“Listen to your body” is one of the most common things you hear in a Yoga class. Teachers use the phrase to remind students to notice what they need, make choices, and avoid pushing themselves too far. It sounds like a simple instruction, but listening to the body is not always simple.

Sometimes you listen to your body and notice that your legs feel tired and shaky. Maybe you notice that you are not as flexible as you used to be or that one side of your body moves differently than the other. Maybe your shoulders seem to lift right back toward your ears every time you try to soften them. Sometimes you notice that you are exhausted, even when you do not think you have a good enough reason to be.

In those moments, becoming aware of the body does not always make us feel more connected to it. Sometimes it just makes us frustrated.

We often talk about body awareness like noticing automatically leads to healing. If we become aware of where we are holding tension, then we can let it go. If we recognize what our body needs, then we can respond. But being present in the body does not mean we will automatically understand, trust, or feel compassion toward what we find.

It is possible to be very aware of the body and still be deeply critical of it.

You might notice your legs shaking in a pose and immediately think you are weak. You might recognize that you need rest and become frustrated that you cannot keep going. You might notice discomfort and wonder why your body cannot just cooperate. Even an invitation to scan the body can become another opportunity to search for what is wrong.

The body can easily begin to feel like the thing standing between us and the life we want. It gets tired when there is still work to do. It holds tension even when we are trying to relax. It feels anxious in situations the mind knows are safe. It can experience pain, illness, or physical changes that seem unpredictable and outside our control.

For people who have experienced an eating disorder, chronic pain or illness, or trauma involving the body, that distrust can be even more complicated. The body may not feel like a safe home or a reliable partner. It may feel like something to control, correct, ignore, or escape.

We also hear the phrase “the body keeps the score.” The phrase is based on a real and important understanding that stress and trauma can have physical effects. It has helped validate the experiences of many people who were taught to dismiss their physical responses or believe that what they were experiencing was “all in their head.”

At the same time, the phrase can make the body sound like a record of everything that has gone wrong. It can create the image of the body holding onto every painful experience and waiting to reveal it later through tension, pain, or illness. For someone who already feels frustrated with or disconnected from their body, that idea can create even more distrust.

The body is not keeping score against us. It has been responding, adapting, and trying to protect us with the resources available to it.

That does not mean we have to feel grateful for every physical response. Pain is still painful. Exhaustion is still frustrating. Understanding that a response may have developed for a reason does not mean we have to enjoy experiencing it.

Compassion does not require us to pretend that every sensation feels meaningful or that every limitation is easy to accept. It simply asks us to stop treating those experiences as evidence of failure.

That is part of what makes “listen to your body” more complicated than it sounds. Listening is not just noticing a sensation. It is also learning how to respond without immediately turning that sensation into a judgment about ourselves.

Maybe your legs are shaking during a pose. The shaking is the information. “I am weak” is the judgment added to it. Maybe you feel tired halfway through practice. The fatigue is the information. “I should be able to do more than this” is the judgment.

Those judgments often happen so quickly that it can be difficult to separate them from the sensation itself. With practice, we can begin to leave a little more space between what we notice and what we decide it means.

Instead of immediately deciding that shaking means weakness, maybe you become curious about whether your muscles are working hard or asking for rest. Instead of treating tension as something you should have fixed by now, maybe you notice where it is present and experiment with softening it. If it returns, you can notice that too.

Listening to the body does not mean every signal has to be perfectly understood or automatically obeyed. It means allowing the information to exist long enough to make a conscious choice about how you want to respond.

Being present in the body does not automatically make us compassionate toward it. That is a separate skill we have to practice.

A shaking muscle can be information instead of embarrassment. A limited range of motion can be what is available today instead of a personal failure. Rest can be a choice instead of a defeat. Not understanding a sensation can simply mean that we do not understand it yet.

Every moment of awareness gives us another opportunity to choose curiosity over criticism and begin building a relationship with the body that feels a little less like a battle.