Feeling Whole
Being kind, listening and welcoming your body parts home
In A world of AI, it’s when we listen to our Body Intelligence that we can find a sense of wholeness and ease again
I often have students come into class or a private session saying
I’ve got a bad knee
I have a bad hip
My shoulders have been really bugging me lately
I too have used this type of language towards my body parts as if they were somehow being unkind to me. Separate from myself. Then I remember that all of my body parts are all part of me. I am one being and my knee or hip or shoulder is not something other.
When there is pain, it means that something is out of sorts. It’s a way of our body talking to us and telling us something needs to change. Something needs attention. Working through many years of severe pain, I learned how to Listen and respond in a way that can help bring about healing and reduce my suffering. When I have days that I feel some pain, I can definitely slip into the fear that it will return to some place that I have already journeyed from.
Thankfully, my body is generally now free of any pain other than a small messages in my left hamstring insertion that I have from an injury I’m still working through. It talks to me when I lift too heavy at the gym. I listen. As I’m trying to continue to heal, sometimes I overdo it.
How did I work through this pain? I studied a LOT of various techniques. I reach into that bag of goodies when helping my students. The basic tenet for all my work is the same… Release areas of tension, strengthen areas not engaging, create safety, listen, breathe and acknowledge that when there is a physical reaction, there is an emotional response and when there is an emotional reaction, there is a physical response. They are two sides of the same coin.
Our emotional responses can create physical tension patterns that affect or ability to move freely and can put us into misalignments that are counterproductive to our happiness and throw our nervous system out of whack. When there is excessive tension in muscles, it often puts pressure on nerves, making us feel unsettled, anxious, irritable or in actual pain. It also reduces blood flow and thereby nutrient delivery as well as toxin clearance through the lymphatics.
In this way, these areas become cut off from the rest of us in a way. When we restore the balance in the muscles and surrounding tissues, these body parts can become reintegrated into our whole. When we experience this, it is often the feeling of not having a body. By this I mean all is quiet and the nervous system is calm. Everything is working together with ease and as such there is very little making us notice our body parts. We get to move in the world whole - without feeling all our separate parts. Have you had this feeling? It is a joyful thing. To be whole, to be silent, to be one, to be very alive and very relaxed at the same time. How would you describe the feeling?