The Secret Language of the Body
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Your body is speaking to you all the time, it just doesn't speak in words.
Its language is more ancient and more real than words and yet its a mystery to most. Ive spent more than half of my life learning to decode the language of the body and explore its mysteries and Id love to share with you some ways for you to get access to its infinite intelligence. Lets explore how the body speaks...
Your body speaks in sensations and feelings. Like;
temperature
pressure
movement or stiffness
tension
heaviness
emptiness
softness
aliveness
This is the beginning of somatic literacy. In understanding that these signals are a form of communication we start to access the realm of energy merging with matter.
Pain for instance, is an acute message that the body shares to alert us to something that is not quite right in our experience or that there is something urgent that needs to be attended to. It can be physical pain like stubbing your toe but it can also be emotional pain from a belief that we carry.
Pain is designed to alert us to where our attention needs to be immediately. However when we carry a lot of emotional pain we can push it aside as its extremely unpleasant. This causes the imbalanced energy to become locked in the body and the body then alerts us to this distortion.
The way this reality is designed, life continually brings us opportunities to heal this distortion by presenting the very circumstances that trigger the pain we have been trying to avoid. These moments are invitations to resolve what remains unfinished, so that life force can begin to flow freely again.
YOUR BODY IS THE INSTRUMENT FOR SPIRIT
You are not your body, You live through a body. Your body is a highly sensitive and sophisticated manifestation of consciousness and spirit. (wow thats a mouth full!)
We could simplify it, just so we can wrap our mind around this concept, by saying that your body is the living interface through which your awareness experiences this world.
It's not a machine that carries you around, and it's not separate from who you are. It's a living field of intelligence that is constantly translating consciousness into sensation, movement, emotion, instinct and perception. Every feeling, every impulse, every tightening or softening in your tissues is consciousness expressing itself in form.
When you learn to listen to your body, you are not just learning to read symptoms or manage stress. You are learning to recognise how your own awareness is moving through your nervous system, your organs, your muscles and your energy. This is why your body always knows what is aligned and what is not.
Your body is not the problem to be fixed. Your body is the instrument through which your spirit is learning how to live here.
The way spirit merges with the body is through a process called interoception, which is simply our ability to sense and understand what is happening inside of us.
It's how we notice signals such as hunger, thirst, fatigue, or even the need to go to the bathroom., but it goes much deeper than basic physical cues. Interoception is also how we recognise our emotional states and the subtle physiological changes that accompany them, the tightness in the chest, the heaviness in the belly, the softening, the opening, the contraction.
And here is the part that is really interesting,
When sensation is allowed to be present, awareness can land. When we tune into the body and feel the sensation we start to experience an increase in spirit or energy to where we are focusing our attention. You know there is a saying that says 'where attention goes, energy flows'.
AWARENESS EXERCISE
Just for a moment take your focus to your left hand and notice how the sensations start to come into awareness. You may notice that you feel a warmth or a tingling. That is awareness anchoring spirit. If we were to look at that part of our body with an MRI we would notice that blood flow increases to that area and that there is more electrical activity happening there. This is part of the reason pain wants your attention. However we often want to move away from pain or shut it down, for obvious reasons.
WHEN SPIRIT CANT ANCHOR
When sensation is shut down, spirit has nowhere to anchor.
That is one of the deepest truths behind the freeze response and emotional and physical numbness. The freeze response is a survival response. When fight or flight are not safe we can tend to freeze or numb out as the emotions are too big to metabolise. This can happen when life is simply too overwhelming.
How this may manifest in the world is a little bit of un-aliveness a loss of energy.
It can look like moving through life on autopilot. Doing what needs to be done, functioning well on the outside, but feeling strangely absent inside your own life.
It can look like not knowing what you want anymore as the inner signals that normally guide desire, and truth have gone quiet.
It can look like feeling disconnected from your own emotions, and sometimes from other people too. You may care deeply, yet you can't feel that care in your body. Love becomes a concept rather than a lived sensation. It's like the hearts feeling dead or feeling shut down.
It can show up as chronic fatigue, heaviness, flatness, brain fog or a sense of being dull or muted from the inside. Life feels distant.
It can show up as difficulty making decisions, constantly second guessing yourself, or needing excessive reassurance from others because your own internal reference system is no longer clearly accessible.
It can even show up as searching for intensity, drama, struggle or constant problem solving, because at least stress and urgency generate sensation. When the nervous system is frozen, stimulation becomes a substitute for aliveness.
YOU NEED TO FEEL IT TO HEAL IT
As spirit anchors into the body through sensation, through feeling, through the subtle internal movements of the body, and when sensation is shut down, awareness cannot fully inhabit the body.
This is largely the underlying factor of many illnesses.
In other words you may be feeling a discomfort in the body that is related to something that is not working in your life. If the pattern is to keep overriding the feeling, then there is a disconnect to what is life enhancing and a movement to what is life diminishing. Spirit is life force so when the spirit cant anchor then the body starts to decline. This is why staying in something that simply doesn't align with us can also lead to illness.
So we could say healing is not about trying to feel better its about learning how to feel again.
Learning how to feel the sensations of the body and simply bring our focus and awareness there is very liberating. The body then naturally processes the sensations in its own time and the process of transformation takes place.
The body holds unfinished survival responses and can gently complete them when it feels safe enough. When we start feeling into the sensation of the body instead of constantly living in a story or mentally repeating the story it brings us back to present time. The more you practice listening to the body rather than the story the quicker the body becomes a safe space to be.
Your body heals when you stop overriding it and start listening to it.
MEDITATION & PRACTICE
My invitation to you is to practice tuning into the sensations of the body at least once a day. When you tune in simply notice without judgement the feeling. Be aware of the urge to create a story around it and just notice the sensations. The mind wants to call it anger or tiredness or diagnose it as an illness. What if you just noticed each area of your body that is coming into your awareness and simply knowing that when you direct your awareness to this area you are sending more blood to that area and also you are anchoring spirit or life force there too.
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