EVERY BODY KNOWS...!
TRUST YOUR BODY'S INTELLIGENCE
A while back I saw an advertisement for a popular sports gear brand. The picture showed a man preparing hard for a competitive event. The headline said:
If your body asks you to stop, tell your body to shut up.
How often do you ask your body to shut up?
Most of the time! Is it not?
From the moment you wake up in the morning, it is a tug-of-war with your body.
Do you realise, man is the only creature who needs an alarm clock to wake up in the morning - because he is so completely out of tune with nature's rhythm!
When you get up, your body is screaming for more sleep. It hasn't had the time to recover after that late night you had. But it's Monday morning, so you tell your body to shut up.
After spending hours staring at the computer in office, your eyes feel dry and tired. But you have a project report to be finished. So what do you tell your body? Yes, Shut up!
When you overeat or drink too much at a party, when you sit up late watching television, when you push yourself to work even on a day when you don't feel well - you are continuously ignoring the warnings of the body.
These days we all take pride in telling our bodies to shut up. We tax our lungs with polluted air, our stomachs with spicy and unhealthy food, our livers with alcohol. To some extent, our bodies learn to cope with the assault by becoming less and less sensitive. That's why our tolerance threshold is climbing every day. We need larger quantities of alcohol to get drunk, and higher doses of painkillers to stop feeling pain.
If we knew how deeply our body and mind influence each other, we would treat our body better!
Our body has tremendous intelligence, gathered over 600 million years of evolution.
The processes we usually call 'conscious processes' are the ones controlled by our central nervous system - the brain and the spinal cord. This includes voluntary actions, thinking, and so on.
But conscious processes are a small minority of the action that is going on in our body! The vast majority of the processes are 'unconscious', and are mostly controlled by the autonomous nervous system. These processes, like breathing, digesting food, keeping our balance when we walk, all run beautifully without our control or even our awareness. Imagine, if we had to worry about running our bodies, we would never get anything else done!
How do you think all this happens?
This is the miracle of body intelligence.
Just watch your body!
Every single cell in your body is gifted with the intelligence to carry on its own unique functions. When an infection attacks the body, your white blood cells swing into action on their own, long before you are even aware of the danger.
But the sad truth is, we have lost trust in our own body wisdom! The day you have a cold, or feel a headache coming up, you automatically pop a pill. Why? Don't you see, your body is carrying on the work of a huge industrial plant! It is an ecosystem in itself. When your body can digest food, pump blood and fight infections on a regular basis, can't it heal a simple headache on its own?
If you enter the amazingly complex world of DNA, you will see that your emotions, your memories, even your opinions are strongly controlled by your body! DNA are the carriers of our genetic code. They carry imprints not only of physical characteristics, but also of mental states. Geneticists say that every person has a unique perception of the world that is built up by his DNA!
Not only does the body influence the mind, the mind also exerts tremendous influence on the body.
A person who has been cured of a disease, or rehabilitated after a drug addiction, still carries some memories of the disease in his body. In the same way, if you worry constantly, the negativity triggered by the worries can solidify in your body and being. This is what we call depression. That's why depressed people often can't tell why they are depressed. Long after the problem has been solved, the stress associated with it remains in their memory as an energy blockage, both physical and mental.
Not just depression, but practically every disease is equally influenced by both body and mind. In fact, over 85% of our diseases are psychosomatic in nature. Not just headaches or heart disease, but peptic ulcers, skin and respiratory allergies, even cancer is influenced by our thinking.
The mind has unimaginable power to cause or cure physical ailments!
An experiment was performed in Japan on a group of people who were allergic to a certain plant. The participants were blindfolded and leaves from different plants were placed upon their skin. Each time, the researchers told the participants which leaf they were placing on them.
Amazingly, they found that in most cases the allergy was caused by the mention of the name of the plant, rather than by the actual plant. When they placed the allergy-causing leaf on the skin, but told the patient it was a harmless leaf, the subject did not develop the allergy. On the other hand, even if a harmless leaf was placed on the skin, and the subject was told that it was the allergy-causing leaf, he would instantly break out in a rash!
In another amazing experiment with a boy having multiple personalities, psychologist Daniel Goleman found that the boy's allergies could be switched on and off depending on which personality was dominant at that time! The same mind would give the body orders to act allergic or non-allergic, depending on which reaction suited that particular personality.
Modern medical science uses techniques like the PET scan to track chemical changes in your brain under different circumstances. Researchers have found that each time you recall a different memory, or experience a strong emotion, it triggers a different chemical pattern in your brain.
Not just that, the news spreads throughout your body immediately. Whether you are feeling happy, angry or sad, a signal is sent out instantly to every cell in your body. So your body is actually a changing reflection of what you are thinking at that moment!
Just like psychosomatic diseases show us how our unconscious mind controls our conscious functions, meditation teaches us how to use the conscious mind to control 'unconscious' functions. In yoga and Zen, there are techniques by which you can consciously control your pulse rate, digestion, metabolism, body temperature and even your degree of sensitivity to pain!
Actually, there is nothing miraculous about these phenomena. They appear miraculous to us only because we are unaware of the deep relationship that exists between our body and mind.
Both body and mind are only expressions of the same Consciousness. They cannot, and do not function separately. Unless we respect both equally, we can never be complete, integrated individuals.
In modern civilization, we are developing our minds at the expense of our bodies. Anthropologists say that a few hundred generations from now, we may be reduced to creatures with giant brains and stunted bodies, because the brain is the only part of the body we are using!
Abusing the body is not a modern problem. The body has traditionally been condemned as the grossest part of ourselves. We always blame the body for disturbing us, pulling us into maya, towards the temptations of the world. Right from ancient times, yogis felt it was necessary to neglect the body to attain to spirituality. So they would torture the body, deprive the body, and keep repeating to themselves, I am not the body, I am not the body. This is one path, but it works for very few.
I say, the way to spirituality is only through the body!
The body is the boat that is going to carry you across the river of samsara, of Life. If your boat itself is leaking and faulty, how will you ever cross the river? Unless you learn to respect your body, how can you go beyond the body?
Enter into a deep, loving relationship with your body.
Sri Ramakrishna says beautifully:
There are two ways to cross the river of maya.
One is by summoning all your strength and leaping across. The other way is to stand before it with folded palms and request, O Maya, please allow me to get across!
This is the path of respect and tolerance.
Make peace with your body.
Drop the idea of controlling your body.
Trust in your body wisdom.
Only by deeply understanding your body, with clarity and compassion, will you find a way to go beyond it.
Part 2: Open the door... let the breeze in!