the body says no

As I walk home, I often realize how sore I am. It feels good to have this evidence that I got a good workout. An hour of kickboxing, then an hour of grappling. I'm so fortunate to even be able to do this at all, let alone do it well.

As I walked to class, I was thinking about this line Gabor Mate uses, where he asks the audience how many times they listen to their gut and regret it. He then asks how many people ignore what their gut tells them, only to regret that. The audience response overwhelmingly supports his proposition that we should always listen to our guts.

As I walked along in bitter argument with my gut, it occurred to me that this can be very wrong, as the gut is often commandeered by mental health problems. That's a defining characteristic of mental health problems to such a broad degree, that we're talking about something most people will experience. Our gut instincts shaped by excessive levels of anger, fear, resentment, or depression.

This point isn't necessarily in contradiction to Gabor's larger point. Which is not so much that our gut instincts are always right, but that to refuse to listen can have serious consequences to our health. It's interesting to think about how this correlates with depression. Evidence suggests that depression is a lot like an immune response. Our instincts are telling us we're sick, and we need to rest and recover. Even hiding can seem like a good idea.

Except with depression, we never recover, and there's tons of evidence that living like that in the long-term is horrible for both mental and physical health. Depression may not even be an exception, per se. It's stressful as hell fighting with my gut instincts all the time. That can't be good for me, either. Every single class, I fend off excuse after excuse. My instincts screaming at me, don't go, this is a terrible idea, and it's going to suck. Today's a bad day for it, it's too hot, or too cold, or I'm too tired. My body says no all the time. 

I remind myself, as I often do, that not once have I regretted going. I always walk home happy that I went.  It's easier to go, being the only thing I do now. When I'm fighting with myself, that point lands hard. I don't do anything else now, so this is all that stands between me and doing nothing. It doesn't feel like enough though. I don't see how training gets me anywhere, and I'm pretty sure I still need to get somewhere.