Listening to the Body - The Body Knows First
We learn a lot about listening - listen to understand, listen with empathy, active listening. They share quite similar concepts and practices. This article is about something different. It is about listening to the body.
Our body actually flags disruptions. It gives us data. But disruptions rarely arrive as insights. They arrive as discomfort. Frustration. A sense of flatness we cannot explain. The feeling that we are doing the right things, but something essential is missing.
We might not call it a signal at first. It just feels like “one of those weeks.” Or months.
When we override the signals
I ignored the signs for a long time. The recurring stress at work and at home pushed me toward unhealthy eating. Snacks, burgers, pratas, and steak. They became a way to cope - something warm, something familiar, something that did not ask questions. I gained weight. My sleep and mood suffered.
At some point, it stopped feeling like a phase and started feeling like a pattern.
In Singapore, many of us were raised to push through difficulty rather than sit with it. So we work longer. We push harder. We optimise. Even rest becomes something to get right. We plan a holiday and treat it like another project - itinerary, timings, food spots all mapped out. We tell ourselves we are tired, not stuck.
And because life in Singapore moves quickly, it’s easy to blend in. From the outside, it feels like everyone is rushing for the MRT, rushing from place to place, rushing to queue for food. It feels normal to clear emails late into the night. Everyone is trying to keep up. So we assume what we are feeling is normal.
But the body is a more honest observer than the story we are telling ourselves.
A tightness in the chest.
A heaviness when we wake up.
A hesitation before a certain conversation.
A recurring dread before certain tasks.
These are not random. They are not inconveniences to suppress or explain away. They are the first vocabulary of something important trying to surface.
Noticing What We Have Missed
The challenge is that we often do not speak this language.
We are more fluent in explaining, justifying, and analysing. We can give very good reasons for why we are stressed, why we cannot slow down, why things have to be this way. But when it comes to simply noticing what is happening in the body, we hesitate.
It can feel unproductive. Even uncomfortable.
So we do what we know how to do. We override.
We push through the tightness.
We distract from the fatigue.
We scroll when things feel too quiet.
A bit like being at a buffet, already full, but still eating more because it’s what everyone else is doing. We don’t pause long enough to ask if we should continue eating.
As a parent of three, I am starting to pay more attention, especially to how I show up with my kids.
I notice that I can be physically present with my children while being entirely absent, my attention consumed by the very anxieties I am trying to outrun. When my child says, “you are always on your phone,” I could deflect with my work responsibilities. I could explain the the deadlines and the job expectations. But what’s underneath that complaint is often true.
Something in me has gone automatic.
Something in me has become so habitual that I can no longer feel it.
And it is often the body that reveals this first. Not as a clear thought, but as a subtle disconnection. A lack of warmth. A sense that we are going through the motions of something that used to feel alive.
We might notice it in small moments - sitting at the dinner table, hearing the conversation but not really being there. Walking beside someone we love, yet feeling a distance we cannot explain.
These are subtle but real signals.
Listening to Our Body as a Practice
The body is trying to bring us back. Back to what matters. Back to what we are avoiding. Back to what we have stopped noticing.
But listening to our body is not something most of us were taught.
We were taught to think clearly, to speak properly, to behave appropriately. The body, on the other hand, can feel like the stick holding the lollipop. The lollipop is the brain, and the body is just “a thing” to hold it up.
What might change if we related to our body sensations differently, as an ongoing practice?
Not as interruptions, but as invitations.
An invitation to pause, even briefly, in the middle of a busy day.
An invitation to notice what is happening without immediately fixing it.
An invitation to ask, quietly, “what is this trying to show me?”
Nothing dramatic happens. There are no big, visible breakthroughs. But something shifts within us.
We become a little more present.
A little less automatic.
And over time, this small shift changes the way we move through our days.
Like choosing to be in the moment instead of rushing off. While the environment and the people we interact with are more or less the same, but our way of being is now different because of the small shift. We start to experience what was always available, but rarely noticed in the past.
New possibilities now open up - possibilities to bless others with an act of service, to smile at someone, to acknowledge a colleague’s actions or to say something kind to a neighbour.
And perhaps this is what listening with the body can bring.
And for me, those possibilities open up a whole new world to breathe in.
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Written by Victor Seet
Victor facilitates teams to leverage their collective strengths, get clear on ways of engagement and ways of working to strengthen team and interpersonal dynamics. Victor specializes in integrating strengths-based and ontological approach into his team coaching and leadership workshops.
