Many of us have a habit of ignoring the feeling messages coming from our bodies. We often interpret feelings as symptoms to be controlled or avoided rather than as helpful messages from your body’s wisdom.
We tend to value and trust our left brain intellect and rational thought over the body’s wisdom. What we can weigh, measure, or prove tends to be perceived as more valuable than right brain intuition.
Learning to allow feelings to reveal their wisdom and guidance is an artful process. It’s something we could have learned at home. More commonly, we absorbed the unconscious and avoidance-based feelings habits of our parents.
This avoidance of feelings often takes the form of distraction by incessant thinking and excessive outward activity. Perceiving vulnerable feelings as a sign of personal weakness can also lead to their rejection.
Usually, we learn these habits in childhood. This is done for the purpose of avoiding emotional pain or conforming to the limited emotional patterns of the family. Once established these feeling habits can endure a lifetime.
To the degree that we’re successful in avoiding the vulnerability of feelings we’re also disrupting the body’s capacity for healing. The suppression of emotion disrupts energetic balancing, biochemical equilibrium, and neurological maintenance and repair.
For example, to experience a feeling like anger mindfully or through expressive writing can be very helpful. Those activities can reduce the intensity of the anger and inflammatory processes or painful conditions in the body. The mind and body are inextricably linked.
We Heal to the Degree We can Safely Feel
The patient, curious, and non-judgmental experience of feelings is a way to get out of your head. It also helps one to connect directly to the moment. It’s this style of inner connectedness that’s necessary for triggering the ongoing balancing of our autonomic nervous system. That’s the system that’s responsible for our overall health and wellness.
A lack of autonomic balance and the resulting disruption of the body’s innate healing and self-repair mechanisms is the primary cause of most illness. When undesirable feeling habits interrupt the automatic processes of maintenance and repair, the mind and body break down.
Emerging sciences like epigenetics and psychoneuroimmunology are helping us to understand how the mind and body influence one another so profoundly. This knowledge is also assisting us in finding non-medical approaches to healing.
In addition to the creation of illness, this avoidance of bodily felt experience distances us from the direct experience of our true self, our heart’s wisdom, and present moment awareness. Nature gave us a left and right brain that when functioning together give us an expanded experience of reality, as well as, ourselves.
Unfortunately, we can develop the limiting habit of living imprisoned by left brain intellect, analysis, and judgment. This left brain habit deprives us of right brain intuition, acceptance, and felt connection with our soul. Life can lose its richness, potential, and meaning.
Welcome to our modern world.
Safety Activates Your Body’s Wisdom
The experience of being ‘safe’ is the key element that allows us to reconnect with our deepest, bodily felt soul resources. Said another way, when we’re free of threat our brain shifts from survival mode to growth mode, where creativity, positive expectancy, and access to our body’s wisdom are possible.
The re-establishment of the safety that many of us didn’t have as a child allows us to balance left and right hemispheres, increase neurological communication between the heart and brain, and activate autonomic nervous system balance.
Part two of this post will cover some of the practical steps for re-establishing safety, reconnecting with your body’s wisdom, and making yourself available to your soul’s guidance. We’ll also look at the neurology that accompanies those changes.
Steve is a retired Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Acupuncture Physician, and HeartMath Trauma-Sensitive Certified Practitioner with over 35 years of clinical experience in Energy Medicine, Energy Psychology, and Biofeedback.