Insight of the Month: “You Can’t Fool Your Body”
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Welcome Members to the May 2010 Edition of SGM. I’m Kevin Schoeninger.
This month, we’ll explore Body-Centered Spiritual Practice. We’ll use material in Jonathan Ellerby’s book, “Return to The Sacred,” as a starting point. In this week’s “Insight of the Month,” you’ll discover that you can’t fool your body. Your body doesn’t lie. Because of that, it can be a tremendous source of accurate information about where you’ve been, who you are, and where you are going.
In next week’s “Practice of the Month,” we’ll work with four secrets of inner body training and learn how to tap into the phenomenal wisdom your body has to share. In our “Question of the Month,” we’ll explore the healing power of sound. On our Group Coaching Call, we’ll talk about the importance of ritual and ceremony to welcome spiritual resources into your life.
Let’s begin with a quote from Ellerby. He tells us that he grew up “assuming that the body was a barrier to spirituality—not a pathway. I felt that I’d always heard Western spiritual leaders talking about the body as a distraction, something to be overcome or denied. I’d been taught in school that the only way of ‘knowing’ something was through words, logic, and the mind. These were the cultural assumptions I took for granted.” (p.88, RTTS)
Now, I must say that I didn’t grow up rooted in that cultural assumption. For me, from a very young age, I was fascinated with the body and with the ability to change my life through physical training. I’ve always felt the physical is a conduit for the spiritual. Because of that, I’ve found myself working for the past three decades to convey that experience to others. It’s not always an easy task. I’ve found that many people are just not in touch with their inner being in a physical way.
We hold so many just plain wrong-headed notions about what it means to live in this world in a body. Many of our implicit assumptions clash with each other. For example, we’re taught that we need to overcome the desires of the body and that passion is the key to our happiness. We’re taught that we’re here to enjoy life and that we should deny ourselves pleasure. We’re taught that we need to exercise and that exerting ourselves is something to be avoided. We’re taught to listen to our bodies and to escape our feelings in distraction, sedatives, and alcohol.
We’re taught to fear death and that death is the passageway to heaven. We’re taught that sex is naughty and that it is a way to intimacy and even a stairway to the divine. We’re taught that the body heals itself and that we need to run to the doctor with every sniffle, ache, and fever. We are told that beauty is on the inside and we’re enamored with physically beautiful people. The list goes on and on. We have inherited a contentious, dysfunctional relationship with our bodies.
Because we lack accurate knowledge about the gift of physicality, our health, our sexuality, our mental-emotional well-being, and our spirituality have suffered greatly. So this month, let’s begin to set that right.
We can start with this: your body is a sacred vessel for your life journey. It is the ideal apparatus within which to understand “who you are” and “what you are here to do.” It is a marvelous information processing tool and the source of tremendous intuitive wisdom. By understanding the workings of your body, caring for it, and cultivating its capacities, you will tap into your ability to be, do, and have everything your soul desires. You will tap into inner guidance and experience your connection to The Sacred.
Unlike the slipperiness you’ll find in your thoughts and emotions, your body doesn’t lie. It always lets you know exactly how things are. Your body holds your life history, is the doorway into present felt experience, and even guides you in the best steps to take toward your best possible future. How is that so?
First your body, your thoughts, and your emotions form an integrated system. The thoughts and feelings that you entertain on a consistent basis are the environment in which your cells live and express themselves. According to the research of Dr. Bruce Lipton and others, your genes are activated and deactivated depending on the environment in which your cells live. Your thoughts and feelings are a significant part of that environment, as is everything that you take in from the outer world. Together your inner and outer environment determines what genetic potentials you activate.
Your body is the record of your past cellular environment. It tells you where you have been and what you have done up to this point. You have a tremendous ability to affect your cellular environment through your habits of nutrition, exercise, stress management, rest, and patterns of thinking and feeling.
Your body is also an indicator of how well you are doing right now. Check in with your body and it will tell you if you are eating well, if you are getting sufficient rest, if you are managing stress, if you are holding positive thoughts and feelings. As you get to know the signals from inside your body you can monitor your inner sensations to help you take appropriate and effective action right now for your health and well-being.
Your body not only processes everything that is going on inside you, it also processes all the events in the surrounding field. It processes everything inside and outside you and translates that into a tangible feeling. Accurately reading that feeling can direct you toward appropriate action. If you learn to “listen to” your body, it can guide you in taking the next steps toward your best possible future.
