YOUR BODY IS NOT SEPARATE FROM YOU 

The catalyst of bodily symptoms

Most people don’t like it when their body behaves in ways that seem dysfunctional.  People’s relationship to novel or chronic sensations, pains, or symptoms that don’t make sense often throw them into a state of alarm, panic and distress.  The struggle to attempt to change the expression through figuring out and controlling one’s self or environment can become life consuming.  Often the journey can feel exhausting and like it isn’t achieving the desired outcome.  

If you see from the perspective that this entire life experience is about learning, then including the experiences that you have in relationship with your body is no different.  Oftentimes however rather  than viewing from the perspective that life is about learning we attempt to find some solidity or permanence inside of our experience, particularly when it comes to our physical body.  Since most people identity as their body rather than the presence that makes their body come alive many feel intimately threatened by certain bodily sensations or symptoms.  That threat can come in the form of not being able to do things we feel we want to do, loss of certain functions that seem vital to our existence and a general hopeless or powerless perspective towards the body and its expressions.  

First I want to offer the perspective that you are not your body.  Your body is an instrument of you.  It is what you utilize inside of this human experience, but it is not you.  The body also does not function independent of you.  Just like a piano does not play without the pianist, your body does not function without you playing it.  Without you your body does not make a sound, a beep, or a single move.  This is important to fully understand.  See when things go “awry’ in our body we tend to view the body as separate from us and while your body is not you it does nothing without you.  

When we view our body as acting independently from us we disown ourselves in the equation and thus any power we have.  This is why we feel powerless, helpless and try to figure it all out as if it is something other than us.  It is not that we are actually powerless or helpless to our body, but only that we have the perspective that we are somehow separate from our body.  When we see through and dissolve the story of separation we no longer perceive disconnection or otherness.  There is no other thing inside of your body running the show.  It is only you inside your body running the show.  How could there be something or someone else inside of your body?  That one that is you is the one that is playing this instrument of your body.   

EMPOWERED YOU = HAPPY BODY 

You are the Creator

All learning is to help us realize more of ourselves, and the more realized we are of what we are, the more empowered we experience ourselves to be.  To say this another way the more we know ourselves, the more aware we are, and the more resourceful we are in navigating with the forms of life because we see more clearly how we are the creator of them.  The body is one of those forms of life, one in which we are seemingly more intimately connected too.  

In times when we perceive greater separation there is often the feeling that life and our body are against us.  Maybe we see our body’s symptoms, pains and expressions as punishment for something, or as unfair, or as wrong.  However our body is not against us as that would be absolutely impossible.  That would be like saying the piano is against the pianist.  How could that even be so?  Who would be inside the piano to be against anything.  The piano is inherently neutral and so is your body.  What chooses for or against is you.  

What I am pointing to here is a high level of empowerment and knowing yourself.  Not everyone is ready to take full responsibility for knowing themselves and therefore will keep trying to fix and manipulate the form.  The form will change in response to those manipulations, however it may or may not change your experience.  This is why people don’t arrive where they hope to arrive.  They are waiting on the form to inform them.  They are allowing the form to decide for them rather than deciding for themselves.  

The way I see it is that the body’s expressions are catalyst, meaning ways to help us wake up and realize ourselves.  They are learning tools.  They are not meant as punishment, or to harm us, and they are not wrong or unfair.  They are pointers, pointing us to pay attention to ourselves.  To see, choose, act, respond, think, and feel differently then we currently do.  To expand our range of life and possibility and move beyond our current perceptions of limitation.  To ultimately turn our awareness towards ourselves rather than the stuff of life.  To come to know ourselves.  This is how I see all of life.  There is nothing in this entire universe that isn’t moving towards greater self-recognition.  That is the impulse that drives all movement, all energy and all direction.  It drives your entire life even if you don’t yet see it.  

No forms are permanent.  We all know this despite our great efforts to try to make them so.  You are on an epic learning journey with the only destination being greater awareness of self.  The one stable, non-changing element is you.  Not your mind, thoughts, emotions, sensations or ideas about who you are, but your very essence.  Come to know that.  Realize that is all any of this is about.  Find safety in yourself, not in the ever changing world of forms.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado