The Ultimate Thriving Machine
The body is an amazing creation. It allows us to experience the world for as long as it is able, taking care of things like breathing, converting plants and animals into energy, getting rid of what isn’t required, adjusting to temperature differences, moving us from place to place, and allowing us to feel every moment of what happens inside and outside of us. Over a quadrillion microorganisms (cells and their organelles) all cooperate to make this happen without us thinking about it.
The body as a transformer
The body channels energy. Whether we get it from the food that we eat and oxygen we absorb, or from the sensations we experience, the emotions that travel through our hearts, energy is constantly flowing from us and through us, being transformed into hormones and electricity, allowing us to experience and create magic.
When we allow energy to flow through our bodies without blocking it, our bodies work effortlessly. When we feel an emotion, we express it. When we choose to do something, we do it. Things almost happen by themselves. When I drive in this state, I don’t actually feel my mind directing my arms and feet. My arms feel weightless as they drive by themselves. It’s almost as if I am observing my body do its thing. There is absolutely no resistance inside the muscles. They simply glide along the bone structure, as if all of the moving parts have been well-lubricated.
Getting clogged up
Although many in the spiritual community describe the body as a vessel, I describe the body as a tube. When it is free of clogs, energy flows through effortlessly. Frequently, however, we don’t allow energy to flow freely through our bodies. It may be inconvenient to express our emotions at a certain time. We may feel inhibited from behaving in a certain way.
When we don’t let our bodies release that energy, it stores it, and plaque builds up on the tube. The plaque appears as knots in our backs, tightened muscles, upset stomachs, and so on. If the flow gets blocked to the point where more energy comes in than goes out, eventually the body cannot carry the excess energy, and damage occurs. Heart attacks, ulcers, autoimmune diseases, obesity and so on, are all indications that our bodies can no longer hold the energy going through us.
Unclogging the clogs
We have a couple of options for dealing with a constricted body.
We may increase the energetic capacity of the body. Exercise is a common technique for increasing the size of the tube. When the body is fitter, has more aerobic and anaerobic capacity, and is generally in better shape, it allows for more energy to flow through. If the tube is partially constricted, increasing its size allows for more space for energy to flow around the buildup. Exercise by itself does not, however, actually remove the cause of the buildup: the energy we didn’t feel safe releasing in the first place.
Another option is to reduce the impact of existing constrictions. Frequently this appears as meditation and relaxation practices. As the body holds onto energy, it can become less capable of ingesting processed foods, and those foods can become constrictions themselves. Improving one’s diet can remove the food-based blockages and improve the body’s ability to manage other blocks as well.
Both of these options help with reducing the impact of constrictions, and can give us opportunities to release the energy, but do not necessarily release the energy itself. When we exercise, the endorphins may help us unwind to the point where we can release our emotions. If we use it instead as a confrontational experience, focusing on powering through prior records, then additional constrictions are created instead. If we use meditation as a way to suppress our energy, instead of a way to safely experience it, we are sweeping dust under the rug instead of clearing it out of the house. To remove the constrictions, we need to be willing to release them.
Medication? Depends.
These days, medication appears to be a common answer to our energetic problems. High cholesterol and hypothyroidism are managed with statins and synthetic hormones. I do not discount medication out of hand, but there is always a question in my mind: Is the medication actually treating the problem, or is it addressing the symptoms of a larger problem?
The challenge with medicating an energetic issue is that it address the symptoms, but not the underlying issue. Many conditions that lead to heart disease, for example, have an energetic underpinning of being unable to express our hearts, our emotions. When we take statins to lower our cholesterol, we reduce one of the causes of heart disease. At the same time, statins put pressure on our livers, as they have to metabolize the statins. While the heart is the center of our emotional expression and empathy, the liver is the center of our courage. Rather than face our need to express our feelings, we undermine our courage – the very courage we need to face our feelings.
Western medicine has its origins on the battlefield. It excels in emergency medicine and surgical remedies. If I am in a car accident, I want a western-trained surgeon to put me back together. Eastern medicine focuses on the homeostasis of the body. When my body is out of alignment, and it is in danger of deteriorating rapidly, I may use a western medical regimen to stabilize myself. At some point, however, there comes a time when I need to look at the underlying causes for the deterioration. For that, I will use eastern medicine and energy practices to help me look within, and see what my body is storing inside.
Listening to the body
Whether we are retaining energy or looking for ways to improve our energy, the body will tell us exactly what it needs. A given ache or pain, when we focus on it and ask about what energy is being stored, will give up its emotional energy, allowing us to feel what is pent up inside. Or we may find ourselves feeling a desire to do something active with our bodies – walking, running, or even simply spending some time in the sun.
When we need a particular nutrient, we’ll find ourselves craving a particular food. When we eat something that the body wants, a feeling of joy and increased energy comes from eating the very first bite of it. This is what many folks talk about when they speak of eating “higher vibration” foods. Conversely, when we eat more processed foods, we may find it making us feel more sluggish. We can actually make better food choices simply by feeling how our body responds to food. We may find that, rather than eating until we are full, we eat until we are sated. The body says, “I’ve had enough,” and we stop.
Overeating doesn’t happen when we listen to our bodies.
