Do you navigate your way through life through your head or your heart? Do you use your head in business and your heart at home? Or some other combination? Do you think one has value over the other?
This is what I want you to pay attention to this week. If you are going around and around in your head and only getting more and more frustrated it is time to drop into your heart. This will take some prep time at first. You may need to go on a walk in nature to get back into your body. Or do some yoga. Or dance like a crazy person around your house. Whatever it takes to get out of your head and drop you back INTO your body. You will have a difficult time accessing the wisdom of the heart if you are not in you body.
(Those are whales that you can just make out in the water!)
This in itself is an interesting notion. I remember the first time my teacher, Deb Schubert, talked about the notion of “being in our bodies”. I remember thinking, “How can I not be in my body? I live inside it?” But I have come to realize how much time we live OUTSIDE our bodies. We live in our heads, we live in other people’s business, we live in our addictions and distractions…..but we do not spend a lot of time in our bodies. If we are in our bodies we would have to feel all our feelings. We would have to become aware of what is running in the background of our minds. We might actually become aware of what is running us.
Most of us learned to leave at a very young age. We left our bodies because it was too painful. We left because we were bored. We didn’t have much control over our lives or what was happening to us so we learned to just ‘slip away’. Perhaps it was too painful to feel the fullness of what we were experiencing. As a child perhaps it didn’t make sense. Perhaps it was confusing. We did not know how to process those painful feelings or didn’t know who we could talk to about them so we stuffed them down and in. Often over and over and over. And maybe we even forgot about them.
But feelings have an energy. And like an abcess it only grows over time. It may show up as an ache or a pain or infection. I t may show up as rage. It may show up in not valuing ourselves fully. It may show up as fatigue. “It” can show up in a hundred different ways. What I do know is that it will show up at some point. We will have an opportunity then as an adult to make different choices of how we deal with ‘it’. We can keep stuffing it down. We can keep ourselves in drama, in addiction, in a numbed out place…..but unless we deal with ‘it’ “it” will just keep following us around until we do.
Well, I started out this blog with a little bit different idea then I have ended up writing about. But I guess this is what needed to be shared this week. I will return to this theme and write more next week. This week notice when you start to get uncomfortable in your body or in your emotions and what do you do? Do you tell yourself it is really not a big deal (when it is). Do you change the subject? Do you grab a beer? Do you raid the refrigerator? Do you call a friend to get your mind off it? Notice what you do. Then see if you can just sit with the feeling. Sit with what you feel in your body. Don’t run away from it. Feel it. Let it grow even bigger. Keep breathing into it. It might feel very uncomfortable and you want to run. But try not to. Try to have compassion for yourself as you do this differently. This is a wave of energy and it will pass. Stay connected with your breath and stay inside your body. Allow your mind to just observe.
That is all. Drop into your body. Drop out of the story. Drop into the emotion and ride it like a wave………..see what happens.
Next week I will get back to the original topic!
Love to hear your thoughts and experiences!! Much love, melaniej
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