Corinne Austin: Happy bodies equal happy beings

We need to start listening to our bodies Photo / 123rf

COMMENT:

I have a dream...

Where we can liberate and enliven the human being by enhancing the happiness of the human body.

To end the crisis before us we need to first accept that WE are the ones responsible for our health - for understanding it, acknowledging it, and addressing it.

This is a sustainable solution for we are the ones that live and have lived in our bodies. We are the ones who therefore know its workings better than anyone. And we have more power than anyone else does to help it be happier.

We have to find a place in our consciousness where we can take that authority back into our own hands, and align this with our own duty of care and responsibility for our body too.

We've spent a long time focused on medical advancements and amazingness, gifted them the authority on our bodies, and in the need to address disease we've neglected the most crucial part - the HOW; the processes behind pain, disease and suffering.

How has this symptom or disease manifested? What are the processes at play here. Being labelled with a disease is becoming more and more common, and this is certainly a crucial part of the process as it means we can be given the appropriate medication or intervention to help reduce our pains and suffering whilst also keeping us alive.

However, the medical model as we know it was never designed to understand and explore lifestyle disease; they've got far bigger issues to deal with - like deadly communicable diseases, emergency surgeries, and acute trauma. Lifestyle disease isn't their forte, and this is the main thing currently overburdening and overwhelming a medical system and stretching their resources to the absolute maximum.

And that is the hole that needs filling – understanding lifestyle disease, what creates it, and how we can overcome it – for it's our biggest killer. And we can do that. We just have to believe that that power and prerogative is ours. And by doing so, we gift them back the time, space and energy they need to focus on the more dire and acute cases.

We need to go back to nature, to what our bodies were intended for, to what they truly long for.

So, it's time to make the shift. Together. By understanding and knowing the basics of health that we have never been taught but that is life-altering to know.

And that instead of putting all our faith into medical literature, studies, medical trials, textbooks, and extensively-qualified personnel, that we simply just start listening to our bodies, our "gut instinct", have an open mind that never wishes to stop learning about the wonder of our own body, and a heart willing to take the responsibility back into our own hands with the belief that we are most certainly a huge part of the solution ourselves.

So that's where I'm going. I'm headed there. And our ability to achieve this dream is heightened by each of us having our own motivation and our own desire to reach that space too. We are collectively seeking a new era of health and wish to empower those around us to take the happiness of their bodies back into their own hands as much as they can.

Every health professional out there has a role. We can each learn something from them and they're there to catch us when we need them.

But what we need to understand more is that we ourselves are an expert on our own body - because we are a unique human, who's travelled a unique path, facing unique circumstances, who knows our body better than anyone external to us. It's about listening intensely to our bodies whispers, acting in our bodies best interest, and seeking the health practitioners we feel are necessary to guide us to the happy body destination we seek.

Because life is just better when our bodies are happy. And happy bodies equal happier beings.

This is MY Dream.

• Corinne Austin is a movement and health coach (corinne@fitfixnz.co.nz).