Physical Culture: How To Deal With Your Body Consciously

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

Despite the increasing availability of fitness and gym clubs, I have found that most of us use our bodies ineffectively and ineffectively. In sessions of body-oriented therapy, most patients show disconnection from their body, they cannot feel.

There are many reasons for this relationship with your body: these are ossified beliefs about how the body looks, excessive control over body movement, the desire to make a certain impression, and last but not least, a passion for spiritual techniques aimed at reducing identification with your body ("Who am I ? - I'm not the body. ")

How our body looks and how it behaves affects how people perceive us. In a world where the importance of first impressions is universally emphasized, the desire to make a pleasant first impression - one that the "inhabitant" of the body perceives as positive - is natural and understandable.

The paradoxical discovery is that there is a difference between how we think, how our body looks from the outside, and how it really looks from the outside. Fixation on the movements of your body and preoccupation with how the body looks from the outside, instead of being consciously in your body, has the opposite effect.

Each person intuitively "removes" the presence or tightness in the body of the interlocutor. The bodies present, that is, those that are in the flow, are perceived by us as light, natural and inviting. Squeezed, well-trained and carefully controlled bodies we perceive as solid, stone and non-flowing. An atmosphere of pretense hovers around such people.

I have found several behaviors that interfere with the enjoyment of my own body in space:

1. An attempt to combat gravity. The desire to soar and the perception of the body as a ballast, preventing flight.

2. Decentration of the body. Lack of balance.

3. Constant reflection on how the body looks in space: from the outside, from the point of view of the interlocutor, instead of “filling” your body with yourself and feeling its integrity.

Any movement made by the body, we pass through the filter of perception. We classify some action as beautiful, another as ridiculous, awkward. The desire to perform only beautiful actions and avoid clumsy things plunges the body into constant tension. The flow of energy that feeds the body is blocked, and all activities produced from this state look unnatural, repulsive and constricted.

4. Reluctance to feel.

There are many areas in our bodies where we have been repeatedly sore. It could be physical pain: for example, pain in the knee after falling off a slide, or mental pain felt in the middle of the chest, which once arose as a result of betrayal. When we experience multiple traumas that resonate in different parts of our body, we begin to perceive these parts of the body as vulnerable, damaged. We avoid the occurrence of sensitivity in these areas, because any sensitivity can mean a repetition of the trauma.

Most people are unable to accept their bodies as they are. We think that if we begin to perceive our body in a different way, abstracting from the flooding negativity at the mere thought of it, our body will correct itself and begin to feel differently. Part of this way of thinking makes sense: how we experience our body is largely determined by perception. The dangerous side of this practice, if we do it in isolation from work with an ignored but real reality, is that in this way we exacerbate the suppression of negative emotions, thereby preventing our own release. The accumulated suppression does not disappear anywhere: they just remain languishing in the dungeon of our being, sometimes taking possession of us as an unpleasant subpersonality.

Any body, in whatever state it is now, can be balanced, thereby making your stay in it happy and joyful. The body, in the form in which it exists in the here and now, should always be the starting point.

To connect with your body, try a simple exercise:

Stand up straight. Feel your whole body. Feel how the force of gravity acts on the body.

Find your center of gravity. For most people, it is located slightly below the navel. Make a movement: for example, lift your leg, and if possible, find balance by standing on one leg. When taking an action, pay attention to the impulse that occurs before the action and activates this action. Make this impulse come from your center of gravity. The limbs and torso should be relaxed, including during the performance of the action.

Traffic efficiency is determined by three things:

A) our presence in the body, the feeling of our body entirely at the moment of the action;

B) a sense of space around the body;

C) the willingness to anticipate the result before the action is taken.

Being aware of your body is a great start on the path to relaxation. Conscious feeling is achieved through bodily practices, regressive body-oriented hypnosis, conscious identification of tense areas and their subsequent relaxation, Tai Chi and martial arts, dynamic meditation.

The good news is that our bodies are designed from the start to make movement simple and easy, and use the body painless and trouble-free. In my practice, I find that anyone, whatever their relationship to their body, can develop a more conscious and enjoyable way of being in the body, positioning their body in space, and performing effective, graceful actions.

Lilia Cardenas, integral psychologist, hypnologist, somatic therapist