Hello …. How are you today?

Let me start by thanking all the wise messages about the first part of "My body and me".

Becoming aware is the first step to heal, and with the necessary loving actions, little by little, we’ll be able to transform.

This week I’d like to invite you to think about the disconnection there is between our mind and body. It seems as though our existence happened in our brain and our body was forgotten. Just ask yourself “how long do I spend inhabiting my mind?” And now, “how long do I spend inhabiting my body?”

You can listen to the podcast with this player, or if you prefer reading you have a written version below. Enjoy it!

Michael Singer in his book "The Untethered Soul" says:

“In case you haven't noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops.”

That mental internal dialogue doesn’t stop at all. It tells us “what did he want to tell me? How come? How unfair! Don’t do it, you’ll get hurt! Do you think I'm stupid? I look terrible! What should I do? And blah blah blah our mind goes on and on.

Unlike Eastern philosophy that takes body, mind and spirit as part of an indivisible whole, in Western culture we mostly think of our body as something separate from our mind. I’d dare to say that we see it as a machine that must fulfill functions according to our mind’s commands - work, produce, strive, and even look in a certain way. Do you remember Descartes’s "I think therefore I am"? According to this, there’s no doubt that we exist thanks to our thinking capability. And this is where the challenge begins. There’s such dissociation between our mind and body, and there’s such veneration of our intellectual and mental function, that we forget our life from the neck down. We live in the mind and use it so much that in some cases we end up feeling burned out. I find the Chinese pictogram for the word "busy" interesting. This is made up of two different characters: heart and kill. I’m not an expert in Chinese but I do feel that attack on my heart when my mind doesn’t stop. Furthermore, I know that I’m not the only one because I see it all the time in my clients too. Therefore, to find relief and clarity, it’s essential to integrate and align our body and mind.

This is not about stopping our thoughts, on the contrary, it’s about developing a presence that observes our busy mind and all the messages that we tell ourselves. To be aware of how our mind works and to find inner peace, it’s necessary to return to our body. What do I feel? Tension? Pain? Where? In the shoulders? In the belly? In the neck? How do I perceive it? Is it intense? Is it throbbing? When my body responds like this, what does it want to tell me? Am I trying to control everything / to be perfect / to please others? Little by little, all that mental activity relaxes, and body, mind and spirit become integrated. This brings great relief. That pause enables us to say "ah, I'm getting lost in thought; I need to let go, relax". Mindfulness teacher Tara Brach says that when we return to our body in the present moment with gentleness and kindness, we start creating a new habit, a new way of being in the world.

Right now you might be saying, "easier said than done. This is all very nice but if it’s so easy, why is it my default setting to forget my body and get trapped in my mind?" The answer is that the integration of body and mind in the present moment is simple, and that, like with all habits, it requires practice. When we find ourselves lost in thought, we must bring ourselves back to the present, to the here, and to our body. Imagine if every time you found yourself obsessing about future scenarios or whipping yourself about the past, you could say “It's just a thought, this doesn't have to be this way, I don’t have to believe it. Take a deep breath”. What a balm would that be, right? The truth is that if we don’t become aware of how the mind works, it goes on non-stop. The more power we give to our mind and overthink, analyze, and judge, the greater our false sense of control. "If I think about it a lot, it’ll be perfect. No one will judge me" we tell ourselves. But ... what happens when we realize that we’ve spent years trying to get everything under control and do everything flawlessly? We’re showered by sadness and anxiety because control and perfection don’t exist, they are just unattainable. Moreover, if we don’t become aware of this, we’re going to feed our mind more activity to meet our goal. Too bad that our entire system will become like a pressure cooker where our thoughts will be boiling so badly that our escape valve will be some symptomatic manifestation in the body. Insomnia, lack of concentration, fatigue, digestive issues, autoimmune diseases, among others, have a direct correlation with the stress our busy mind produces.

That’s why this blog is a cry for mindful mind and body integration. There’s nothing to be ashamed of with our obsessive thinking. Neither does it help us to reject our tendency to rationalize everything. As Jung says "what you resist persists." Rather, it’s accepting calmly and beginning to work on our deepest feelings and needs. That’s the way to find the causes that keep us encaged in our mind. And I insist, if you can't on your own, dare to ask for help. When I see that my clients are suffering, the first thing I ask them to do is to not rationalize for a moment and to tell me what they feel in their body. What we discover is impressive. We begin to remove all the veils till we get to the core of what’s showing physically. That’s why our body is our great ally, we may not want to see but your body speaks your mind. As I mentioned last week, the idea is to tread the middle way - neither to exterminate our thoughts nor to blindly believe them, neither to worship our mind nor to reject it. Everything belongs to us and everything requires our care.

I’d like to round off by sharing some of the learning I got from the course "Living from a place of surrender" by Michael Singer. He taught us that there’s nothing more important to true growth than realizing that we aren’t the voice of our mind, we are the one who listens to it. If we look objectively, and this is easier in contemplation and meditation, we’ll realize that much of what that voice says doesn’t make sense. Most of the conversation we hold with our inner voice is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of our life will unfold according to forces beyond our control, regardless of what our mind says about it. The exercise of returning to the body to open ourselves up to our experience here and now is the doorway to soothing ourselves, to observing our thoughts without buying them, and to working with the whole palette of our emotions.

If you know a friend who might need this message, forward them this podcast/blog, please.

A big hug ❤