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Steve Sisgold is a popular speaker and body-centered therapist whose clients include Kenny Loggins, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks and several other bestselling authors, Grammy-award winners, and CEOs. He has taught thousands how to use their body intelligence to create better health, prosperity, and richer, more authentic relationships. The author of two books, three audio programs, and a documentary film, Sisgold holds an M.A. in communications, a B.S. in business, and certifications in body-centered psychotherapy and relationship counseling.

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What's Your Body Telling You?

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

The body is a device to calculate the astronomy of the spirit; look through that astrolabe and become oceanic.

—Rumi

Baltimore, Maryland, 1961

Sitting in my usual seat at the family dinner table, I feel a surge of energy coursing through my twelve-year-old body. My father has just put his lifelong dream into words: "Midget Grocery has one of its stores up for sale; I want to buy it and run my own business." His excitement is tangible; the air feels electrified. My mother, who was not privy to his plan before this announcement, looks a bit stunned. After a pause, she begins to marshal a series of practical arguments for why he should forget the whole idea.

"What? And give up your management position with an established grocery chain?"

My father has always had a predictable schedule and a dependable salary that provides quite a bit of security for our family. My mom's reasons are solid, and her arguments perfectly sensible. The risk to our family's financial picture is too great—end of story. Pass the blintzes, please.

I try my darnedest to keep a lid on my feelings. Thoughts race through my head: Don't interrupt! ... You better keep quiet! ... Mind your own business.... What do you know? You're just a kid. But my body, with heart thumping, will hear nothing of it. A strong sense of certainty washes over me, and I cannot keep quiet. Like the cork on a bottle of bubbly, I pop: "Dad, get the store! You can do it!" I look at my mom with soft eyes of apology, but inside I feel like James Brown strutting the one-step and singing, "I feel good."

The morning after my dinner-table outburst, my mom agrees to accompany my dad and take a look at the store, saying, "Why not? We'll see the place, and afterward we'll get a corned beef sandwich."

I'll never be sure how much I influenced her by blurting out my conviction, but five minutes after she walked into the store, my mother changed her tune and supported my father's decision to buy it. One week after my father opened his store, a statewide food strike closed down all the local supermarket chains. People lined up halfway down the block waiting to buy their groceries. This went on for weeks, and many of them became long- term customers. The opening of his first business, Super Discount, was a personal triumph for my dad. He loved working for himself, and my mom leapt at the chance to work as his right hand. He became an overnight success by following his instinct, which was encouraged by mine.

A New Kind of Awareness

The lesson I learned at the dinner table that night was pivotal. It was a marker moment in my life—that flash of conviction searing through my body and compelling me to blurt out, "You can do it!" What I didn't understand at the time (and couldn't put into words until much, much later) was that it was my first experience with whole-body consciousness—an expanded form of awareness that transcends and expands our rational way of knowing. I literally became a different kind of person than I had been before. Taking the risk required to break with convention and speak aloud what I simply knew in my body beyond all reason changed me at a very basic level. A kind of knowledge outside the dominion of rational thought had revealed itself. I would not notice or name this subtle shift for quite some time, and yet the net effect of my outburst was evidenced quickly. My father's work life immediately improved, and our family life took a turn for the better as well.

The Queen of Diamonds

Fast-forward some forty years to another table, where whole-body consciousness is about to yield keen awareness once again. This time the key player is not a wisecracking preteen but a dynamo political strategist. Nancy Todd Tyner has run 196 political campaigns in forty-two states and six countries—and won 98 percent of them.

Nancy first learned to play poker at her family's kitchen table when she was a girl. A resident of Las Vegas, Nancy had watched the World Poker Tour on television but rarely went into the casinos. All that changed in the months that followed the death of her fourteen-year-old son. Hayden had died of cancer, and to keep from going crazy with grief one night, Nancy fled to the noise and lights of the MGM Grand and sat down at a poker table. Surprised at how readily her skill as a political strategist transferred to the competitive atmosphere of tournament poker, she got hooked. The game gave her something to look forward to during her otherwise dismal days of grief. The more Nancy played, the clearer she became about her goal: she wanted to become the first woman to win the male-dominated World Series of Poker tournament. She continued to build her skills and even attended World Poker Tour Boot Camp.

But somewhere along the line, Nancy's confidence began to falter. She found herself distracted by errant thoughts and self-doubt, especially when sitting at the poker table with men. She started to overthink her instincts in an effort to show the men she was no dumb blond, and distracting thoughts arose when she faced female opponents. In an interview on national television, Nancy talked about the type of mental noise that often got in her way: "When I first started playing, someone told me, lose the jewelry, tone it down, and I took it to heart, but when I showed up, I wasn't comfortable." Competitive anxiety from the past would flood Nancy's mind and make it impossible to remain present and alert in the game. This woman, who rarely saw a loss in the cutthroat world of politics, found it difficult to manage her thoughts and feelings when she lost a hand. But Nancy wasn't ready to walk away and felt certain in her gut that if she stuck with it, she could win at this game, too. But she knew she needed help to get the defeatist voices out of her mind.

Nancy called and set up a one-day intensive with me. A quick study, she learned to get out of her head and access whole-body consciousness at will through the same simple steps I've taught thousands of people in my seminars and which you'll read about in the chapters that follow. Nancy learned to recognize when her thinking got caught in what I call a spin trap—those dead-end thought loops in which distracted, fear-based thinking makes the natural intelligence of the body impossible to hear. Together we uncovered the fearful beliefs that fed her negative thoughts. I led her through an exercise to discover and embody her larger life purpose, and this clarity shed new light on her zest for poker. What was initially a means to an end—coping with her grief—became a platform from which she now speaks out on cancer education to help parents whose children have been struck with the disease.

With renewed inspiration, Nancy set an initial goal to win the first women's World Poker Tour Championship. The going was tough at first. Nancy had to face down the negative thoughts and beliefs that prompted her to make desperate, losing moves. After going through a host of tournaments, she developed much greater awareness of her internal mechanism as well as the external bodily signals that gave her away. It worked—and fast. Instead of getting eliminated in the first...