I’m reading a great book on body-centered coaching, and it has caused me to become more attentive to my own body signals. We tend to ignore our body unless it signals us in very dramatic ways: Back aches, stiff necks, viruses, and worse. Then we usually react by resenting our body, filling it with medicine and trying to ‘get better’. So, I figured I would try to tune in to see what my body is telling me.
Signal #1 – stiff shoulders and neck. Hmmm…. What does “stiff neck” bring to mind? I looked it up in the Thesaurus and was unpleasantly surprised by the results:

Synonyms: authoritarian, authoritative, biased, bigoted, bullheaded, dictative, dictatorial, dogged, fanatical, impractical, inflexible, insistent, magisterial, mulish, obstinate, one-sided, pertinacious, pigheaded, rigid, speculative, stiff-necked, stubborn, unrealistic

Antonyms: amenable, flexible, manageable, obedient, submissive

OK, anyone who knows me would say I’m not authoritarian or bigoted or biased. But, thinking of ‘stiff necked’ brings to mind inflexible and rigid. Looking at the Antonyms, I kind of like the idea of flexible and amenable, although the others aren’t very attractive.
So, if my body is telling me that I’m being inflexible and rigid, how do I take that knowledge to become more flexible? Is it just a matter of affirming that I look at all sides of an issue before making up my mind? Or should I take a look at my goals and wants, to see if I’m being too stubborn in pursuing them? I tried beaming flexible intentions to my neck with little success. I must admit that I do have some pretty strict goals for my business this year, and it means working many hours to keep moving me towards them. I suppose I have to be inflexible in my approach, but maybe what I can do is lose my attachment to having the outcomes complete by a certain date. Nothing is driving that date but my intent, anyway. So, I think about those deadlines and let them go, like helium balloons floating up in the sky. OK, that feels better already!
The other consideration is that I can have all the good intentions to be more flexible in the world, but until I take action, I have not really committed.
So, I think I’ll go read a book for a couple of hours, and see what happens to my neck.