The Sense of the Body is a Huge Resource
And one we're overlooking
The sense of the body is a huge resource. And one that most of us are vastly underusing.
What do I mean by this?
Well, how about we consider things in this way....
What are the basic elements that comprise the state of being awake and conscious? Let’s make a list:
Sensory experiences - sight, sound, taste etc
Thinking - discreet narratives that forge themselves in our minds
Feeling - distinct human emotions that flavour our lives
The Sense of the Body - a raw, usually vague sensation
All of this stuff is going on in the average conscious experience.
The first three are exciting to most people. The last generally gets relegated to the background of our awareness. We give it little heed.
When our nervous system represses emotion and energy, it achieves this by reducing our capacity to feel our body.
Later on, our thinking mind reinforces this. It gets us to reduce the depth of our breathing. It gets us to breathe using the wrong muscles - those around the throat, rather than the intercostals or abdominals. It creates holding patterns at the throat and diaphragm. It’s trying to regulate conscious access to the sense of the body.
Our thinking mind is memetic in nature. It’s not “bad.” But it wants control. It’s been programmed by evolution to try and create a perfect “avatar” of who we are, and then to project this image into the world. Like this, it believes we will be able to get our needs met.
“Oh, life would be so much easier,” it thinks, “if I could just be like that perfect-me image I put on my Instagram!”
So this is what it tries to achieve.
And the biggest headache it has, the thing that is most likely to upset the applecart, is the sense of the body. Because within our sense of the body is all this energy and all this spontaneous feeling. It’s unpredictable, wild, free. So it tries to reduce our exposure to this. It’s all quite rational.
But…
The sense of the body is our ground.
It’s what gives us resilience.
It’s what enables us to thrive in a situation where others might fail.
It gives us huge energy.
It’s what creates deep psychological health.
It makes us human, capable of holding deep feelings within us.
It keeps us present, in a situation where others are spacing out.
Just the thinking mind hasn’t worked any of this out yet. It’s still trying to create its perfect avatar of “me” and project this into the world.
Learning about the sense of the body can help. We can suggest to our mind, “There may be something you’re overlooking here.”
Open the body, feel the body.
This is the basic path and that I practise and I teach. It’s simple. You don’t really need to read many books.
It would be great if we could rapidly access all the feeling and energy that is repressed within us. But that isn’t possible, for most people, because over time our mind has simply hardened, or shut down the natural toning, of our muscle system and fascia to the point where it’s become a barrier to our inner world.
The bottom line is that we need to dedicate some time, on a regular basis, to opening our fascia and our muscle system once more. And to simply feeling what is there.
As we get more feeling in our body, we also get more pleasure. So it’s not all hard work!
Check out Bioenergetics and Reichian Breathwork. These are body movement and breath therapies intended to open up the body. Just doing the Bow & Arch exercises daily will do so much over time.
Strongly agree!!! I like the point about muscle tone - which probably first arose as adaptive defense of our energetic boundaries to keep bad things and bad people out, eventually exiles us from out own bodies too.