deteriorate.
The good news is bodies are not that complicated. Give them the right directions, listen to their feedback and you will be surprised they do function in ways you might not have been open to. But if you think you breathe because of micromanaging you’re breathing or move based on an exercise program it becomes a very one sided conversation. Your body knows how to breathe, and move.
Your honest body!
What I love about working with the body is its complete and total honesty. I can beat around the bush, talk in circles, or overanalyze—but the body doesn’t do that. It simply gives us feelings.
When I struggled with chronic pain, I tried to analyze it, interpret it through other people’s experiences, and catastrophize what it all meant. When nothing worked, I gave up. So did my body. And in that moment, something shifted. I felt something purely physical—not good or bad, just new. For me, it was my right knee. How do you describe a feeling like that? As individuals we don’t have a language to describe physicality. We have good and bad, and we have basic thoughts about how we move our physical parts. Some of us, not many, incorporate physical feelings and movement naturally. They are usually very young or were not subjected to a lot of bad teachers. For example, you can replace people’s natural ability to feel movement with bad training.
As for my knee, it surprised me in that moment. It began to rest. For a moment I stopped clenching it and my Body Dialogue began. In that moment I knew that I felt fine. I knew there was something other than what I was being told. That was my freedom, there was something that amazing, but I couldn’t realize how to get there. All I knew was how to tell it what to do.
But it wasn’t always positive because there were some physical feelings that were holding and clenching in ways that took my breath away. I had to allow myself to breathe but not by making myself breathe, understanding that the way I was feeling had much to do with holding my breath.
At the time, I had been dealing with severe sciatica and loss of function on my right side. My body felt dramatically different from my left. But in that quiet moment, when I stopped fighting, I noticed something else: my body felt something. That was alright. A childhood of running and not feeling what was happening all began to start making sense. My body oddly enough became the teacher.
As strange as it may sound, most of us don’t really feel our body. We talk over it, around it, tell it what to do, and act superior to it. Yet our body has mechanisms that can help it function, adapt, and even dramatically improve how we feel and move. But as long as we’re talking, we’re rehashing our stories, opinions, and struggles—our body can’t help us. We’re trapped by our own ego, convinced we’re smarter so we cant always hear over our own thoughts.
For me, giving up was a gift. I discovered something I’d never considered before: my body had its own intelligence, and it was listening to me all along. It was only adapting to my internal dialogue. What if, instead of talking over it, I started listening—and then changed the dialogue?
That eventually became the Miracle Ball Method. It’s not just “relax, release, and let go.” It’s understanding that your body can sense deeply, and that sensing is a powerful form of communication. This truth has brought me not only physical relief but also greater awareness in everyday life. I began to notice how often I thought I was “listening” to others while really just waiting for a different response. My conversations—with people and with my body—were often one-sided.
But here’s the thing: stripping away one-sided conversations is easy for the body. It responds more readily than we imagine. That doesn’t always mean we trust it, or know what to do with the information right away. But we can learn through listening—and the body is no different.