Why Body

     You may think your thoughts and ideas define you. But your mind only gives you half the story. The way in which you manage your thoughts affects the way your body functions (i.e. worry causes tension). Your physical state of being affects your thoughts (i.e. pain interrupts). Emotions influence and shape both your mind and your body.

     Your self-knowledge will ultimately be limited without an embodied sense of yourself. Embodiment is the sensory experience of body and mind functioning as one integral entity. This entity is your body-mind.

     Etched in your flesh, in your posture, and in how you breathe is inscribed your sorrows and joys. Encoded in your nerve impulses are written your personal needs, habits, memories, and talents. All that is enlivening and all that leads to illness is manifestly expressed in your body’s infinite articulations of tension and relaxation.

     You can learn to read and regulate the most gross and the most subtle communications of all these personal truths. Slow down and tune-in. You will decipher enormous refinement to your sensations. They will reveal a body language that expresses your most honest feelings about life events.

     BodyMind Boundaries give you a safe environment in which to experiment with the sensations generated by your emotions. And a secure place to change old habitual patterns into new ways of being.                                                                                    

An Example

You can free yourself from the grip of an emotion

by making it less scary.

Have you ever noticed that when you repress a feeling

it just keeps coming back over and over, and that

your mind begins telling you stories about it?

Instead, when you are in a safe environment,

experience that emotion as a body sensation.

Observe what happens when your attention is fully

focused on the sensation generated by that emotion.

Simply be with it, and watch what happens.

When you allow yourself to fully feel a troublesome emotion,

it usually doesn’t stick around long.

Truthful Body

     Your body is naturally truthful. Your personal truths are readily evident as a body-felt experience. For instance, happiness encourages expansion. You feel connected to your life, your skin blooms, eyes shine, and you live with more ease.  Also, sadness collapses your body, contracts your experience. This limits your ability to feel the all important emotions of love, trust, security, and desire.

     The mind organizes your emotions. But first your body registers whatever is happening and transmits that experiential information to your mind via the Central Nervous System. Your mind then interprets the body sensations. The truth of your mind’s interpretation depends upon your current self-awareness and your past experiences. Your mind  can lie to you and tell you the same untruth over and over.

     The truth of your body’s experience is of the most subtle sensations of You in the moment. This communication from the central nervous systems offers an unbiased response to the reality of Now. When you slow down enough to listen and then learn to manage your body’s subtle messages, you discover a weathervane pointing in the direction of your personal truth. Your body cannot lie, but your mind will delude you.

     Your body communicates via sensation. When you provide a safe place to hear what it says, you discover an enlivening world of rich sensory data.  All of your deeper emotions are founded upon gut reactions, heartfelt feelings, and experiences that originate in your body. By tuning in to your subtle sensations, you get "in touch" with yourself.