To change your mind, change your body!
For nearly twenty years now I’ve worked as a counsellor in a variety of settings. I’ve worked in a G.P. surgery for ten years and in three Sure Start Centres with young families for the same amount of time. I’ve worked in a domestic violence forum and as a generic and relationship counsellor in an agency setting. I now work almost exclusively in private practice.
I’ve noticed over the past 8 years or so that so-called mental health issues and problems seem to be on the rise; anxiety, stress, depression, fear, anger, angst and distraction are spiking. I believe there are many reasons for this, though its less the “reason” and more the “solution” that I want to focus on in this post.
Its become apparent to me that for most of us we tend to approach our difficult situations or “stuckness” with our cognitive mind; we try to problem solve, analyse or think our way out of difficult thoughts. I have come to see this as a kind of cul de sac in terms of effectiveness, and hence our future wellbeing and overall health.
I have watched as folk have taken thoughts to thoughts, emotions to emotions, thoughts to emotions and emotions to thoughts, and whilst this has brought some reprieve, clients have returned to my consulting rooms-the “problems” have returned, there has been little lasting change.
What might be missing is the part our body plays in all this.
Sure, many therapists of all modalities will ask “how does this feel” or inquire into a broad range of questions regarding physical pain in the body; yet the locus of evaluation will often default to the thinking mind.
Something’s missing, something crucial.
Perhaps what is missing is a sustained inquiry into how we might explore ways of being and living more fully as embodied humans.
I’m reminded of James Joyce’s quote from Dubliners: “Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body”-a sentence that perhaps sums up our Western malaise: we’re profoundly disembodied.
The Buddhist teacher Reginald Ray writes about how we use the body in modern culture; he calls our bodies a “donkey” which we often punish to satisfy our ego agendas. We do not take into account that our bodies might contain insight, wisdom or an intelligence we can learn from. In his book Touching Enlightenment Ray suggests that we can become more grounded in our sensory experience, often from the inside out (we are so used to experience our senses from the outside in we forget that it works both ways) to encounter the flow and attunement our body can have with the world, instead of the cognitive battle that takes place when we attempt to control the world and get our own way or simply manage things.
With practice we can allow our thoughts and emotions to drop into our body and allow an integration of thoughts-emotions-body. This in turn allows us to be with our experience in a fuller way, owning what we have come to disown and come to reject: the life of the body. If this experience is held cognitively or emotionally only, then it is not lived through, we remain stuck: at best we are given a kind of respite from our difficult thoughts and thinking, but they return.
In her book How Emotions Are Made Lisa Feldman Barrett writes about our “body budget” the available energy we have in out body and how our thoughts and emotions are intimately connected to this energy source. This is a budget we need to replenish via nutrition and rest, but also something that we need to pay attention to; it has a wisdom that we can learn from. There is an invitation here to not only attempt to “resolve” our difficult thoughts and emotions but also to let them “dissolve” in the spaciousness of somatic descent. This is a radical change in our relationship to mind and body.
We might shift our perception here, we might realise we no longer “have” a body but we “are” a body and begin to relate to a more integrated sense of self. Our soma, which we previously positioned as our body, is now experienced as more akin to a vibrational field that resonates deep with us and radiates back and forth in a never-ending feedback loop of connection to the world; we’re vaster and more interconnected than we thought, that thinking would allow.
We might experience a whole range of denied thoughts, repressed emotions and suppressed pain, parts of us we held as numb; we might shake with joy at finding new connections. And then-because this is experienced somatically-the energy here changes; we’ve become more embodied for the first time in our lives since we were little children.
Anxiety, stress, depression, anger, fear can all be held and fed in our minds, our thinking minds traying in vain to resolve what the soma can dissolve if it is lived all the way through.
We might best change our minds by changing the way we relate to our body.
See
Lisa Feldman Barrett https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/1509837523/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528972622&sr=1-1&keywords=lisa+feldman+barrett+how+emotions+are+made
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