Access the radiant currents of your deeper self

Ever called somebody “a stiff”? Or had a friend tell you to “loosen up”? 

And surely you know the sayings “don’t run from your emotions,” “listen to your gut,” and “listen to your heart.”

What do all of these sayings have in common?

They’re all subtle reminders to address the natural human tendency to dissociate the mind from the body.

Now, you might think advice telling you to “integrate your mind & body” is a cheesy phrase most fit for a tagline on the front of a yoga studio or fancy spa where green smoothies are served aplenty.

But the truth is that the human urge to escape the body and find refuge in the mind is something that the philosophers, sages, & shamans have been grappling with for all of human history; and psychologists since at least the mid-20th century.

After all, the body can be a scary place. It's the home of emotions, physical pain, and ultimately death.

So what’s so bad about “losing the body” and living only in the mind? In the extreme, this is where you find:

• Obsessive focus on “more” whether it be money, status, people, or things despite already having more than you’d ever need (Scrooge McDuck, Gordon Gecko of “Wall Street”)

• Demonizing desires that arise from the body (Puritans, the townspeople who hate dancing in Kevin Bacon’s “Footloose”)

• Dedication to living a role defined by society instead of the authentic deepest self (The Narrator / Edward Norton in “Fight Club”, Neo at the start of the “The Matrix”)

• Neurotic fixation on the past or future at the expense of living in the present moment (Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, Adam Sandler’s “Click”)

Now to be fair, the opposite extreme can be just as bad. I am not asserting that anyone should go be broke, give in to all their bodily impulses, abandon society, and never think about the past/future. There’s a reason we also have the saying “they've lost their mind.”

Balance is the key here. You want to integrate the body & mind, living in neither your mind or body alone, but in your full psychophysical self, your “bodymind” if you will. 

The drift away from living here, in the full bodymind, has been particularly present in modern day Western Society, where most people’s work consists of sitting in front of a computer all day and we’re always “plugged in.” 

Take two of the movies I mentioned above (spoiler alerts ahead):

In Fight Club, men meet in secret to beat the shit out of each other, not because they want to inflict pain on others (or themselves), but because the act of fighting forces them into their bodies in a world designed to do anything but. A punch in the face reminds them that they are not “their job” or “their khakis” or any other mental projection, but are in fact psychophysical organisms living in the present; human beings.

The Matrix is less subtle in its messaging. Neo (and all humans) are literally living in a fake world created in their minds. When Neo is “freed” from the matrix, he quite literally “wakes up in his body.” He eventually finds himself wielding what appear to be superpowers in the world of those still stuck in their minds.

The solution, as philosopher Ken Wilber puts it: “is to find that the very processes of life itself generate joy. Meaning is found, not in outward actions or possessions, but in the inner radiant currents of your own being, and in the release and relationship of these currents to the world, to friends, to humanity at large, and to infinity itself.”

Sounds pretty nice, no? So how do we achieve it?

There are four major schools of practice that all deal with this (which I’ll dig into deeper in the future) including Hatha Yoga, Gestalt, Focusing, and Bioenergetic analysis.

But right now, there are a few easy things you can do to get going:

1. Grounding: bring attention to the feeling of your feet on the ground, your hands on your phone / keyboard/ whatever you’re touching, your ass on your chair. 

Don’t just think about the idea of these things, but actually feel them. Recognize that you live in the world through these parts of your body as much as you do your head.

2. Breath tracking: breathe in deeply, focusing on your breath, again with actual feeling attention. As you exhale, try to track the energy from your breath as it radiates out from your abdomen down your legs to your toes, out your arms to your fingers, and up your torso to your head. Start with just one direction at a time. 

Spend a couple minutes just following your breath and seeing if you can feel the energy currents moving in your body. 

3. Deliberate tensing: this is a more advanced practice, but I’ll give the basics for those interested. Most people who get good at tracking their breath will notice it’s harder to feel energy in certain areas of the body. This is due to energy blockages, the result of physically holding in emotions through tensing certain muscles in the body. 

Rather than trying to “relax” the tension, the goal is to deliberately increase the tension so that you can bring it into your conscious awareness and then release it – like a spring-loaded button that has to be pushed in further to release. 

I’ve found that even just a few minutes of any of these can-do wonders for how you feel.