Stay in the Body?

"Land in the body"

"Tune in to the body"

Why is this the message? Why does this matter right now?

My thought is that it’s because we are in our heads so much - mental illness is mental. This is the age of information and we are bombarded if we choose that and our brains are on speed mode at times, depending on our history, temperament, attention controls and our history of early trauma.

So - why go to the body? Because it gets us out of our head, at least for the moment, or temporarily - and if we do this, enough times -repeatedly - randomly - the brain will begin to ‘pause’- again and again. And this is the beginning of re-wiring our ‘monkey’ brain and the narrative we have created over time about our life and is possibly no longer serving us or is not based on our truth and our real authentic Self.

Are you with me so far? Next question - can we stay in the body all the time. Not really, we are mental and spiritual beings. But the body is the original home base, in this world. Our body experiences our senses, our thoughts and our emotions simultaneously and when they are not integrated - something gets lost in the interpretation and in the experience. Thus, we dissociate from the experience and the event and the moment. In some ways, we can say that we are someplace else - and this is good and a survival thing - for example, when we learn to ride a bike, we are paying attention to the body: the balance, the visual aspect, the bike itself, our survival ; and eventually it happens unconsciously - without tuning in to the body. It is integrated. It is holistic.

But, when the event or experience is stressful, traumatic; it becomes overwhelming and our senses cannot take in and integrate everything that is happening, we tend to dissociate or leave our bodies (the experience gets split up or fragmented) - if this happens a lot - it becomes a pattern and psychological symptoms develop over time. So, what we are doing by - landing in the body, making room in the body, staying in the body - is reconnecting! And we do it - in small increments, in small chunks, while checking in to make sure we are feeling safe.

It is an individual journey since every body is uniquely different. In general, there is a science to this art of listening to the body and many body workers such as massage therapists, yoga embodied teachers, and various others have been studying this for many years; and now the trauma specialists and psychologists have really taken off with this concept - based on the work of Peter Levine, PhD, Bessel van der Kolk, PhD, and many others. In general, there is a consensus that it is our bodily response to the traumatic event or events that creates havoc or a system malfunction, more or less like a freeze, or shutdown - that blocks the energy flow and it gets stuck. Reconnecting to the body - gets to the block and begins to allow the flow, but it has to be done carefully and incrementally unless the person would get ‘overwhelmed’ again and re-traumatized.

The wonderful news is that the body is doing this healing or re-aligning on its own anyway. The body has it own healing mechanism - physically and mentally - its called a "felt sense" or intuition. It’s what we do when we seek joy, when we seek friends that regulate us, when we seek books and words that teach us, when we seek peace and stillness in nature, when we seek movement and exercise that produces endorphins, when we seek to meditate, when we seek to fall in love, when we seek to dance, and when we seek to leave a friend or love that is not good for us, or an experience that sucks the life out of us.

For me the big picture is to remember that the journey of staying in the body or tuning in to the body - is done one moment at a time and one emotion at a time. When we do it incrementally - we begin to feel its effects later in time - and we begin to feel the Flow in our life. We are connected!