Re-Membering Your Whole Self

Re-Membering Your Whole Self

I can’t help but see things that most people never notice when it comes to the body. Just from posture alone, I can tell a lot about a person.

The computer and the car are devices we rely on to create freedom, ease and efficiency in our lives. But yet they also create a magnetic pull of all of our inner resources out of the body, into the head. We are a world of Talking Heads—dismembered from our bodies!  This shows up as head forward syndrome and all types of malaise in the body.

Stress starts in the mind.  Then it drives awareness out of the body intentionally, as a survival mechanism. Blood goes to the limbs (to fight or flee), away from the vital organs, and the nervous system is dulled from feeling sensations. The body is responding on an evolutionary survival level.  It doesn’t know your stress is about a deadline, not a saber-tooth tiger. It prepares itself, so that if you get injured by a predator, your chances of surviving are better.  Better not to feel too much pain or lose too much blood!

However abstract this may sound, the impact on you and your life is real.  Why not re-member your mind and body, and begin to connect to your whole being?  You’ll be amazed at how energized and centered you feel. 

Practice

Stand up and have a friend look at you from the side. Ask them to visually measure whether your ears are in front of or in alignment with your shoulders.  If in front, your body is stressed out and needs help!  Get to a yoga class fast with myself, one of my faculty (Sally Walsh Roberts or Mary Ellen Coleman) or anywhere you can get yourself to!  If you can’t get to a yoga class, try this stretch.  Clasp your hands behind you, stretch the elbows straight, bow forward and drop the arms over your head, head below the heart. Do this for at least five to ten audible breathes.  Repeat as necessary.

Let me know here how it goes!

Love and light,

 

 

 

 

The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.   –Mahatma Gandhi