You Can’t Calm The Mind ... Without Listening To The Body

I was once asked me to imagine what it would feel like to drop in to someone else’s body for a few minutes. What would the experience of being in another persons physicality actually feel like. This may seem incredibly abstract but stay with me for a few more moments!

The reason for the exercise was to be able to recognise that the uniqueness of each and every persons life experience creates a totally unique inner experience and related set of sensations. 

For instance, if the person had injured themselves playing sport at a young age they may feel tightness in their knees or shoulders (dependent on where the injury was) years later. If they had experienced trauma at some stage in their lives this may affect the way they breathe. If they live in a chronic state of stress due to their relationship with life, this will also affect the way their body feels and the tension they carry. It would likely feel very different to the experience of your own body.

You could tell a lot about someone by experiencing the sensations they live with internally day to day. In particular you could tell a lot about a persons mindset by tuning in to what they feel in their body. The reason for this is that our minds are intimately linked to our bodies. There is a bi-directional relationship between body and mind whereby each entity can affect the experience of the other.

If there is fear and anxiety present in the mind this can often translate into tension and a range of unpleasant sensations in the body. Similarly if the mind is at peace and feels balanced, most likely the body will also feel more at ease and may also contain more pleasant sensations. Equally if the body feels tense, strained and in a state of dis-ease, then the mind will be affected accordingly. That’s why often if our bodies feel unwell we can also feel low or unhappy.

The challenge is that most of us have become so accustomed to the way we feel that we don’t even recognise or notice that we are often in a dis-regulated state. The gradual creep of stress and strain that enters our system year after year as we get older often moves in un-noticed. There is no single moment we can point to when we go from feeling care free and at ease (perhaps at some stage in early childhood for some of us), to being stressed, out exhausted adults.

So for that reason we can walk around for years in one of two states. In the first instance we just accept that our inner space doesn’t feel so great, we get used to our shallow breathing and perhaps the mild tension that accompanies us in our chest day to day. We have a sense that this is just the way things are, just a part of what it feels like to be alive we might say.

In the second instance our minds are so busy, hijacked by passing thoughts, worries and distractions that we end up living in our heads and become completely disconnected from our bodies. We don’t really feel much at all. Some people describe this as feeling numb. We become desensitised to whole regions of our inner experience, we don’t truly know what it feels like to be hungry or thirsty, we don’t recognise the sensations of stress in the body. And so the strain and stress just accumulates, which over time can lead us to both physical health issues, as well as a permanently unpleasant feeling in the mind.

For me I can confidently say I was living in scenario two. Before I started my yoga journey I was a long way from balance. My mind was always racing, I was burning the candle at both ends and I had become completely disconnected from my body. I didn’t even realise the level of physical tension I was living with day to day.

Yoga is a practice which gradually helps us to deepen and refine our capacity of awareness. To begin noticing things with a sense of clarity and to become more sensitive to our internal and external environments. This sensitivity allows us to experience more fully and imbalances start to become very apparent as a result.

As I started to connect to my body through practice, the first thing I noticed was the poor state of my posture. As I began to strengthen and awaken to the body through practice, I noticed how I was holding myself and started to rearrange the way I sat, the way I stood, even the way I slept.  

At a deeper level I began to connect to a deep state of tension and anxiety that had been accumulating in my body for many years. That feeling was present within me pretty much all the time to varying degrees. I had never learned how to relax properly or to access states of peace or stillness. I didn’t even realise those states existed! The result was decades of accumulated tension = high blood pressure.

One of the biggest realisations I had was that this, sometimes subtle, and sometimes not so subtle tension, was creating a restless and unpleasant feeling in my mind. The inner experience of the sensations in my body were so challenging that my mind always needed a distraction to get away from that feeling. I also mistook that very physical experience as being my mood or mindset. And of course over time it informed my mood and psychological state quite deeply.

It was one of the main reasons why I became emotionally overwhelmed so easily. There was no space internally to hold any more than was already there and so it had to be released somehow. Often as anger or impatience, sometimes as tears.

So, my point is that, if we wish to start moving towards balance in our lives, which we can described as being in a state of inner pleasantness allowing us to be in a balanced relationship with everything around us, we must develop the capacity to become inwardly aware. The way to do this according to yoga is to practice mindful movement, balancing breath practices and techniques that can take us in to states of unwind and deep rest. This is arrived at through increasing degrees of focus and concentration.

By working through the body we reconnect to spaces where the neural pathways may have weakened, we begin to recognise what we are holding internally and we have a method of self regulation and release that can take us to more peaceful and balanced inner states. Through this connection we create beneficial bhava or feeling states that influence both the body and the mind. Without the ability to shift this inner bhava from states of stress to a space of quiet stability we can’t sit quietly in meditation, but even more importantly, we can’t find balance in our lives.

In this modern age, most of the people I practice with in groups or at the one to one level, are experiencing varying degrees of overwhelm, stress, and inner tension. If that feels like it might be you remember that the most important aspect of the practice is non-judgementally noticing what is being felt internally and focussing on the aspects of the practice that gradually help us to alchemise unpleasant states of experience in to ones that feel more balanced and peaceful.

I’m excited to let you know that I’ll be releasing a free mini-series in the coming weeks that looks specifically at how we can release tension and strain from the body and breath at the end of each day. Stay tuned for more details.