Body Language

Whoever came up with the notion that the mind and the body could be separate? The very notion is absurd -- even if you define "mind" as "brain function," the brain is in fact an organ of the body. And even if you define "emotions" as something a little less tangible, we experience them with our minds and our bodies. The body is the vehicle that we have come here with to experience this life, so we should be very interested in understanding its language.

Certainly this is not so easy. We say "listen to your body" in terms of knowing if we're hungry or tired, or if we get a "gut" feeling to do or not do something. But understanding how conditioned thought patterns and emotional patterns manifest somatically is another matter. I was convinced that the back pain I've been experiencing for more than a year now has psychological roots. I had some ideas of what it was about but nothing I did or thought seemed to affect it. A year is a long time to go with pain, but then again, remember me and the heat! Recently, as I've been working on moving forward in my life, I've realized there are some deeply emotional issues I haven't dealt with as explicitly and I need to. The other night I was thinking about them and feeling the emotions and at the same time moving around trying to do something about this back pain when -- crack! I felt a big adjustment (somewhere in the upper spine) and I just knew that I'd affected my back. Sure enough, by the next morning, the pain was significantly different, maybe 75 percent gone! It's still there, reminding me that I need to keep listening but the relief is profound. Once again I find myself in awe of the way the mindbody continuum expresses itself. Keep listening!

Everything is Everything

In some ways, I think I have always been a Yogi. Ever since I was young, I always noticed how people and concepts were the same, rather than how they were different. This fundamental perspective led me into social issues-based college journalism, later into social work and education, and, over the past decade or so, into Yoga. Now, finding myself at one of those junctures in life where you examine the past and meditate on the future, I realize that Yoga is indeed a way of thinking, seeing, being and feeling in the world, rather than any set of practices or techniques (like meditation). In questioning what your purpose is, you discover that you bring your fundmental truth to everything that you do, and the approach defines the quality and result of your efforts much more than the activity itself. This is enormously liberating, especially if you tend to judge yourself critically for not doing something "enough" -- e.g., you don't do enough asana practice or you don't eat enough vegetables. Through Yoga you reside and abide in your fundamental truth, a unified, holistic state of being that is evident in your work, relationships and pasttimes. In this way you realize that everything is everything -- or, Yoga. Om shanti.