For myself, my endocrinologist was concerned that I was showing signs of hypothyroidism. My TSH levels were increasing beyond normal. Before taking thyroid medication, however, I stopped and focused my attention on my throat, where the thyroid resides. As I thought about what was blocking it, I felt a fear of being physically assaulted for speaking my truth.
This didn’t make any sense to me, because I worked in a white-collar job, with wonderful coworkers, who would be happy to hear any concerns I had. Even if someone took offense at my words, they would tell me about it, not punch me. I didn’t have a history of physical abuse in my background. I needed to find out what was behind my fear of being assaulted for speaking.
So I took a participatory course in bondage and sadomasichism. It seemed the best place to actually participate in physical pain, as it would be in a controlled setting, with prescribed boundaries.
As I was being flogged, I could feel this rage rise up from within me. It burst out through my mouth, and I roared, “YOU CANNOT STOP ME!!! I AM RIGHT HERE!!!” the people flogging me paused and asked me, “Are you okay? Should we stop?” “No, keep going,” I responded, and I kept roaring as they kept flogging.
When I got home, my partner at the time identified that, in a past life, I had been a monk sworn to vows of silence, but I had broken them and was flogged to death for it. In this session, I was able to, in essence, speak my side of the story and complete the process.
When I next had my thyroid levels examined, the numbers had returned to normal.
Feeling our gunk
The body does not have a sense of time. It feels exactly what it feels, right now. If it stores energy, the energy it stores is the same energy it retained, whenever that was. That energy is put in stasis, leashed until it is released. When it is released, that energy is “unpaused” from the moment it was paused, and the body feels that energy now that wasn’t felt then.
When we have a massage, we may feel the muscles relax. As that happens, we might feel emotions arise as the body gives up that energy knot. If we let that emotion subside, then it shifts to another part of the body, perhaps to reappear in the same place at a future date. (For myself, I would feel impending deadline pressure as a row of knots parallel on either side of my spine. When the knots were kneaded out, the emotion I felt was terror, as if a wild animal were chasing me down.)
If we experience that emotion fully and let it out, however, we may find it tied to something else. The emotion of deadlines may go deeper, to the emotions of what failure would mean in the eyes of others, to situations where our failures had serious consequences, to the pain of failures in past lives. Following an experience all the way through allows us to get to the root of the constriction and release it in its entirety. We experience the emotion; feel the root story that generated that first emotional burst; allow it to flow freely from us; and watch it go. The constriction is removed, and more energy flows freely.
What the body hands us
Sometimes, the body is actually an instrument in our growth. When someone comes into this world with a congenital defect or disease, or an autoimmune reaction appears, we have choices about how to address this. It is fairly easy to cry, “Why me?” And at the same time, it is also an opportunity to learn humility and peace despite the circumstances.
I am reminded of the 1985 movie Mask, where the protagonist was a child with a cranial deformity that many classmates had difficulties adjusting to. When he finally meets a blind girl who sees his inner beauty and intelligence, he internalizes that his deformity is not a detriment to having a full life. He finally passes away after their last meeting that confirmed her love for him, several years after he was “supposed” to die.
In this case, and many others, the body provides an opportunity to learn.
Letting go of gunk
Frequently, if we have a a lot of energy pent up in the body, we’ll avoid listening to our bodies, because it hurts too much. We plod along, going from comfort to comfort food, or even immerse ourselves in alternate experiences with drugs. We may fear that we will lose our minds if we allow that energy to be released.
The key is to lose our minds in the presence of someone who will keep us safe while we lose it, allow us to lose it, and be there to remind us where we are when we’re done. As we get practice losing our minds, we discover that, eventually, they come back, as long as we’re willing to experience the emotion fully. Then we can lose our minds on our own, without outside help, and still come back in time for dinner.
Learning to love our bodies again
In the cases where we’ve abused our bodies to avoid listening – binge eating, self-mutilation, drug use – when we finally realize what we’ve done to our bodies, it can be heart-wrenching. Looking at how we’ve treated this amazing vessel, all of the abuse that it has withstood, and it still tries its very best to fulfill your wishes, it can be like watching a loved one who, with bruises on their face, says that they know their partner loves them. Our hearts go out to our own bodies, our servants with no voices, and we decide to nurse it back to health.
And it can take a very long time to do so! If we have spent years overburdening the body, it can take years to unburden it. Just as the body was able to withstand quite a bit before it started deteriorating under the pressure, it can take a while before nurturing it takes effect. But it does, even at the very beginning.
When a body has been abused for a period of time, there are many levels at which it can be nurtured. At the beginning, simply changing foods from more processed to more natural can help reduce the load it deals with, giving it the opportunity to focus its energy on dealing with emotional challenges versus physical processing challenges.
We can also start spending more time being physically active. This can be a challenge if we have become morbidly obese, but even being aware of how we breathe can be a start. Rather than simply allowing the body to breathe, we can watch it breathe, and be aware of the air coming in and leaving us. This sensory awareness of the unconscious activity of the body can inspire us to more conscious activity. We can also increase the amount of oxygen entering the body by breathing consciously, bringing more energy into our bodies.
And, importantly, we can focus on where the body is storing pent up emotions. By focusing on these spaces, we not only get the opportunity to release those emotions, but we can also appreciate the efforts the body goes through to help us get through the day. We can thank it for storing this energy until we could finally address it.
The body loves knowing that it is appreciated. It loves to thrive.