YOur symptoms may not be the enemy you think they are…
WHAT IF THEY WERE ALWAYS JUST THE MESSENGER?
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding." Proverbs 3:5
She notices something. A flare. A rash. A strange fatigue that wasn't there yesterday, settling into her bones like weather she didn't see coming. And before she has even fully registered what she is seeing or feeling, the familiar cascade begins — the tightening in her chest, the reaching for her phone, the opening of browser tab after browser tab, the spiral of worst-case scenarios that carries her far away from the present moment and deep into a fear she can't quite name but has been living with for longer than she wants to admit.
She believes she is helping her body. She is doing what she has always done — gathering information, searching for answers, trying to stay one step ahead of whatever this is. But what she is actually doing, what most of us do for years before we learn any differently, is responding to her body's communication with so much noise and urgency that she can no longer hear what it is actually trying to say.
This post is about learning to hear it.
WHAT WE WERE TAUGHT ABOUT SYMPTOMS
From the time we are old enough to notice that something feels wrong, we are taught that symptoms are problems to be solved. Diagnose, treat, eliminate, fix. The medical model is built on this premise and it is not entirely wrong — there are absolutely times when symptoms require immediate attention and skilled intervention, and I would never suggest otherwise.
But for the woman who has been living in a prolonged cycle of health striving, something else has happened along the way. The symptom has become the enemy. And she has been at war with her own body for so long that she has forgotten what it ever felt like to simply inhabit it without bracing for the next thing to go wrong.
What if the symptoms were never the enemy? What if they were always just the messenger?
Your body is not malfunctioning when it sends you a signal. It is communicating — faithfully, persistently, in the only language it has available to it. And the invitation, as frightening as it might feel at first, is not to silence the messenger but to learn its language.
THE SHIFT THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE
There was no single dramatic moment when everything changed for me. No morning when I woke up and decided, with great clarity and conviction, to stop being afraid of my symptoms and start being curious about them instead. That is not how it happened, and I suspect it is not how it happens for most women who find their way to this place.
It was gradual. A slow, deepening awareness that accumulated over the course of my healing journey, layer by subtle layer, until one day I realized that something had shifted in me without my quite noticing when it began.
The awareness came first — an intellectual understanding that my body was responding to stress and not simply betraying me. But the living of it, the actual embodied experience of curiosity replacing fear, came later. It came after I walked away from the rigid protocols and the elimination diets and the constant monitoring, and began to listen to my body from a genuinely different place. Not listening to track symptoms or catch the next problem before it arrived. Listening to know. Listening with openness and patience and something that, over time, I came to recognize as trust.
There is a profound difference between those two kinds of listening, and it is worth sitting with. Monitoring keeps you in a state of vigilance and activation, your nervous system perpetually scanning for threat. But genuine curiosity — the kind that says I wonder what you are trying to tell me rather than what is wrong now — begins to create the safety and trust that allows your body to actually communicate clearly. One keeps the fight going. The other begins to lay it down.
THE SYMPTOM THAT TAUGHT ME THE MOST
Of all the symptoms I navigated during my years of health striving, it was eczema that became my most unexpected teacher. And a particular kind of small bump that would appear on my fingers from time to time, something visible and tangible and impossible to ignore.
I think it was the visibility of it that made it so instructive. Most of what I was experiencing during those years lived inside my body — the fatigue, the brain fog, the digestive discomfort — things I could feel but not see. But this I could see. On my own skin, in plain sight, undeniable.
And for a long time, seeing it sent me straight into a spiral. The fear response was immediate and familiar — what does this mean, what have I eaten, what did I do wrong, is this getting worse? The appearance of those small bumps on my fingers was enough to undo an otherwise steady day, because I had not yet learned to receive what my body was offering without the weight of fear attached to it.
But gradually, something began to change. I began to notice the eczema differently. Not as a threat but as a signal. Simply that. My body communicating something worth paying attention to, the way a good friend might tap you on the shoulder to get your attention before saying something important.
And what made that shift possible was the combination of two things that had been quietly building in me over years of paying attention. The first was curiosity — a genuine openness to what my body might be trying to say rather than a desperate need to make it stop saying it. The second was knowledge — a deep and hard-won familiarity with my own body, including what my true food triggers were and what stress looked like in my particular nervous system and what it felt like when something was genuinely off versus when I was simply tired and overwhelmed.
Together those two things — curiosity and knowledge — created something I had not experienced before. The ability to make decisions for my body from a place of confidence rather than fear. To look at those bumps on my fingers and think, I know what this is telling me, and I know what to do, and I am not afraid.
