Mindful Voice Integration
Managing Moments on Life's Journey
Make your body a player in your life
Are you aware of the signals that your body sends, do you understand and listen to its signals?
Our body holds all the information. Everything that has ever happened to us, every experience is stored in the body, the issues are in the tissues.
For a moment imagine what the table edge feels feels like in your mouth, or a glass bowl against your teeth. You know how it feels because you put everything in your mouth when you were a baby/toddler and the body remembers those sensations.
In effect if we only access insight of what is going on for us through or via thought, then we are not accessing all the information we can. It is a bit like only listening to one member of staff or having two cds but only listening to one because you have been told that one is more important and more sophisticated than the other.
Every morning the first question I ask is: ‘what are the sensations of the body in this moment?’ I allow the sensations, investigate and then remind myself that this is just a sensation that this body is experiencing at this point in time.
It feels a little like starting the day checking in with the notice board. It means that I am more likely to notice when something new enters the board space. I am cultivating my recognition ability, and ability to pick up changes occurring because I am cognisant of the space.
When we are present in the body we are in the Now and when our focus is in the Now, it is not in the future nor the past, the main playing fields of the self.
The self is a bunch of constructs, ideas and stories and in the body this information is represented in body sensations rather than thoughts and concepts. It means that we have a chance of not getting caught up in the story, the ‘why’ and the endless second daggers, but rather can just sit with the sensations.
Awareness is only ever in the present moment, so this also becomes available to us through connecting with the body.
In one way when we are engaged in investigating what is going on in the body the ‘self gets out of the way’. In those moments there is no room for the idea of self, the limitations of the self nor the indulgences of the self.
The body is much quicker at picking up what the response to surroundings/stimuli/contact is moment to moment than the mind. So as we tune in we can also access data sooner! It gives us an advantage in that we are more likely to step out of autopilot, we get response –ability.
The other point is that the body can’t lie or deceive, so we can trust its sensations as what is actually going on for us.
There
is a lovely story of a senior monk who was being honoured. Dignitaries
had been invited to the ceremony. All went well, however the next
morning the master’s servant noticed that his master was walking off
with his little satchel of belongings. He asked what he was doing and
the master replied: ‘I still have much work to do. The monk asked him
why and reminded that it had all gone so well. The master responded:
‘during the ceremony I had sweaty hands.’
In other words, he trusted this body information saying that he was anxious around the dignitaries.
The body in one way is more reliable than the mind. I often have people say, that they are not stressed, they just like eating while on the phone, they find most of their employees slightly irritating and tap their feet a lot, often get sick and don’t sleep well, might even feel depressed and joyless. With all these signals the mind can still tell us that we are not stressed, and yet the body is shouting in the background: DO SOMETHING, CHANGE THE WAY YOU LIVE OR YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH LIFE!
Tune in to your wonderful resource of information and make the body an integral player in your life – not just something that ‘bother bother needs a haircut’, has put on weight or needs to go to the toilet, but a miraculous intricate representation of your life, both past and present.
I invite you to sit and just observe all the different body sensations that you can access in this moment. Once you feel you have covered them, then go back to the first ones and see if and how they may have changed.
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