Saturday, September 23, 2006

57

The lie lives in the body. Long after the rational mind, the thoughts have shifted towards love and acceptance, the remnants of outdated patterns, outdated belief systems still exist within the body and must be excavated because their absence means freedom.

You see, this explains why it doesn’t make sense when we fall into habitual patterns again and again, despite knowing the difference. It’s like if someone asked you: Are you worthy? You’d say yes, and believe at a conscious level that you were speaking truth, but then turn around and eat well beyond satiation for no apparent reason. It is said that awareness is half the battle. It’s not half the battle; it’s the whole damn thing. Because breaking the cycle is nothing more than awareness. You can’t do your way out of it. It is as simple as that: once you’ve identified your lie, you have stripped it of power. Why then, if it has no power, is it still repeated? The habit of disrespecting your body does not mean that you haven’t done healing on your psyche. The act is repeated because the hardwiring remains in the body and that chain, just as your thoughts have, must too be broken.

Determining exactly *where* in your body your lie lives is important then. Feeling, acknowledging where it lives helps us to see the bodily manifestations of the lie, which then brings to light the physical patterns which also must shift in order to break the cycle. Here’s an example: one of my lies is that I’m not smart enough. This plays itself out in my life as confusion, procrastination, and unnecessary apologizing. The part of me that cognitively knew this to be untrue wondered how this could keep coming up when everything about this belief looked and felt false??? So, a couple of weeks ago, after I became aware of first, the lie that I have believed about myself, and second, the ways in which it’s manifested in my life (i.e. confusion, etc.), I began to observe what happened in my body when those sensations came up in my life. I’d be at work, avoiding writing a behemoth document, and as I watched the avoidance, I focused on where I felt the procrastination in my body: Right between my eyes. After several similar experiments, it became apparent that there was a correlation between the wrinkle in between my brow, and feeling stupid. (Note: I had long suspected this wrinkle was environmental – it goes away during every bootcamp only to return after a short while when I return to my routine.) This is important because once the connection is made between the thought pattern and the place in the body that it’s expressed, we can work in the body to eradicate the lie there too.

Again, there is no doing. Which is a relief since it’s low risk / high reward to just watch. So, using my previous example, now when I notice confusion or excessive apologizing, I also focus on my brow. I don’t try to talk myself out of it (there is no negating a lie because it doesn’t really exist – to try and argue with the lie is to acknowledge its sovereignty at some level). Rather, I sort of watch it and the point on my face and see if I’m holding tension in that spot. To hold tension indicates that a part of me is struggling, which again is negative validation. As a result, I’ve noticed the wrinkle is much less pronounced, and I attribute this to the lie slowly starting to break its connection with my body.

It follows then that there are external things like asana / exercise, massage, healthful eating that we can use as tools for breaking the physical realm in which the lie remains. . Every time we choose to respond with truth to an untruth, the lie is weakened. If habits are to change, from dark to light, hurtful to healthy, every part of our being must believe it. To clean the mind and neglect the body is to clean your room by pushing all the dirty clothes into the corner. Clean means clean. Not half ass clean, not I’m sorta committed clean -- *clean*.

Big bang rarely works because the body will try and homogenize. The all-or-nothing approach can be interpreted by the body as attack. So rather than tackling, it’s just small, meaningful choices that help synthesize your healthy intentions with a physical mapping, creating muscle memory in the body, and a truly new way of being.

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