Your Body Speaks First: Learning to Listen Before Burnout Hits

Maricho Dumale
2025年12月23日
読了時間: 3分

There are moments in life when clarity doesn’t arrive as a thought — it arrives as a physical interruption.

For me, that moment came the day I was told I could lose my hearing if I didn’t stop.

Not someday. Not eventually. Soon.

At the time, my life looked successful from the outside. After five years in New York City, I had returned to Japan and joined Shiki Theatre Company — one of the most respected theatre companies in the country.

Within two years, I was working closely with original Broadway creative teams, serving as a translator and assistant director for productions like Wicked and Spring Awakening.

It was meaningful work. Prestigious work.

And yet, something essential was missing.

I had joined the company because I wanted to perform — to act, sing, dance, and be on stage. Slowly, quietly, I buried that truth. I told myself to be grateful. To be practical. To keep going.

My body tried to get my attention long before the diagnosis.

The exhaustion. The tension. The constant pushing through.

I ignored the whispers.

So one morning, during a critical week with the Broadway team visiting Japan — after months without a single day off — my body screamed. I woke up with a massive headache and couldn’t get out of bed.

The doctor looked at me and said, “If you continue like this, you risk losing your hearing.”

That was the moment everything changed.

Your Body Speaks Before Your Mind Is Ready

We often believe clarity should arrive as certainty — a fully formed plan, a confident decision, a logical explanation.

But the body doesn’t wait for the mind to catch up.

The body communicates through sensation: tightness, heaviness, resistance, fatigue, symptoms we often label as inconvenience or weakness.

In reality, they are messages.

I see this pattern again and again in the YU-project community.

One community member shared that every single morning, on the same train ride to work, she would break out in a rash. Same timing. Same location. Same reaction.

She didn’t understand it at first. She thought it was stress. Or coincidence.

But her body was speaking long before she was ready to hear the truth.

Healing Doesn’t Always Require Drastic Change

When we began working together, she didn’t quit her job. She didn’t overhaul her life.

Instead, she learned something far more powerful.

She learned how to listen to her heart — and honor it gently.

Not with dramatic gestures or productivity-driven solutions, but with small, human choices. Simple joys. Moments that didn’t earn praise, titles, or validation.

Things that didn’t make logical sense.

But they brought her back to herself.

As she began honoring these small truths, her nervous system softened. Her breath deepened. Mornings felt lighter.

And eventually, the rash disappeared.

Not because the train changed. Not because the job changed.

But because she stopped abandoning herself.