Tapping Into The Wisdom Of Your Body

Your body is a field of intelligent wisdom that is speaking to you all the time, and yet if you are like most people, you don’t live in your body so you can’t hear its wisdom. You live in your head. When you were very young, you lived in your body and you knew joy. You were embodied, or as I like to say ‘in-body’ with joyful spirit. Your body was a field of energy and everything flowed – madness, sadness, gladness, pain and joy. There was nothing to resist or hold onto. As you grew up, even if you had loving parents, you got hurt, confused and scared. Since you didn’t get the kind of support that allowed these feelings to move through you rather than getting bound up inside of you, you learned to tighten your body, hold onto your breath, and retreat to your head. Now, most of the time, you live in your head and your body is just a vehicle to get you places.

This is our suffering. Instead of being grounded and open to Life, we live in a dualistic mind that likes this but doesn’t like that. It judges this right and that wrong; it names this as good and that as bad. It can be so dualistically-opinionated that one moment it tells you to do something and five minutes later it says you shouldn’t have done it. And this is what we use as our guide through Life?  It is crazy.

So many people have asked me for advice on what they should do about a particular choice in their lives. They proceed to share all of the opinions of their head and the confusion that comes with it. All the while they are caught in their head, trying to figure Life out, and they are cut off from the wisdom that is always speaking in their body. I don’t advise what they should do in any particular situation, but rather I invite them to begin to listen to their own wisdom. I help them to understand that they always know what to do in any given situation, and it is not the brain in their head that knows. It is the wisdom in their body.

You actually recognize this wisdom in your body, even though you don’t usually listen to it. For example, you may say, “I had a gut feeling.” The truth is, the inner radar in your gut is much more connected to the wisdom at the heart of Life than your mind is and it will guide you unfailingly along the way, if you listen. Part of the reason you don’t hear it is that it is not loud like the voice in your head. But it is always there.

In order to introduce people to their own wisdom that is there all day long, I often ask them if they ever played the warmer-warmer/colder-colder game when they were young. This is where you hide something in a room and another person tries to find it. If they are going away from the area where it is hidden, you say “colder-colder.” And if going toward, you say “warmer-warmer.” Getting in touch with your own wisdom is like that. It is beginning to feel deep inside what is resonating within you – what feels right, or what feels like it is not a good thing to do. I have heard so many stories of people that had a gut feeling that they shouldn’t do something – date that person, walk down a particular street, go to a party.  And when they didn’t listen to it, they paid a price.

What does it look like to live from feeling for resonance rather than having our thinking be our guide? Oprah, who loves shopping, once told a story about how she used to shop. She would buy so many things because she thought she should (they were the fashion craze of the day or they were on sale, or because she kind of liked them or they may never be available again). So she was shopping from her mind’s ideas of what she should buy. Then she realized that most of these things were rarely, if ever, used. She then began to realize she could feel what things resonated with her. She says now she buys only things that call to her, that she can feel in her body that they ‘fit’ for her. She is listening to what resonates within her.

Actually you listen to resonance a lot and don’t notice. You go to eat something and, if you are not on some eating program, you can feel the density of meat or the lightness of an apple. It takes a while to begin to hear and trust this field of wisdom. A powerful question to ask as you move through your life is, “What do I need to do, say or be that is for my highest good (or the highest good of my family or the highest good of all beings)?” Then you let that question go. Don’t try to figure it out. Over time it will become easier and easier to check into your body. It is always speaking if you will listen.

Because so many of us haven’t been in our bodies for a long time, it is helpful in the beginning to just notice your body. Before you get out of bed in the morning, notice three different sensations, like a cold foot, a hungry stomach, an itch on your forehead. This may not seem like much, but you are beginning to train your mind to pay attention to your body. Then you can begin to tune into your body for a few moments here and there throughout your day. And slowly and surely, you will listen to what the wisdom in your body has to say in any given situation, rather than all of the mind chatter, and you will rediscover it is a lot smarter than most of the thoughts in your head!

Image of Light Man by Piero Manrique   http://www.pieromanrique.com/