What If Your Body Is Not the Enemy?
Sep 21, 2026
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to trust your body. Not to pretend nothing can ever go wrong. Not to ignore symptoms or diagnoses. Not to reject doctors, treatment, or the incredible amount of knowledge we have available to us.
I mean something more foundational than that.
What changes when we stop approaching our bodies primarily from fear and begin approaching them with curiosity, respect, and an awareness of just how much they are doing for us every single second?
That question stayed with me after my conversation with Dr. Ben Rall.
This week on the Be a Blaze Podcast, I sit down with chiropractor, author, speaker, and Designed to Heal podcast host Dr. Ben Rall. We talk about his own health journey, the experiences that shaped his work, fear and faith, the stories we accept about our health, and what it means to become more conscious of the incredible body we're living in.
🎧 Listen to podcast Episode 62: The Innate Wisdom of Healing - A Conversation with Dr. Ben Rall
Your Body Is Doing More Than You Notice
One of the things I loved about this conversation was how often it brought us back to something incredibly simple: your body is constantly working on your behalf.
Your heart keeps beating while you sleep. Your lungs keep breathing. Your digestive system processes what you eat. Your body responds to injury, stress, rest, movement, nourishment, connection, and thousands of other things without requiring you to consciously direct every step.
Most of the time, we don't even think about it. And yet when something begins to feel wrong, it can become very easy to relate to the body as though it has betrayed us.
What if we became curious instead? What if the question wasn't only, What's wrong with my body? but also, What is my body communicating, and how can I support it well?
That shift doesn't eliminate the need for good medical care. It changes the relationship we have with ourselves while we're seeking it.
Fear Can Wear Very Responsible Clothing
Dr. Rall said something during our conversation that really caught my attention. Sometimes we don't recognize fear because we've learned to give it more acceptable names.
We call it being careful. Being prepared. Being responsible. Making absolutely sure nothing bad can happen. And sometimes those things really are wisdom, but sometimes they are fear dressed up in language that makes us feel more comfortable.
That's worth getting curious about.
Are you gathering information so you can make a thoughtful decision, or are you trying to create absolute certainty before you allow yourself to move? Are you caring for your body, or are you constantly scanning it for evidence that something is wrong?
Those can look very similar from the outside while feeling completely different inside.
Fear narrows the world. Curiosity opens it.
What Are You Giving Your Attention To?
Imagine receiving frightening news in a single phone call. Nothing physically touched you. No external event happened to your body in that exact second. You heard words, interpreted their meaning, and your physiology could immediately change.
Your heart might race. Your stomach might tighten. You might shake, sweat, cry, or feel completely frozen. That alone tells us something powerful about the relationship between what we experience mentally and what happens physically.
Our thoughts are not irrelevant to our health.
This doesn't mean positive thinking cures disease, and it certainly doesn't mean someone created an illness because they had the wrong thoughts. That's not the point. The invitation is simply to notice what we're repeatedly feeding our attention.
If most of your internal conversation is centered around everything that might go wrong, your body is participating in that experience with you. So what else deserves some attention?
Strength. Rest. Nourishment. Connection. Faith. Movement. Hope. The things your body does well every day that you've stopped noticing because they have become ordinary.
You Are Allowed to Ask Better Questions
I love questions. Questions create movement. They interrupt assumptions. They help us become conscious of things we've been accepting automatically.
One of the questions Dr. Rall asks people is whether they believe healing is possible for them. I think there is something worth exploring there beyond any particular diagnosis or treatment.
What do you actually believe about your body? Do you believe it is fragile? Difficult? Broken? Working against you? Do you trust it at all?
Maybe you don't right now. That's information too.
You don't have to manufacture certainty you don't feel. But you can begin noticing the story you're carrying and asking whether that story is helping you care for yourself well.
Information Should Give You More Agency, Not Less
Another theme that kept coming up in our conversation was the importance of understanding your choices.
I want you to be able to ask questions. I want you to understand what you're choosing and why you're choosing it. I want you to work with healthcare professionals who are willing to have those conversations with you. And I want you to remember that your health journey belongs to you.
You don't have to blindly follow every trend that appears online. You also don't have to reject something simply because it belongs to conventional medicine, functional medicine, chiropractic care, nutrition, therapy, or any other particular category.
Become curious. Gather information. Ask questions. Understand the potential benefits and risks. Pay attention to your own body. Work with qualified professionals when appropriate.
Then make conscious choices rather than fear-based ones. That is thinking differently about health.
Sometimes We Have to Turn Down the Noise
There is so much information coming at us every day. Our phones. News. Social media. Advertising. Experts. Influencers. Friends. Family. Podcasts. Health trends. New studies. New products. Another person telling you the thing you absolutely must do if you want to be healthy. It becomes a hum.
When that hum is constant, it can be difficult to hear yourself. Sometimes one of the healthiest things we can do is create enough quiet to notice what is actually happening inside us.
For me, that includes prayer and connecting with God. For you, it might also include walking, meditation, journaling, sitting outside, breathwork, or simply turning your phone off for a while.
Quiet isn't empty. Sometimes it's where we finally notice what we've been too distracted to hear.
Your Health Is Not Your Diagnosis
Labels can be useful. They help healthcare professionals communicate, identify patterns, and make treatment decisions.
But a diagnosis is information about something you're experiencing. It is not the entirety of who you are.
The same is true of anxiety, depression, chronic pain, digestive issues, autoimmune conditions, or any other health challenge that begins occupying a large part of your life. We have to be careful not to build our entire identity around the thing we're trying to heal.
You are still you.
You still have relationships, creativity, purpose, humor, gifts, desires, faith, curiosity, and an entire life that exists beyond a medical chart. Your health matters tremendously, but you are more than the thing you're navigating.
Caring for Your Body Can Become Partnership
I don't want to live at war with my body. I don't want every health decision to come from fear of what might happen if I don't do everything perfectly. And I don't want to look at my body only when something hurts, changes, or stops working the way I want it to.
I want partnership.
That means listening without obsessing, caring without controlling, learning without assuming I know everything, and seeking help when I need it while continuing to stay connected to myself.
It means remembering that health isn't something being done to me. I get to participate.
Maybe Trust Starts Small
You don't have to wake up tomorrow with complete confidence in your body, your health, or every decision in front of you.
Start smaller.
Notice one thing your body did for you today. Ask one question you've been afraid to ask. Pay attention to one place where fear may be making a decision for you. Create a little quiet.
Choose one thing that supports your health because you love your body enough to care for it, not because you're terrified of what will happen if you don't. Then notice what happens.
The body is extraordinary. The mind is powerful. Faith can change the way we experience our circumstances. And there is still so much we don't understand.
I think there is something beautiful about respecting all of that.
You don't have to know everything about your body to begin treating it like something worth trusting, listening to, and caring for.