Over the last fifty years I’ve observed a gradual shift towards including the body in the pursuit of mental, emotional, or spiritual healing. I’m not speaking of the body as an object to be treated but rather as a source of wisdom when we turn our attention to the body’s inner felt experience.

Really, the body is a source of wisdom?

Eugene Gendlin, PhD. and the author of Focusing, said “Your physically felt body is, in fact, part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people, in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside.”

This new perspective of the body, as it’s felt from the inside, is very different from viewing the body as a source of problems with its never ending needs, demands, and its tendency to malfunction.

 

Your Body Talks to You with its Own Language

 

If we make the time to listen our bodies speak to us with felt experience, with feelings, sensations, and vibrations …. as well as with imagery, thoughts, and memories. Unfortunately, most of us are conditioned to keep our awareness focused externally and preoccupied with thinking.

It’s often believed that we need to use psychedelics in order to have a psychedelic or mystical experience. Not really. When we know how to listen to our body’s inner promptings rich inner stories and intuitive knowing begins to unfold naturally.

The body’s natural capacity for mythological storytelling brings to mind, Stan Grof, MD. Grof pioneered the use of LSD in a therapeutic setting. The drug allowed him to observe the deeper unconscious workings of the psyche in his patients.

When LSD research became illegal Grof was in need of a new point of entry into the psyche. He eventually found it through a combination of evocative music, sustained breathing, and inner awareness. No drugs.

This topic also brings to mind the mythologist, Joseph Campbell. When asked where mythological stories come from, since the same essential stories appear scattered across the globe, he replied that the stories come from the body, they come from the energy that runs our organs.

This makes me think that we all have access to this inner source of stories, often wise and guiding stories, if we only knew how to listen to the body.

It’s possible that gifted poets and other storytellers come by this gift more naturally than the rest, but that with guidance we all have a capacity for connecting with our inner wisdom.

 

Listening to Your Body is Good for Your Brain

 

When we make the time to connect with the body and listen without judgment, to be with these bodily experiences curiously and respectfully, our brain and nervous system begin to function more efficiently. This is quite a health supporting feat since our brain and nervous system are responsible for our overall health and well-being.

It turns out that the key to better thinking, better intuitive or creative knowing, and even better physical health is to develop a habit of experiencing your body from the inside. Neurologically this act of inner noticing is called interoception. This neurological mode of non-judgmental inner listening is a foreign experience to most of us.

Most of us are all too familiar with judging our inner thoughts and feelings, often rather harshly, rather than tending to them curiously and respectfully.

The neurological truth is that when we listen respectfully, with heart, we become more whole and begin to heal, whereas ignoring or judging our inner experience creates more neurological imbalance, symptoms, and suffering.

I suspect, or at least hope, that if more of us had reliable access to our inner guidance we’d be in a better place in terms of personal and cultural health and well-being.

The science supporting heart-brain integration is full of positive news and hope for us personally and collectively. It’s as if a seed has been planted, but why isn’t it sprouting?

Roadblocks to Connecting with Your Body’s Wisdom

 

The simple habit of thinking divorces you from your body’s wisdom. Remember the philosopher Rene Descartes saying, “I think, therefore I am”? One way or another, his observation appears to reflect how we identify ourselves, as thinkers. 

The problem is that when thinking is not tethered to wisdom we can get ourselves into all kinds of trouble. A further complication is that no amount of additional untethered thinking will solve the problems that too much thinking created originally.

A further complication is that aside from our cultural proclivity for ‘thinking’ one of the hallmarks of emotional trauma is to distance oneself from bodily experience while living more in the head and identified with our thoughts.

 

Your Body as Mystery

 

Quantum physics suggests that time and space are somehow illusory and that the reality we think we experience isn’t all that real. Mind boggling. It’s interesting to me that mystics have also said very similar mind boggling things.

The HearMath Institute has a thirty year old study, that I’ve referenced before, showing that the human heart has its own mini brain and is a source of intuitive knowing. 

I’ll very briefly summarize the experiment, which by now has been replicated by many others in the field of neurocardiology. Subjects were randomly shown photos that would either elicit joy or horror. The study showed that the heart was responding to the imagery before the brain and was in fact informing the brain via the vagus nerve as to the emotional nature of the imagery.

The salient point here is that the heart knew about the emotional nature of the photos before the brain. The mind boggling part is that the heart was responding to the imagery about five seconds before the random images became visible.

That’s not possible, or is it?

Researchers in the field of neurocardiology have repeated this experiment many times. The emerging reality is that the human heart, along with its linkage to our brain and nervous system, and it’s communication with electromagnetic fields surrounding the earth, gives us access to untold resources.

 

We Need a New Guiding Story 

 

Here’s a story for you. We live in a dog eat dog world and if you aren’t just as aggressive and greedy as the next guy you will lose. 

Is that really true or is it a reflection of an autonomic nervous system stuck in a threat induced defensive mode? 

I don’t think it’s who we really are at our essence …. and apparently neither did Darwin. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin spoke of ‘survival of the fittest’ as a mechanism guiding our evolution. 

However, in Darwin’s Lost Theory, evolutionary systems scientist and psychologist, David Loye writes about Darwin’s long ignored “fully human” completion for his theory of evolution. Here he points out that Darwin makes the case for the primacy of love, moral sensitivity, mutual aid, and education as higher order drivers for human evolution.

Is it possible that we’re in the process of evolving into our fully human form where division, greed, and discord give way to cooperation, altruism, and love?

We apparently have the neurological structures to support such a transformation, at least in part, in the ventral aspect of the vagus nerve and the prefrontal cortex.

While we have the biological foundation for such a transformation, do we have the will?