GIVING SPACE TO YOUR BODY
03.03.24 | Por Andrea Fajardo
Welcome. If you are starting to read this, my first invitation is to allow your curiosity to guide you, my intention is not to fill your head with more information, but to open a door to start exploring what makes it so relevant to bring awareness at our body and its messages. Do you remember an event you've experienced without your body?
I want to start by acknowledging that Western culture, in which I and most of the people I know have grown up with, has prioritized rationality above all else. "I think, therefore I am", this famous Descartes’ phrase that has symbolized how we have chosen our head as our leader, to create a world based almost solely on it, offering a static and reduced notion of our being: we are just cognitive beings, who could well live like walking heads.
Perhaps it is very common for you, reader (it has been for me for more than half my life) to spend a lot of time in the world of ideas: what you think about yourself, about others, about what is right and what is wrong, about what we must do to achieve our dreams, of the plans for next week and those for the next few years, of what would have happened if, of whether it is logical to feel a certain way, of our "irrational" fears...
As I write this, I feel my head heavy... How much energy we put into our heads! And in this separation from the rest of our body, have you ever asked yourself, why do we have bodies? Perhaps you are one of those people who conceives the body as a tangible element that gives us shape, we can use it to exercise it and thus feel the benefits of the endorphins that are generated as we move it; and not least, it keeps us alive. But is the body just that? A shell that contains us, preserves our vital signs, allows us to move, and supports our head?
Take a pause, observe if you're breathing. I invite you to take a conscious breath from wherever you are. Notice if you can feel your forehead, head, and neck. Check if you are clenching your jaw or not, breathe once more. See if you can move your shoulders back and forth, maybe you feel the urge to move your head and neck back and forth, can you follow your body’s impulse? Take another breath. Bring curiosity to your feet, do you notice them? What is their temperature, and if you move them little by little, is the sensation pleasant or unpleasant? One more breath. If you exhale through your mouth, do you hear your exhale? And if your exhalation could express something about you right now, what would it say?
This body contact exercise may or may not be easy. Maybe you have experience it with a slow or fast rhythm. Perhaps, you went straight to your head to ask, why do all this? Being in contact with your body can be challenging and there are a variety of reasons that can explain why, but I won't focus on that now. What I'm interested in sharing with you is the notion that the experience of life happens in the body: we touch, smell, see, hear, feel in the body. Experience is a bodily phenomenon, you only experience what takes place in the organism: when something happens in the external world that affects an individual, they experience that affectation through the effect it has on their body.
It is such a paradox that we are educated to think: to learn mathematical concepts, chemistry or languages, to teach us what is right and what is wrong in the eyes of the society in which we are born, but very little value and space is given to learning to listen to our body's signals and language. If our body contains us, it means that it not only contains concepts about what we have learned about the world, but also how we have learned to relate to it, what has felt pleasant and unpleasant, our "yes" and our "no". We are thinking beings and we are also sentient beings: we are emotional beings and emotions are felt in the body.
If you stop for a moment, you might remember a past or present situation where, even if you tried rationally to change your thoughts to make them more positive, change your perspective on a situation or person... You keep reacting in the same way, maybe one that doesn't feel satisfying or that brings you more problems, but that is engraved in you as an automatic movement, no matter how hard you try, manipulating your thoughts doesn't feel enough to transform the ongoing experience. What if behind the "uncontrollable" impulses, there is a meaning and a message?
Anodea Judith says that the body has an intelligence whose mysteries the mind has not yet unravelled, and I completely agree. The processes of psychotherapy based solely on talking tend to help us understand from our rational dimension, but usually in these processes the body is still or ignored. Talking about the body is not the same as being your body: turning to the resources we have in the body to navigate life. Life is movement, sometimes it caresses us, rocks us gently, sometimes it pulls us, squeezes us or expands us. Learning to navigate it from our body, from our ship, is choosing to be present with what we are experiencing, letting ourselves be guided by our own compass with confidence to access what we need.
I feel the impulse to invite you to allow yourself to notice how what you have just read impacts you. Do you notice any particular sensations, are they pleasant or unpleasant? I take a breath and feel my chest expand and little shocks of energy move through my hands, arms, and feet as I finish writing this paragraph. I want to invite you to start questioning if there is a part of you that wants to perceive and feel yourself as a unit: you are your body, we are our bodies.