Paying Attention to What the Body Knows

The Rules for Being Human

Rule # 1 -- You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s the only thing you are sure to keep for the rest of your life.

The Rules For Being Human, by Dr. Chérie Carter-Scott. 

I’m finding that I am becoming more and more interested in the messages the body provides.

Westerners have a much more divided concept of human existence than are those from Eastern cultures. The Judeo-Christian heritage of the West has its basis in the Greek (and Babylonian) understanding of the separation between psyche and soma, between mind and body. Never quite understanding how the two interrelated, and having "blame" as a motivating force in ethics and religion, the body got blamed for everything – got the reputation of being sort of a wild beast that had to be contained by the force of will – by the mind. This in turn led to the true self being thought of as being the mind. The body, as I’ve said before, was relegated to "that which transported the self from point a to point b."

In the East, there was more of a sense of wholeness in the body/mind. The whole package -- body/mind/spirit -- was thought to be the person; and the person was acted upon by the force of nature, chi. The chi itself had yin and yang components; the goal was not dominance of one or the other, but balance. So acupuncture, for example, was designed to restore the free flow of chi throughout the whole body; when "in flow" the chi would be equally yin and yang.

In the West, we have developed, through the scientific model, a penchant for tearing things into bits in order to understand them. There's a joke here, though. Part of the joke of this is that we do have much more knowledge of the workings of the mind/body through our endless dissection of the parts. But, and here’s the joke, the more we dig, the smaller we go, the more we find, and thus the more there is to know. It’s like that old Firesign Theater skit, where the car talks, and announces, "Antelope Freeway, 1 mile." "Antelope Freeway, ½ mile". Antelope Freeway, ¼ mile." Antelope Freeway, 1/8 mile." Antelope Freeway, 1/16 mile." Given the premise that you can divide a thing infinitely, you’ll never get to the Antelope Freeway.

Our idea, point 1, that you’ll have a body, love it or hate it,  needs to be pushed a bit. We don’t necessarily trust our bodies, nor the messages they bring. On the other hand, the "feelings" that arise from our bodies are often bang on – illogical, but ultimately reliable.

Now, it will come as no surprise that I would suggest that all data we receive is sensory data – typically, our two main sources of interaction are through sight and sound. Sight, sound and "gut feelings" are just that – feelings.-- sensory input that stimulates various neurons. In and of itself, sensory data has no "meaning." What an input "means" is the meaning we attach to it.

We get into all sorts of jams because we make the silly assumption that everything means the same thing to all people. For example, let's reflect on colour. When our parents tell us, as kids, that "grass is green," we have no trouble with that concept. We are labellers from the get go. We want to put names to things. Where this gets interesting is that there is no way to share, person to person, what colour the person is actually seeing. We’ve come to an agreement that we’ll say that grass is green, but its nonsense to assume that the green I see is the same green you see.

You can play this game with El Greco paintings. What did he see? Did he have a different set of lens’ in his eyes, so that his elongated figures, to him, seemed normal? Or was he exaggerating through artistic license?

The upshot of all of this is that we need to check out what we perceive. This is especially true of bodily sensations, feelings, hunches.

I was wrapping up a long counselling / Bodywork session the other day. My client had come a long way and had released, through talking and then through Bodywork, a large chunk of stuffed material. I was sitting next to my Bodywork table, waiting for her to open her eyes and re-orient herself to the room. Suddenly, I had an urge to continue. I had no logical reason, no "head" reason, but something suggested that I hold a couple of acupuncture points. So I did.

She took two deep breaths and began to sob. Deep, wracking sobs. Went on for about 5 minutes. Then she stopped of her own accord, and I sat back again. Her eyes popped open and she said, "What the hell was that???" I said, "Beats me. What was it for you?" (How could I know? Despite being the "therapist," whatever "therapist" means, I’m not "in there," experiencing what she was experiencing what she was experiencing. She had to tell me, not the other way around.)

What she came up with was, "Old, old, black sludge. God, I’ve never wanted to go there. But I did." I pointed out that not only had she gone there, she’d come back alive. I asked her what she was feeling. She replied, "Everything."

I’ve learned to trust my instincts. If I am moved to ask a question that comes from "nowhere," out of context, so to speak, or, in Bodywork, to focus on a specific area, I simply say the words or go to the area. I have found that virtually always, the question, probe or touch is exactly what is necessary to allow the person I am in contact with to explore something at the "next level."

The key here, though, is subtle. I ask the question, make the comment, or begin the Bodywork without any sense that I "know" anything about what’s going to happen next. I allow for the possibility that whatever happens will have no context for me on my planet. I am, in other words, interested in what the probe will lead to, for the other person.

All too often, we get a "feeling" about someone or some thing, and we blow it off, write it off, blame it on anchovy pizza. Or, we make the feeling "true" without confirming what’s going on for the other person.

We think too little of our body’s ability to teach us; we think too much about how our body looks in comparison to some airbrushed standard.

This first point is about learning from your body’s natural ability to pick up data. If you approach what comes with curiosity, if you ask for clarification, if you, in short, learn to trust your instincts but not your interpretations, you will find that your consciousness expands, and you become more than a brain perched upon a body. You become whole. Curious. Alert. Present. And in that, there is peace.