A crucial aspect of our well being is disregarded and overlooked. Obsessed with cognition, we seem to miss what’s right underneath us - our bodies. Funnily enough, we’ve separated the brain and its function, from the body. We’ve forgotten that the brain IS body and that the body is continuous.
Now it’s a curious thing being identified with our minds, with very little consideration of where the mind or thoughts come from or where they reside, though generally it’s thought to be in our head/our brain. I’ve spent the past twenty-five years investigating suffering, dis-ease, bodies, consciousness and movement, and I’ve found that the mind, as we experience it, is actually in the body, or more specifically, an emergent part of it.
From a developmental point of view, our brain’s primary job is to organize movement. Our unique mammalian human bodies have the potential for omnidirectional movement and need a lot of brain to organize it. The primacy put on the brain and the nervous system is the product of dysfunctional dissection of the human body over the last two hundred or so years.
While examining dead bodies, fascia, the tissue that is responsible for our animation, movement, homeostasis and so on, was scraped away and dismissed as having no functional contribution to the human body. The very fabric that connects every single cell and system, and organizes it all into form and function was thought to be inert packing material and was not studied until about fifty years ago. This conception of the human body is what our medical and psychological systems are based upon. Understanding this crucial part of the human body completes the picture of how we work as people. This organizing, omnipresent, biological, communication fabric is your fascia, and it’s more than just connective tissue.
When we look at mind-body connection we always start in the mind, but in doing that we’re disregarding one of our super powers, sensation, an innate aspect of our self-organization. We’re trained to put our attention on our thoughts and perceptions and fall asleep to the language of subtle sensations. Our mind can manipulate, shifting reality to fit our beliefs and experiences in an attempt to keep us safe. But our body is ever present. Always communicating what’s now, through sensation, knowing and instinct.
Our bodies are our allies, but we’ve forgotten that they are whole, inclusive of mind and made of nature. Our bodies have a solution to anxiety, fear, disassociation, but we’ve forgotten how to listen, how to respond, and how to just be.
There is something profound that we can learn from embryology, that we always are and never cease to be whole. Our essence, the life force that animates us, is actually present at the moment we move from an egg and sperm to being a zygote. More than its preceding component parts, we become something that self-organizes, through inherent intelligence and sensing, into the complexity that is you reading these words right now. Our bodies come first, organized and created from our essence, with a mind emerging later to navigate the sense of separateness that accompanies being an individual.
We’ve forgotten who we are and instead using our body’s innate intelligence, we try to use our minds alone to whack-a-mole our problems away, finding that once one has been handled another pops its head up.
Maybe our dis-ease and dysfunction is actually a product of our disconnection from ourselves.
Ourselves as bodies and beings.
Our bodies are alive and made of fascia, from the liquid our cells move though to our bones, skin and everything in between.
Our fascia gives us our felt-sense. When it is fluid, free and functional, we have a corresponding sense of feeling well and like ourselves. When it is tight, bound and restricted our emotional landscape resembles the same, causing distorted perceptions of reality.
So I offer, from my observations and the emerging science, that our soul’s first creative act is the creation of our bodies. That as we inhabit our bodies, a form, we enter into a world of polarity. In this world of polarity, we emerge a mind so that we can then have the experience of being a separate individual, and in making ourselves individual we forget our essence.
But body, unlike mind, is always here, in the present, and always communicating to us our return to harmony.
It’s time to upend and reconsider our conventional approaches to healing and remember not just that we have a body, but that we are a body.
A holistic approach to overall well being must start with our wholeness, and our bodies are the perfect place to reconnect to the continuity of who we are. When we connect to breath, we remember presence, and we come back to now. When we connect to movement we remember why we’re here. When we unwind our patterns of conditioning and assumption we return to our neutral state, begin to break free from our isolation and remember our naturally connected and creative hearts.
Our bodies are our portals to the knowing and inner wisdom that will heal us. With intention and movement we can rediscover who we are at our core and allow that connection to reframe and reorganize the rest of us, back to who and what we’ve always been.
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