Body As a Path To Knowing the Self
“The material body has a practical reality that is accessible. …However, we must not forget that the innermost part of our being is also trying to help us. It wants to come out to the surface and express itself.” — BKS IYENGAR
our bodies carry traces of emotion over time
As we interact with the world our body gives feedback about what it encounters via emotions. Emotions respond to information about the world instantaneously, a split second before our conscious mind does. Sometimes our emotions know things hours, weeks, or months before our intellectual minds catch up.
Emotions have both cognitive and physical components. Frequently we are aware of the cognitive part, putting language to our feelings, but we often ignore the physical pieces of emotion. These body-held reactions, especially when unseen or untouched by us, build up over time, accruing in layers like plaque on a tooth we fail to brush. Anxieties and Depressions can take hold; body pains and tensions can accumulate. Hearts can harden, guts can suffer, and we can experience a range of ailments.
The innermost part of our being expresses itself through the body. We must listen to what is imprinted in our flesh, muscles, bones, heart, and lungs to know our deepest selves.
We ignore our bodies and get out of sync with them, but when we tap into them they are sites of symbols. They hold information that our conscious minds have long forgotten. Especially when what we carry in the body is unprocessed and unintegrated with our prefrontal cortex – the site of rational thinking — these memories are raw and deep: folds and folds of pink, an inner organ on display, unraveling on a table.
bodies are homes for ego and what lies beyond
Whether or not you believe in a soul, we have some spirit, some essence, some essential thing that is “us” beyond simply a collection of cells. Our spirit comes through a particular form — our body.
This is a beautiful paradox: our collection of cells, the bag we carry around which is our body, is intricately interwoven with this energy of our most essential self, our spirit.
But our mind gets wrapped up into ego defenses — it becomes cynical and negative or arrogant and confused, and splits in all sorts of ways that become distant from who we are at our core. To the extent we get lost in our minds we get separated from our true nature and the truth of our connections.
Our minds also label things, pin a specific truth or valence onto them while the body is full of the paradoxes of being human. In the same breath we can experience aliveness, joy, resilience, energy; and wearying, exhaustion, and illness, and being stuck. In the same moment at the start of a scream: a desire to connect and to rage; to lay bare and to cover; to be seen and to hide.
When we bring ourselves back to the body, when we bring attention to our breath in the here and now; to our skin or habits of movement that we’ve walked with for many years — for example, the particular incongruence of our hips and shoulders (one side of our body one slightly raised versus the other) — we come back to something so wholly vulnerable, without the protection or static or fuzziness of mental defenses. So plainly exposed to the world.
When we bring ourselves back with our attention and tune in, we can feel the energy, the emotion, the buzzing, the beating, the oxygen and blood rushing, our reactions to the world.
Again the BKS Iyengar quote, as mentioned above: “the innermost part of our being is also trying to help us. It wants to come out to the surface and express itself.”
In figuring out what to say and how we feel, it is prudent to listen to the body and let it guide us. Let’s go past the mental clutter, and dive into the body as the home of the unconscious (which is: the things we carry and know, without KNOWING we know). Let’s go where things are hiding and being held, let’s go to the body and let it speak. Let it speak our memories, feelings, and experiences.
What does your Body have to share about who you are now in the morass of living this life?
Do a body scan. Write down the part of the body that is calling to you right now.
A. Describe the sensations or experiences.
B. What is it saying to you?
Think of your body as a site of symbols — a book or text to read and discover about your own deepest self.
Write down the body symbols that are showing up for you now (or have shown up in the past) — whether as marks on the skin, diseases or headaches, or injuries or muscle, scars or sites of pleasure.
Choose one of these areas to explore.
Ask that body part/area/condition what it knows. Not what YOU know it knows, but what IT knows — meaning — bypassing your own prefrontal cortex, your own expectations or assumptions. Put your pen itself in the body itself and let it write itself. Let it write in its own language. Later, you can do the task of reading and interpreting the text.
What did the body say — were you surprised?
What does it say about your deepest fears, griefs, angers, or desires?