Imagine and feel a future possibility and then check in with your body and see how it feels. If it doesn’t feel just right, adjust the imagined possibility and see how that feels. As you get good at this, you realize that your body is an amazing guidance system.
Many people come to the wisdom of the body through sacred movement practices such as yoga, T’ai Chi, or qigong. As Ellerby says, sacred movement “involves the intentional focus on the body in patterned movement to shift awareness from the wandering mind to the sensations and wisdom of the body. In a sacred-movement practice, your body will show you not only where you hold tension, but sometimes why. In your own body, you can find an imprint of your inner world.
Your life story is recorded in the body, and a sacred-movement practice allows you to hear it. In your impediments of movement, you learn about your impediments of fear, of control, and resistance. The body is in many ways a metaphor for the way you live your life.” (p.89, RTTS)
“Paying close and attentive attention to the body and its experience is a sure way to come into the present moment. . . Make peace with your own body and you will make peace in your life.” (p.89, RTTS)
For the past twenty-five years, I’ve had the privilege to study, practice, and teach T’ai Chi and qigong. Many people come to these practices to de-stress and find greater inner peace. They look at the slow flowing movement or hear of the profound inner experience and they want more of that in their lives. When I first came to T’ai Chi, I saw it as pathway to higher development.
In teaching T’ai Chi and qigong, I’ve come to realize that many people aren’t in touch with their inner felt experience. Many people have no idea how tense and stressed they actually are. Many people have had traumatic experiences or chronic stress that was so overwhelming that they checked out of their bodies. Because they have tuned out their felt experience, like unused muscles, their inner sensing abilities have atrophied.
So, in T’ai and qigong, we begin from square one; we build inner body awareness from the ground up—literally. One of the first things you learn in T’ai Chi is to feel your feet on the ground. That may seem mundane or even boring, until you try it and really pay attention.
You can do this anytime you are walking. Walk very slowly and be aware of the contact of the entire surface of your feet with the ground. Feel your weight gradually shift into one foot and then the other. Move as slowly as possible and feel the entire surface of each foot as it becomes weighted and un-weighted. Become fascinated with the sensation. This simple practice is an effective meditation in itself. It can really shift your state.
You can also practice feeling your feet on the ground while standing still. Let’s try it now. Stand up, take off your shoes, and feel the contact of your feet with the floor or ground underneath you. Allow your weight to spread out and distribute evenly across the entire bottoms of both feet. Imagine points in the center of your feet, just behind the balls of your feet. These are your “Root Points,” sometimes called the “Bubbling Well Points,” because, when activated, they tingle with energy.
Imagine and feel as if your feet are “rooted into the ground” through your Bubbling Well Points. Feel the security in being “grounded” through these points. Relax and sink your weight down into your Root Points.
Now, let’s add deep breathing to the practice. Inhale slowly and deeply and imagine and feel as if you’re drawing your breath from the Earth up through your Root Points, up through your legs, and into your body as a whole. Let your body fill up with your breath, from the ground up to the top of your head. As you exhale, imagine and feel that you are emptying your body by sending your breath down through your legs, down through your Root Points, and down into the ground. This may sound a bit strange, until you start to feel it for yourself. Take a couple slow deep breaths in this way now.
Try that simple exercise anytime that you are feeling overwhelmed, ungrounded, anxious, or your head is about to explode with information or stress. Feel your feet firmly on the ground, center your weight in your Root Points as if you have roots into the ground, draw your in-breathe from the ground up through your body, and send your out-breath down through your root points back into the ground.
If you don’t feel the whole sensation I’m describing, it’s O.K. The action of feeling your feet on the ground and guiding your attention through deep breathing will be relaxing in itself. As you practice feeling inside your body, your inner sensing abilities will wake up. You may feel tingling in the palms of your hands, in the bottoms of your feet, or the top of your head. You may feel warmth in your abdomen or your heart, or tingling in the center of your brain. If so, you are beginning to feel your energetic anatomy. You are opening to a whole new world of peace, joy, and inner power.
So, let go of any preconceptions about your body and begin to feel it for yourself. My experiences learning and teaching T’ai Chi and qigong have taught me that your body is a record of your life experiences, a monitor of what you are doing right now, and a guide toward your future.
This month, we’ll explore some powerful practices to become more conscious of your body and how to read it. We’ll explore how to cultivate your highest potential through your body.
I’d love to hear your comments and questions about feeling your feet on the ground, breathing through your Root Points, and on body-wisdom in the Comments section below this message.
Until next time,
Feel your feet on the ground,
Kevin