Healing the body with the mind start when you are conscious about your body. What does it feel like to be you? How is your experience shaped by your willingness to pay attention? How do you feel in your body right now? I begin each class with the question, “How are you feeling in your body right now?” If they give me a strange look I would ask: Feeling, body, now?
Your body needs attention
Whether it is because of aches and pains or discomfort or some reminder of a past experience we’d rather forget or uncomfortable anticipation of what might, could but probably won’t happen in the future, most of us spend a majority of our lives escaping our physical selves.
Plans, memories, anticipating next moves and possible pitfalls, pep talks and habitual reactions all take us away from our present moment experience. Now happens in our bodies. All too often we live in our heads.
Heads are good. They’re part of the body, but it’s possible for them to believe that they’re not. When we live in a world of anticipation and memory, with our locus outside ourselves in projects, people or things, it’s easy to forget how far we spatially extend!
Our modern world fancies itself “ healthy body ” but too often we are encouraged to be body un-conscious either in order to live up to an unrealistic ideal or on account of falling short. Our body-centric modern life has more to do with how a body looks than how we feel. At the same time that our worth is at least partially tied up in how our body looks, how closely it conforms to some pretty arbitrary standards for what passes fitness, we do not experience ourselves as vibrant, embodied, sensual beings most of the time. Rather than revel in our sensory experience, we have many method for escaping what it feels like to be us in these bodies, clothes, shoes, cars, houses and jobs.
Remember that healing the body with the mind is a process that starts inside us. Our bodies are offering us amazing gifts of information and sensation in every single moment, and we are aware of about one tenth what they offer to us. When our body’s signals and sensation go unnoticed, unheeded and uncared for they can intensify and wear grooves that become habitual ways of holding ourselves. These result in resistance to motion, change and adaptability. To practice healing the body with the mind, our selves, in attention and awareness is an exercise in releasing the past, dissolving habits and reactivity and laying the path way for living in our present moment with freshness and vivacity.
For today, pay attention to how your body feels in your various activities and roles. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling in my body right now?” And listen honestly for an answer.
Meditation to heal the body with the mind
Find your comfortable seat with your sitting bones pressing into the surface beneath you and your heart lifting from the strength of your connection to the Earth. You can either sit Japanese style on your knees or with crossed legs in easy pose.
Begin with breath observation. For five breaths simply be breathing, noticing how your body moves to accept the breath and then to let it go.
Starting with the top of your head, scan your body with your attention, not lingering on any one part, but not rushing. Spiral down around the scalp to one ear, around the back of your head, to the other ear, across your forehead and eyes, around and around and down and down, across your neck and throat, shoulders and chest and arms, belly, hips, legs and feet. When you have reached the bottom of your feet, begin at the top of your head once more.
Notice not just feelings, but absences of feeling as well. And move on. No need to judge or record, simply pay attention.
When five minutes have passed by timer or by music, bring your attention back to the feeling of your breath moving in and out of your body. Opening your eyes, reach your arms up and over head and draw your hands down in front of your heart.
Do you want to learn more about how to heal your body?
The Silva Method has easy exercises for beginners that will teach you to meditation techniques. Sign up for free Silva lessons and start meditating today.
