The Body Compass and Living in Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn

Early in the Martha Beck Wayfinder coaching program, we learned the body compass was our greatest tool for knowing what was good or not good for us, for what was true or not true for us. We learned the body compass was the thing that kept the plane of us flying on track to our desired goals. To get in touch with the body compass, we did something like yoga nidra where we got into a neutral state of mind (or noted whatever state we were in) and someone said out loud the different body parts (right foot, right ankle, right calf) so that our awareness was called to pay attention to each part and check in with how it was feeling. The purpose was not to change the feeling, just to notice it (tingling, numb, tight, open). What’s the benefit of noticing how your thumb feels?

What’s the benefit of a mother noticing how her baby feels?

Anyway. So after that first body check in, we’d have a sense of how we feel when we’re somewhere in the middle of a scale of 1-10 of feelings—1 being this feels really bad and 10 being this feels really great. Then we would have a thought that would cause us to feel less good in the body and do a scan again—this would let us see how the body feels when we are on the lower end of feeling. After that, we did a third scan after putting a good thought in our mind so our body compass would rate higher on the scale. With these three awarenesses, how you feel lower, higher, and mid-body compass you’d have a helpful parter (your body!) who could help you see how your whole self felt about situations. So, for example, if you were on a first date and you weren’t sure how you felt about this new person, you could check into your body compass and give the date a number. Maybe your brain is constructing stories about your wedding, but your body is making your stomach churn and you can feel the hint of a migraine. Maybe your head says this date is a 10 and you are already in love, but your body compass reads a 3—red flag city.

Our brain is nice, but it gets its information from wildly unreliable and often aggressively harmful sources (social media, Fox News, cultural beliefs that stem from racism, ablism, ageism, etc-ism). Our body can react with terror when faced with a new thing that is actually safe, but it is not manipulative. It’s honest in its reactions.

Here’s where I get confused. The body compass seems like a straightforward tool, but I’m not sure how to use mine, and here’s why: my body is almost always, when I pay close attention, in distress. So when, with the rest of the class, I did the exercise I described above to get a fundamental reading of my body compass, “normal” to me—a 5—felt not that good—it felt uneasy. The deep weight in my abdomen, the tightness of my eyes, the uncertainty of my heart that I feel generally when I stop and check in with myself all tell me something is wrong. The thing I’ve been struggling with in the nine months since I started the Martha Beck program is that my body compass seems to be sending out a perpetual SOS even when I walk the streets of Pleasure Point with, technically, according to my calendar, not a care in the world.

I think when I was born into a world that didn’t understand the impact relinquishment and adoption has on the nervous system of a human body, my body compass got gummed up and the reading of “normal” was actually one where fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (the sympathetic nervous system) was what my brain understood normal to be. Life is a racing heart and tight shoulders, tight neck, tight everything. Life is thinking something bad is going to happen. Life is jumping every time someone walks into a room. When agitation is normal, your whole compass is off true north, so when you set out sail for your dreams, you are organically steered for trouble.

I’ll be an official Wayfinder Life Coach at the end of July, but I’m still grappling with this most foundational tool. That’s why I’m taking this tool across the country to three places I think I can learn how to begin to teach my subconscious mind that I’m here in the present moment, not the past, and that I’m safe: to the house of the winningest coach in Ivy League history and to the tip of Cape Cod close to my beloved Atlantic Ocean, and then, finally, to seal the deal, to an island where I felt the most safe as a child: Martha’s Vineyard. I am going to rewire my brain. Rewire or Die.

I am safe. I am safe. I am safe.

If my body compass thinks crisis is normal, I’m going to bring more crisis into my life just to stay stabilized. Safe never happens because I keep inviting tigers into the room.

Do you get it?

I want to treat my body like a newborn. I want to start over. I want to show it the world, even this world, even now, is loving and good. I want my body to believe this so it can feel free to open all the way and flower, to be loving and good, to feel welcomed, to feel safe, to feel at home.

I want this for me. I want this for everyone. Especially now. Especially today.