Head Against Body

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

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The opposition of head and body is deeply embedded in our culture. The head is a bright mind, high spirituality, flight of fantasy, abstraction and global vision. The body, on the other hand, is something interfering, distracting, with its own base needs that arise at the most inopportune moment. He wants to eat, then he gets sick somewhere, then he non-verbally expresses something there, then hugs, and then - God forbid - sex.

“Think with your head, not in one place. Turn on your brains. Concentrate on the goal. Gather your will into a fist”- this is how the formula for success looks like, but in fact a socially approved limitation of the capabilities of your own brain.

If it were a fairy tale, it would look like this. Once upon a time there was an ordinary man. He received a gift of superpower - to see the true essence of things, which is invisible to others. But he refused to use it. That's the end of the fairy tale. Agree, poorly for a fairy tale. Of course, a magical way of obtaining this gift can be inserted into the tie-in, and at the culmination of the hero's dramatic experiences that he sees and understands too much, but cannot change. That, it seems, has a superpower, but feels loneliness and helplessness. Not everyone can handle this load. So our main character has to give up the gift, look at the world through a socio-cultural fairytale prism, and in other words, there are many things not to notice.

What am I leading to. At a certain moment, looking at the world through the prism becomes uncomfortable. Painfully many facts, events, people fall out of the established vision. And there is a desire either to push them into this framework and calm down, or to change the prism. And the benefits of this shift are like from open eyes, with its pluses and minuses.

And call it what you want: age crisis, stagnation, loss of the ability to enjoy life, depression. If creativity, energy, naturalness and simplicity, freshness of perception and the desire to dance to the beat of the music disappear from life, then it's time to connect the right hemisphere and calibrate it with the left.

Our body and its reactions are a storehouse of information that we have forgotten how to use. The ability to hear body language, trust its prompts and interpret them correctly, were once the key to survival. The most interesting thing is that clients who come with situations of unexpected painful changes in their lives "like snow on their heads": betrayal, betrayal, divorce, child leaving home, setting up at work, etc. After the storm of emotions subsides, to my question: “When did the“first bells”begin, that something was wrong”? They say that long before the N event, they began to notice "these bells". And they spent a lot of time and effort trying to “somehow explain” and “somehow not see”.

How do you begin to understand the signals of your body? How to read information in a language that has long been forgotten and use it?

Why is the body put on alert in certain situations and what past experience is the basis?

How to resolve the internal conflict between "want" and "need"?

Such a list of questions usually pops up in work, and the answers to them provide an opportunity to look at many things in life in a different way.

Where can you start?

From getting to know your own feelings. Here's a simple exercise for observing the sensations in the palm of your hand.

The first part is preparatory. To warm up, do a few simple movements that prepare the material from sensations that simply cannot be overlooked.

1. Connect the tips of the fingers of both hands, press them together with effort, leaning them against each other. Perform 15-20 counter movements with your palms with force, as if squeezing an imaginary rubber bulb located between your palms, or as if pumping something into the space between your palms, imitating the operation of a pump.

2. Rub your palms together vigorously until you feel intense warmth.

3. Strongly and quickly clench and unclench your fist at least 10 times, achieving a feeling of fatigue in the muscles of the hand.

4. Shake the passively hanging hand.

Now place your palms symmetrically on your knees. Direct all your attention to the inner sensations in the palm of your hand. You will be interested in the following feelings:

1. Feeling of weight. Do you feel heaviness or lightness in your hand?

2. Feeling of temperature. Do you feel cold or warm in your brush?

3. Additional sensations: dryness or dampness, throbbing, tingling, sensation of electric current passing, feeling of "goose bumps", numbness (usually in the fingertips), vibration, trembling.

- Maybe you will feel that the palm radiates some "energy", as it were.

- Maybe you will feel, as it were, a movement incipient in the fingers or in the hand as a whole - make it … Observe it as if from the side. Imagine that your body moves of its own accord, regardless of your desire. (Involuntary flexion of the fingers, lifting, "floating" of the hands, and sometimes more developed movements are often observed). Continue to observe the sensations incessantly, as if plunging into this process. Try to catch changes in sensations, watch how the sensations change, sometimes increasing, sometimes weakening, as they change their localization. Continue to do the exercise long enough - at least 8-10 minutes, and if you have enough patience, then even longer.

This practice of self-observation is at the heart of body awareness and is characteristic of the Eastern approach, where the experience of feeling and being in the state of "here and now" is as important as knowledge.

Happy practice!