caring for yourself

In my previous article, I touched upon becoming friends with our body by learning to listen to what it has to say to us. In this article, I want to dive a little bit deeper about learning to connect with our body to cultivate the friendship we can have by communicating with it consciously.

Wanna rest your eyes? Listen to this via the MySoulrenity + Beyond podcast!

If we have learned to listen to the body on a basic level, it gets easier to hear what it has to say, and if it’s easier to hear what it has to say, then we can start discovering how it feels no matter where we are or what we’re doing.

On many levels, this includes how our environmental experiences affect our connection with our body, which in turn can affect our mental and emotional states.

Let’s begin

I’m sure you’ve read and heard about how certain colors can affect our mood. Or how certain aesthetics can create a safe surrounding for us to explore our emotions. Maybe you’ve read about Feng Shui and what it can do for a person’s mood or lifestyle.

Now imagine what you could do for your body if you applied color visualization to certain parts of the body.

Our bodies are just as easily influenced by these things as our minds or emotional state. Every part of us work together to create the whole system so that it all works in tandem. Without the body…we’d be only a sum of our parts.

Do you remember the last time you went to a concert and the pounding of the bass reverberated through your entire body? How about the last time you got stuck in traffic and the stress caused your senses to be overcome until you had an emotional outburst? What about the time you were at an incredible height and suddenly felt the gravity, which in turn made you react out of fear?

Some of these are very simple examples. But they still demonstrate how easy it is for our bodies to pick up stimuli. Then we transfer it to the rest of our being and then express itself through our experiences.

It’s very easy for us to forget…

That our senses and perception are still very much influenced by how our body feels about our surrounding environment. Like some kind of filter, even our body size, height, or width can influence how we see or perceive reality around us. If you are living from a place where you don’t really listen to what the body has to say about reality, it will be easier to fall into a reaction that doesn’t benefit you in the situation. This is very tough for most people to discover about themselves. Often we will toss our bodily reactions into a denial bin or each sensation controls our life to serious extents.

It’s very difficult….

To balance our body with other aspects, but it can be done.

We have to sit with the realization that our body itself is coming from an organic place. A place that interacts with our surroundings. Every second of the day even in ways we might not notice. Our bodies can create a conscious awareness to the connection we have with ourselves on a physical plane.

One of my favorite books that covers this topic in depth is by the very talented Healer and Shaman, Mary Mueller Shutan, titled ‘The Body Deva: Working with the Spiritual Consciousness of the Body’.

This book covers the connection one can have with their body and how to connect with the Deva, or spiritual avatar, of their own body consciousness. Through the practice of getting to know your body in visualizations or representations of your own body Deva. Using this methodology, one can not only reconnect but create a relationship with every part of their body. (Right down to the pinkie toes!)

Body scans

Simple conversations along with easy body scans taught within this book, can teach us what kind of pain our body is in and why. It houses many exercises including one that by using different types of color visualizations surrounding different body parts and more!

For example: In one of my legs I suffer from pain due to an invasive surgery I had when I was 19 because of a near fatal car accident. Using Mary’s work, I was able to visualize a color on this specific limb. This appeared to me as a black and cloudy swirl. Connecting with my Deva during meditation, I was able to have a conversation and visualize what my body was trying to tell me about this specific limb. An intuitive feeling came forward.

Deeper introspection revealed to me that my leg had felt disconnected to my body. This has been ever since my accident due to poor physical therapy. And denial of the pain from the trauma. It forced me to finally take a look at myself and the poor decisions I was making for my leg and cutting it off from healing.

…and healed you may feel

Not only did the meditation bring attention to a part of my body but it made me realize how easily I can ignore my limbs. Now I can find the time in my daily life to converse with parts of my body. Parts that would otherwise be ignored or unanswered because I let my environment dictate my perception of how I felt or ignored myself.

By framing my experience I was able to then model my environmental reactions by creating the time to massage it at least once a week. This is what my leg wanted all along!

Is this kind of practice easy? Not at first, but when you learn to start trusting yourself and what your body says—you cultivate a relationship of deeper levels of awareness. This is how I learned to nourish my own body.

Are you ready to nourish yous?