You don’t have control over your body.
For many of our body functions, we are entirely at the mercy of nature. We are as tall as our body manages. If our lungs lose function there is no amount of willpower that will bring that function back. If our brain takes a detour into some dark places, you can’t just make yourself “let it go” and get back to work. If you have mobility issues, a super positive attitude is not going to make your legs support you.
Vegans still get cancer, marathon runners still get MS, monks and holy leaders still face the hardship of mortality. These are just facts.
But the culture that surrounds us wants us to believe different. We are taught – by people who make money teaching us this – that all our problems have individual solutions, and so if we have problems then we have brought them on ourselves. The dominant culture teaches us to believe that any sign of physical weakness is a character flaw, and the result of our own poor choices we should feel ashamed over.
However, I have also spent many years trapped in learned helplessness and nihilism, believing that I had ZERO power to change my circumstances and was just doomed to a life of suffering. That wasn’t true either. I have learned that anytime I come across an either/or black and white framing, the truth is at neither end and is actually somewhere in the neighborhood of Both/And.
It is true that we do not have control over our health, AND that we can make choices that improve our health. BOTH are true.
We can’t do everything, but that doesn’t mean we can do nothing. The art of taking care of a body is in discerning what we CAN do.
I have written plenty about how I feel about manifesting (Seriously, don’t get me started) and how dangerous I think it can be. This is exactly the kind of situation I mean when I say that. If you believe that your health is the product of your own doing you are destined for suffering. Inevitably, you will find a point where your health will not respond to your thinking and you have to absorb the full weight of mortality on your shoulders alone. That shame is crushing. No one who is already struggling with their health deserves to struggle under shame and societal condemnation as well. The consequences of mortality are not ours to take the blame for. We didn’t design this system, we’re just doing our best in it.
However, I am a dedicated personal practitioner of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The cognitive model is that your thoughts affect your feelings which affect your behavior. It is deeply researched, peer reviewed, and proven to be effective. So what makes CBT different from manifesting? They are both encouraging changing your thoughts to change your life. In fact, I’ve seen a lot of manifesting fans using CBT language as they’re selling it. How can I justify calling one harmful and recommending the other?
For me the answer is: Control vs Agency.
I do not have control over my health. I do not have control over outcomes. I do not have control over my fate. But I do have agency over my health. I have agency over my outcomes. I have agency over my fate.
When I viewed my health as under my control, there was a seductive sense of power and certainty there. I have seen people with good health take a great deal of smug satisfaction in their health as a personal accomplishment. There’s a twisted short term reward in taking all the blame, because you also get to feel that sense of control and take the credit too. But there is a heavy cost to that short term boost. All of the shame that comes with that blame. The terror at any evidence of weakness or mortality. The self hate from knowing all the ways your body secretly deviates from your authority. The denial of reality that prevents care, connection, or planning for an inevitable future. Believing that your health is under your control is a deal with the devil. It’s a little short term power at the cost of your soul.
But the answer isn’t just laying down and letting life electrocute you like the poor dogs in the famous learned helplessness experiment. There are always things that are within our power to do, if we can learn to see them. CBT and other therapeutic modalities have helped me learn how to see potential futures for myself beyond the life I was born in to. I learned how to see beyond the limitations my circumstances had given me and to build the life I love living. And I learned how to find the BOTH/AND about taking care of my body.
BOTH of these things are true. I don’t have control over the outcomes of my body. Despite all my efforts over the years, my body is the size it is, I still have the medical conditions I have, I’m still going to reach the eventual end of this life. AND through those efforts I have better functionality, more manageable conditions, and a life I’m going to feel good living until that last day comes.
We don’t have to accept the individualistic blame our society foists on us so they don’t have to change how the power structures work. Mortality is not an ‘us’ problem. We can, however, claim the agency we have over our lives, and take some of that power back.