That was new. And it was everything.
HOW I ACTUALLY GOT THERE
This is the part of the story I most want you to hear, because without it the rest of it makes very little sense.
I did not arrive at curiosity through willpower or the right information or a particularly good supplement protocol. I arrived at it through surrender.
By the time curiosity began to replace fear in my relationship with my body, I had already walked through what I can only describe as a season of obedience. A time when I heard God say “Enough” — gently, clearly, unmistakably — and I listened. I laid down the protocols and the elimination diets and the desperate grasping for control over outcomes that had never been mine to control in the first place. And in doing so, I gave back to God what had always belonged to Him.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.”Proverbs 3:5
I had been leaning so heavily on my own understanding. The midnight research sessions, the constant monitoring, the fear-driven hyper-vigilance — all of it was me trying to figure out, through my own effort and intellect and sheer force of will, what only God could truly hold. And it was only when I stopped leaning on my own understanding and began to trust Him with what I could not control that the noise quieted enough for something else to come through.
That something else was wisdom. Not mine — His. Flowing through the body He had created and called very good, speaking in the language of sensation and signal that my body had been using all along. I simply had not been in a place to receive it until I released the grip that had been blocking it.
The sequence, as I have come to understand it, looks something like this: surrender to God leads to the release of control, which allows the nervous system to begin to settle, which makes space for the body's wisdom to emerge, which makes curiosity possible, which leads to confidence, which leads to freedom.
There is no shortcut through that sequence. It cannot be hacked or protocolled or accelerated by the right information. It has to be lived, step by gradual step, in the particular and unrepeatable story of your own life with God.
WHAT CURIOSITY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
I want to bring this somewhere practical, because I know that is what you need alongside the story.
Curiosity in the body is not a dramatic shift. It is a series of small, almost invisible choices made in ordinary moments — the moments when the old fear response wants to rise and something in you chooses differently instead.
It looks like pausing before reaching for your phone when a symptom appears. It looks like asking what might my body be communicating right now rather than what is wrong with me. It looks like bringing the symptom to God before bringing it to Google, offering it up in the space of a quick prayer before opening a single browser tab. It looks like drawing on the knowledge you have already built about your own body — and trusting that knowledge — rather than starting from scratch with every new sensation as though your body were still a stranger to you.
And over time, with practice and patience and more grace for yourself than you think you deserve, it begins to feel less like a discipline and more like a way of being. A new and fundamentally different relationship with the body you have been living in all along.
THE FREEDOM ON THE OTHER SIDE
I will not dress this up or make it sound more complicated than it is.
When I stopped fighting my symptoms and started listening to them, I was set free.
Not free from every symptom or every hard day or every moment of uncertainty about what my body was doing and why. But free from the fear that had been driving every response. Free from the exhausting vigilance of a woman at war with herself. Free to live in my body with something approaching confidence and even — on the best days, in the best moments — gratitude.
That freedom did not come from finding the right protocol or finally eliminating the right food or receiving the right diagnosis. It came from trust. From learning, slowly and imperfectly and with God's patient help, to lean not on my own understanding but on the wisdom of the One who created this body, who called it very good, and who has been communicating through it all along.
She was not broken. She was just not yet listening.
And neither, perhaps, are you. But you can begin today.
Heavenly Father,
I want to pray for the woman reading this today, who, like me, might be stuck in a pattern of health seeking — always looking for answers about her body everywhere else before looking to you. Lord, you created our bodies with great intention and purpose. You created every single intricacy of our bodies — they are fearfully and wonderfully made, and in your image, Father. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten to seek you for wisdom in our bodies. So today, we remember that you, Holy Creator, made our bodies in such a beautiful way, and that if we take the time to listen — truly listen — we might just hear what they are trying to tell us, rather than allowing our minds to be saturated with worry and anxiety over what this or that symptom might actually be. Thank you, Lord, for loving and caring for us so deeply, and thank you for all the wisdom we seek that only you can provide. We love you, Jesus.
It is in Your beautiful name I pray. Amen.
With grace and 🤍,
Brynn
A note before you go: I am a certified Health and Wellness Coach, not a licensed medical professional. Everything I share here reflects my personal experience and is offered for educational and informational purposes only — not as a substitute for professional medical, mental health, or dietary advice.
If you are navigating a serious or ongoing health concern, please continue working closely with your licensed healthcare providers. Never discontinue or modify prescribed treatments or medications without their guidance.
This blog exists to support women who feel overwhelmed in their bodies and their daily lives — whether that shows up as physical symptoms, emotional exhaustion, or simply a sense that something needs to shift. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition.
