For me, I have always been a physical person. I love to play sports. I love to lift weights. I love to feel the power of my body. I love to feel the burn, when I am working out. When I feel my blood pumping, I feel vital and alive. When my body feels good, I feel good. When my body doesn’t feel good, I don’t feel good. When something isn’t working for me, I feel it in my body. My body is constantly talking to me saying, yes, more of that, no, less of that.
This way of feeling my body is actually a new way of being for me. A long time ago, I learned to tune-out. I rarely listened to my body. I told it to shut up and just do what I say. I have been very unkind, in fact, I have been merciless. It gets me around every day, and yet I never show it any appreciation, “I never say, Hey thanks for the ride. Thanks for getting me from here to there. Hey bod, thanks for making it possible for me to experience all that pleasure, you rock!”
And if I go a little, deeper, in the past I rarely ever asked, “Hey, what do you think about this?” Many of us learned to tune-out the voice of our bodies long ago. We learned to stuff it down. We did this because we didn’t want to feel. It was too painful. If we allowed ourselves to feel, we wouldn’t like what our body had to say to us. That’s unfortunate because our bodies have the ability to guide us down a very loving path, if we would only listen. I think what our bodies really want to say to us is, “I love you. I only want what best for you. Everything I tell you is meant to help both of us. We are a team.”
The brain senses what is going on in the body for a very important reason… to give us vital information about our environment.
Our body is a highly tuned-machine that know exactly what we need, we just need to learn to listen.
Look at wild animals. It’s magical how they know when to eat. They know when they need to rest. They know when a storm is coming and they need to take shelter. They are tune-in. Many of us humans can’t figure out these basic skills. How does that make us more advanced?
I recently learned that when animals in the wild have a confrontation, when the confrontation is over, they often “shake it off.” It is a natural way their body helps them let go of excess negative energy so they don’t continue to carry it around with them.
When we became civilized did we lose touch with our inner animal? Yes, we are in fact animals. However, so many of us deny that we are animals. What if we change our thinking around what it means to be an animal? What if we learn to embrace the animal within all us?