Your Body can Heal your Mind

Cutting out the Middle Man

Western culture has been driven by mental development. That, to me, is its most defining feature. We are the “people of the mind.” We go to our mind to both get our needs met and to improve ourselves. It’s about thinking more clearly. It’s about learning new stuff. It’s about taking control of our lives. It’s about believing we can do it.

And there is nothing wrong with any of this.

So, when we seek to overcome the traumas of our childhood, where do we go? We go to the mind… naturally. We’ve learned that the mind is the one-stop shop for everything we could need or desire.

We might go to a psychotherapist, or a counsellor. We talk about our relationship with our mum, or our dad. We talk about the parts of our childhood that we’ve been covering up. We show the sides of ourselves that we don’t usually let others see.

It’s all good.

But the way of the mind is not the only way that we can heal ourselves.

Humans did not just rock up on our world from outer space. We are the product of natural selection. We have primate ancestors, many of whom are still around. They suffered traumas too, both physical and psychological. So, over time, their bodies evolved ways to heal, not just physically, but psychologically too. Their bodies learned to release the physical holding associated with trauma. Their bodies learned how to bring awareness back in where it had been pushed out.

The bottom line is that the human body is fully capable of creating deep, psychological healing without going through the mind. It is actually possible to heal without all those narratives that we typically construct about who we are and what has happened to us.

This does not mean that using the body to heal is the only way. Nor does it mean that we can’t integrate the two. It simply means that we can heal our mind without using the mind. We can become whole, natural, mature humans without going on a long mental journey.

If you’ve been involved in self-development or self-healing for a while, you will likely be aware of something. Our thinking mind can as much get in the way of the healing process as it can help it along. It tends to want to control. It tends to negotiate. It tends to get in a middle-man kind of role.

“Yes, of course I want change,” it says. “But I want to do it my way!”

I meet many people who’ve been in therapy for years, and who have come to a point where they gave up, simply because they no longer believed that they could create change. They saw their mind for what it was. And understood just how limited it actually was.

This is precisely where the body can come in. When you feel like you’re not really getting there through whatever mind-based practice that you are involved with, try body-based practices.

Your body has been healing your mind for millions and millions of years. It was doing it long before humans first evolved and walked upon the earth. All those ancient healing programs are still within us. Just we’ve forgotten how to make use of them, because our advanced frontal lobes have tried to take over.

We have learned to “go to the mind” to make ourselves whole again, when actually this is an impossible task. What we really need to do is to simply re-invoke our body’s natural programs to restore wholeness.

By learning how to open up our muscle system and allow awareness to come back in, we naturally become more whole. By learning how to clear out the energetic and muscular blocks in our throat, diaphragm and pelvis, we reconnect the lower part of our body to the upper.

This is the work of Bioenergetics and Reichian Breathwork. It is not to do with our mind, though it profoundly affects our mind. It works on the substrate from which our thinking mind creates beliefs and judgements, both about who we are and how the world around us is.

As you learn and perform the techniques, on a daily or weekly basis, so slowly your body heals you. Your mind needs only to learn some movements and then do its best to stay present with your breath and your sense of the body. It has no other tasks. The techniques, of themselves, kick-start back into life all those old, natural circuits of healing that you were born with.

This does not mean that the process will be easy. There will most definitely be hurdles. You will at times experience massive resistance to continuing your journey. This, again, is because of our mind. Despite all of its posturing about how much it wants to heal, it is scared of change. It would rather that you stay in an old, bad way that it knows, that open up to the unknown. This is just how it is.

But when you find the strength to keep going with body-based practices, from wherever you take it, you will be rewarded.

Thank you for reading

Devaraj

(Find my books on Amazon here)