When Your Body Changes the Plan

Photo by July on Unsplash

I started writing this while sitting in a beautiful jungle ashram in Rishikesh.

The whole place felt peaceful, like a comforting hug, and nourishing, in a way that’s difficult to properly describe unless you’ve experienced it. There were people reading on balconies, chatting over tea, wandering slowly between yoga classes and meals.

It should have been exactly the kind of place where I felt grounded and alive. Instead, I could barely leave my room.

A few days after arriving in Rishikesh, I came down with a severe stomach issue. Not just a slightly-off, travellers' tummy kind of bug.

Instead, this was the kind that completely wipes you out physically and mentally, where your body stops being something in the background and becomes the only thing you can think about. And unfortunately, it arrived right at the start of the trip.

This was following several long days of travelling and a hairy taxi trip from Delhi (great fun I'm sure if you don't have a delicate stomach). My body was getting put through its paces even before we arrived in Rishikesh, and it chose time at the ashram to fully rebel. 

The irony is that this trip was to be about furthering my yoga practice - reinforcing the connection between my body and my mind, but being floored by stomach issues wasn't exactly how I envisaged that happening. As I kept trying to tell myself, there was a lesson in all of this. 

When the Trip Stops Looking Like the Plan

Photo by Hayley Murray on Unsplash

I’d imagined my first week in Rishikesh going very (very!) differently. There were plans to go to Ganga Aarti, visit the Beatles Ashram, explore the town with the group, and properly immerse myself in everything India had to offer. Rishikesh was a celebration of sorts - a trip to mark the occasion of passing my yoga teacher training, spending time with people I had grown to respect and care about, and learning more about myself on the next stage of this journey. 

Instead of doing that, I spent most of the first week asleep, dehydrated, exhausted, and slowly shuffling between my bed and the bathroom wondering why my stomach seemed determined to destroy me.

In the moment, it felt frustrating. Not just because I was unwell, but because I felt like I was missing the experience I had travelled to Rishikesh for - it was at my fingers tips, the culmination of months of work in my yoga teacher training, and it was passing by without my involvement.

When we imagine trips like this - especially ones tied to wellness, spirituality, yoga, or personal growth - we tend to imagine ourselves becoming some elevated version of ourselves. We anticipate calm, clear-mindedness, presence.  I had daydreamed of drinking chai while journalling profound thoughts overlooking the river and mountains, sharing moments with my fellow yogis. 

Lying in bed eating plain rice and calculating how many dehydration and electrolyte sachets you need to get through the next few days was not something I had planned on doing. 

But somewhere in the middle of all of that disappointment, something occurred to me.

Letting the Experience Become Something Else

Photo by Jovan Vasiljević on Unsplash

By the second week, after an unhealthy amount of medicine and a lot of forced rest, I managed to get myself out to the jungle ashram. And oddly enough, that quieter, slower environment ended up being exactly what I needed. I have to stress - not necessarily for my body, as the issues continued there, but for my mind. 

There was less pressure in the calm of the jungle. Meals happened at set times, people naturally gathered together, and there was no expectation to constantly be doing something. I could sit on the balcony and read. I could talk to people when I had the energy. I could disappear back to my room when I didn’t. Everything felt gentler.

And for the first time on the trip, I stopped fighting my body quite so much.

One morning, there was a plan to walk to a waterfall nearby. Normally, I would have pushed through - some misguided modern stoicism at play, I would have told myself it would be good for me, and convinced myself that I didn’t want to miss out again.

But when I woke up that morning and looked at myself properly in the mirror, I knew immediately that I wasn’t okay. Or, rather, I was okay, but not okay enough for a hike to a waterfall.

I’d slept for hours, but I still looked exhausted. I was dehydrated. My stomach had kept waking me up through the night, and my body quite clearly had other priorities besides hiking through the Indian jungle.

So I didn’t go.

And honestly? That decision probably sounds incredibly small. But for me, it mattered.

Because for a long time, I’ve had a habit of trying to override what my body is telling me.

• Pushing through tiredness.
• Ignoring stress.
• Treating rest as something to earn instead of something necessary.
• Working long hours, foregoing food and hydration to get things done.

Realising at the end of the day that I had been so caught up in whatever project I had taken on that day, I hadn't looked after myself in basic human ways. I had clearly overridden some of (if not all of) what my body was telling me. 

In Rishikesh, I listened earlier.

Now, to be completely honest, there was a very (very!) practical element to my decision not to make the hike - as memorable as a waterfall trek in India would have been, it would have become significantly more memorable if I’d ended up violently ill halfway through it. There are some spiritual experiences I simply do not need.

Working With Yourself Instead of Against Yourself

Photo by Justin Dream on Unsplash

But underneath the humour was a genuine realisation.

A huge part of wellbeing is adaptability.

Not optimisation. Not perfection. Not forcing ourselves into the version of the day we originally planned. Adaptability.

Checking in with:

• where our body is.
• where our mind is.
• where our energy is.

Acknowledging how the night before affected us. Recognising stress before it becomes burnout. Accepting that sometimes the most supportive thing we can do for ourselves is scale the day back instead of pushing harder through it.

That doesn’t mean giving up on goals or avoiding discomfort entirely  -sometimes growth absolutely does require challenge, discipline, and effort. But there’s a difference between healthy challenge and actively working against yourself.

And I think many of us have become so used to overriding our own signals that we only stop once our body forces us to.

Signs We Miss

Photo by Claiton Conto on Unsplash

Stress shows up physically long before we acknowledge it mentally. It can take so many forms - some of mine are:

• Tight shoulders: Work stress.
• Tight neck and chest: Emotional stress. 
• Exhaustion: Productivity stress.
• Stomach issues, headaches, restlessness: A general lack of self-care due to - you guessed it - stress.

Other people show different forms of stress - including shallow breathing, feeling emotionally reactive over tiny things, sleeping too much or too little. The list is endless, and very personal - your own body gives out its own signals. And the reality is, our bodies are often communicating with us far earlier than we’re willing to listen.

Letting your body change the plan

Photo by Yuris Alhumaydy on Unsplash

The trip to Rishikesh made what my body was telling me impossible to ignore.

Rishikesh wasn’t the experience I originally expected it to be.

I didn’t do every activity. I didn’t have some dramatic spiritual awakening beside the Ganges. I spent more time resting than exploring.

But in its own strange way, maybe that was the lesson.

 

Sometimes the most important thing we can learn is how to stop fighting ourselves long enough to actually hear what we need. And real wellness - the kind that small beginnings come from - sometimes looks messy, unglamorous, and disappointing before it becomes insightful.

So with that in mind, I ask you - before pushing through today, pause and ask yourself what you actually need. And when your body gives you the signals, I encourage you to really listen.