Your Body Is Your Responsibility
Our bodies, thoughts and feelings are our responsibility. No one can take away your pain. No one can carry your pain for you. Yes, you can take drugs to numb the pain but after the drug wears off, it’s still there waiting for you. In the end, if your body is breaking down, it is your responsibility and no one else’s. You can blame nature and God, other people or situations but ultimately you cannot escape that you play a role in every experience in your life. Taking back this responsibility is not an easy matter but it is a powerful way to change your life.
The choice to take responsibility is the first step in taking it back. It begins with intention. Your nervous system responds to your intentions with feelings. Let’s take the example of when you intend to go on a vacation. Your body starts to gear up and prepares itself for the vacation. Feelings of excitement begin to rise within you as you begin to consider all the fun you will have once you arrive.
It works the same way for your intention to take back responsibility. Your body starts to respond to your intention. It may become sleepy and quiet or excited and overwhelmed. You may experience a variety of feelings and body sensations. The key is to allow these feelings.
Feeling feelings is an art.
Learning to Listen to Your Body
I believe learning your body’s language will serve you for the rest of your life. It will protect you from unnecessary physical pain, expensive treatments and surgeries while providing access to your power, strength, endurance and pleasure.
Learning the body’s language is a process that takes time and you must allow yourself this time to evolve.
Our bodies are in constant communication with us, but we are usually not listening. Instead, we have been constantly thinking and spinning our mental wheels. This has caused us to ignore important signs and signals the body is giving us.
The body communicates through feelings and sensations. Most of us have blocked feelings and sensation from flowing because they can be overwhelming and scary. However, allowing uncomfortable feelings gives us access to healing, self–mastery and personal autonomy.
As you read this, your body is providing you with a constant stream of sensations and feelings to your awareness. The challenge is to be able to connect to this stream and begin a new relationship with your body.
An additional benefit from learning to listen to yourself is it improves your ability to listen to others.
While it is true that learning to listen to your body will lessen some of the more obvious discomforts of life, once you being listening you may start to find things within yourself you may not like or things you have been avoiding for some time. You have been in the practice of ignoring these parts of yourself and when you bring them into the light, you may have to endure some difficult moments. However, I assure you, the price is well worth it. By working through this pain, you will free yourself from its power over you. I believe this freedom is worth the price of experiencing pain. The alternative is not to listen and therefore continue being a victim of your body and your life.
Learn to Observe Your Patterns of Behavior
There are many patterns of behavior within our body/mind that reduces our ability to reach our goals. These patterns have been ingrained from childhood and were originally created to help us survive whatever was happening. Now as adults, these patterns can be more destructive than beneficial. To remove these negative patterns from your life requires you to make the choice to recognize these patterns either before they occur or after they have already occurred.
I suggest using the Intentional Relaxation Process (page 57) and Reflection Meditation (page 98) to help you become aware of your patterns on a daily basis. However, the real work begins when you recognize the pattern as a pattern. The method I have been working with simply involves observing whatever feelings are involved when the pattern is triggered.
The feelings existing behind the pattern is the power behind the pattern’s expression. It is what keeps the pattern in power. Feelings are the structure upon which patterns rests. When you neutrally observe these feelings and relax your body it allows the feelings to flow. This effectively removes the energetic foundation from the pattern causing it to collapses.
How to observe patterns of behaviors:
Example:
Ice Cream Scenario – You come home from a long hard day of work. You go to the refrigerator and you see the means to make a healthy dinner, but you also see Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. Instead of making the dinner, you eat the ice cream your dinner.
Later on, while having an upset stomach, you recognize that this is a pattern you do when you’re tired and emotionally drained. Congratulations! You have just completed the first step towards changing this pattern – recognizing it for what it is!
Re-programming begins with relaxing your body and focusing within yourself.
Take the time to relax your body and mind. Once peaceful, go back in your imagination to when you were looking in the refrigerator. Pinpoint the moment you made the choice to go with the Ben and Jerry’s and stop the movie right there. In that moment, the pattern comes to the surface and says, “Ben and Jerry’s, Ben and Jerry’s, Ben and Jerry’s.”
Stay with this moment. See this scene in your head and observe what your body is feeling. Whatever is there is where you begin. Stay with the scene in your head and focus upon what it felt like to desire the ice cream and pick it over the healthy food. What feeling is there? Whatever the feeling is, give this feeling space to be as it is. Don’t judge it or try to change it. Just allow this feeling full freedom to be and relax your body around this feeling. Magnify this feeling and ask yourself, “Where in my body do I feel this feeling?” Ask yourself, “What is the texture, size, shape and intensity of this feeling?” Breathe into this feeling and keep imagining it.
Stay with the scene in your head and watch this feeling in your body. The longer you observe and allow it to change on its own, the more you will cause it to change.
Continue to follow this feeling. Give it permission to move anywhere it wants to in your body. Follow it and you will find it changed into another feeling. Observe this new one and see where it leads you.
Every feeling wants to flow. The root of any pattern is buried by the accumulation of feelings that have not been allowed to flow. Focusing your attention upon any feeling (or sensation) will invariably cause it to dissolve and flow. Somewhere in your body is the root of the pattern and it is waiting for you to discover it and dissolve it.
I have removed a great many patterns from my life in this way. The internal freedom as a result is wonderful and life changing. Don’t let any one pattern convince you that you cannot change. Believe me, you can. All that is required is the desire to change along with focused and persistent effort.
Self-Observation Procedure:
While dieticians, scientists, and nutritionists argue about what foods are good for us, there are few which address how we eat.
We all struggle with food and what is good for us. We eat for a myriad of reasons including, social eating, emotional eating, being bored and of course, when we are hungry.
However, most of us have no real experience of what true hunger really is. We eat three meals a day because science has told us through experimentation and data collection. (This is changing as other data suggest 5-6 small meals throughout the day.)
In my experience of working in the fitness industry, I have learned, each of us is unique in our physical, mental and emotional needs. One exercise or diet may work miracles in one person while another may derive no real benefits. This individuality is good and each of us needs to find the things that work for us. The translation is, no one person can really tell you what is good for you. The best person for this job is YOU. The key is learning your body’s language.