I don’t know anyone who enjoys having physical symptoms and pain. I most certainly do not! But the truth is, we all do have a variety of interesting symptoms, from headaches, to body aches, digestive distress, high blood pressure, all the way up to diabetes, nervous disorders, and cancer. Sometimes we get frustrated with our bodies, maybe even angry, as our attempts to suppress and block out the symptoms work only temporarily or not at all, and we begin a cycle of struggle: us against our bodies. But if we can begin to understand that our bodies are not trying to sabotage us, instead, they are trying to bring awareness to an imbalance that lies at the level of the mind and heart, perhaps we can begin to understand them, listen to them, and accept them as the messengers they are.
Most of us go through life collecting ideas, creating judgments, expectations, and truths that we carry around, coloring our every experience. We carry around the words of our culture, country, heritage, parents and grandparents, teachers, bosses, siblings, friends, and even strangers, and we’ve somehow let them all in our minds, to the point that we no longer know which thoughts, if any, are authentically ours! But since they come from our mind, we assume they are, and there they sit, uninvestigated, for years on end, and yet working in the background dictating our actions, our words, our daily lives. Like an invisible yet heavy backpack, we have forgotten that it is there, but it holds us back from living the fullest expression of ourselves every day.
But once we listen to the language of the body and let it guide us back to the heart and mind, we start exploring all that we’ve collected over time, and slowly, gently begin the work of detoxifying, purifying, and healing. I remember as a child my dad coming home from work each night and emptying his pockets on the kitchen counter. It was everything that he had collected through the day; receipts, change, bottle caps, business cards, etc. Then he’d go through it. He’d throw away everything he didn’t need for the next day, filed away the things he wanted to save for a later date, and kept aside all those things he wanted to start the next day off with. When I think about the work we need to do to heal our minds, I think about this analogy.
Our body speaks in the language of qualities: our pain/discomfort can be described as a combination of some of these: hot, cold, moving, stuck, prickly, sharp, heavy, light, dull, dense, etc. These sensations are messengers that come from our heart and mind through the body, and if we can learn this language, we can begin to interpret what might be going on at a deeper level and bring about lasting healing.
When we first start investigating the contents of our mind, we may be surprised by all the beliefs and defense mechanisms we have stored up to live a “safe” life. For every hurt we’ve encountered, we’ve most likely created a defense, a protection, so it can’t happen again. To some degree this makes good sense – i.e., we left our car door open, our favorite sweater was stolen, and now that we have that memory, we remember to lock the car door. But there are other protection measures that go up and instead of simply providing a layer of good old-fashioned common sense, they wall us up from one another, to the point that we begin leading a very artificial life – afraid to let anyone in, afraid to let anything out, afraid to let anyone know anything about us, carrying a smile and an “I’m fine” from moment to moment. Maybe we can function this way for a while, but soon the heart gets involved, and the lack of fresh, live prana (life force energy we get from food, each other, fresh air) coming into it is so diminished, it begins to feel starved. When the heart feels starved, we start clinging and grasping on to whatever love does come in, and we close ourselves off to the flow. We become protective and closed-off, or we become overly attached and passive-aggressive.
This is when the body prepares to let you know something is off, and we start experiencing symptoms. Perhaps the muscles tense up, the blood vessels constrict, the digestion gets “blocked”, or the heart “burns”. Maybe you get a headache, or fatigue sets in, or the we “come down with” the flu or a cold. These are all signs that come through the body from the mind and the heart, so that you can do the investigative, cleansing work.
Now, instead of simply blocking the symptoms or suppressing them, we can be thankful for the message and begin the inner work on the mind and heart – investigation, letting go, re-establishing healthy boundaries, and allowing each experience in our life to be fresh, full of opportunity, life, and prana.
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