Clearing Your Bodily Awareness

You have a doctor inside you. For a great deal of health issues, your body is capable of telling you what is wrong and how to correct it. It is only capable of doing this however when the things that cloud your bodily awareness, your bodily perception can communicate to you through symptoms and sensations.

So what clouds your ability to “hear” the messages your body is sending you? Firstly, it is your lack of listening. In a prior post, I discussed how in North America, overwhelmingly we don’t use internal cues to stop eating. So, the first step is starting to listen and using internal cues, paying close attention to how you feel.

Unfortunately, most people have behaviors and ingest toxins that don’t allow them to sense what is going on in their bodies. A whole book could be written on this topic, especially how various cultures have tackled this subject. There is a deep wisdom in the body that is open to all of us to reclaim.

Alcohol, drugs, sugar, lack of proper sleep and rest, abnormal exposure to light, emotional stress, dehydration and even abnormal preoccupation with the past or some future event are just some of the factors that cloud your perception of what is going on in your body.

You task is to avoid getting bogged down in the details of science and learn to listen to the wisdom of the body. The Taoists have remarkable exercises where you actually work on each of the organs of your body and through work can learn to understand the signals of your organs. When it comes to longevity and learning how to listen to your body, the Taoist writings on health are by far the most advanced..

But you don’t need to be a Taoist master to learn to start listening. Just start listening. Pay attention to your body, your posture, how you feel, where you feel it, and what your body is telling you. Acknowledge that your body has an intelligence of its own, an amazing ability to adapt and try to achieve balance. It’s a miraculous creation. Most of what we complain about is an adaptation to some imbalance. In that knowledge, you can realize what your body wants for optimal health, balance. Now go and listen.

Image above by Benjamin Balázs