Our Fleshly Home

Our Fleshly Home

How do you feel about your body, your physical manifestation? Do like living in your body? Do you appreciate your body? Or are you critical about your body, and unkind to it?

What a big set of questions that is for us.

I sure didn’t like mine. For decades. My list of complaints about my body was long, from it’s appearance to how it felt. I felt betrayed. I felt abused. I didn’t trust it to do what I wanted. I felt a lot of icky stuff. And I did a lot of nasty stuff to my body, too. I obsessed about how my body felt, what was wrong with it, and how much I hated it. Oy.

I remember sitting down in front of a mirror to do an exercise I found in a self-help book. I was to look at my face and stay three things I liked about it. That seemed impossible. What a complex set of emotional responses and feelings I had to that assignment. It took me several tries, but eventually I was able to do it.

Chronic pain, chronic sick, chronic misery. I had the Chronic big time. I blamed and hated my body for it. I am sad to say that I hurt my body intentionally a lot during those years. It never occurred to me that it was trying to communicate.

When I was a kid, just learning to think about stuff deeply, I remember hearing a lot about the impossibility of the mind/body connection. It was too strange! How could they be connected? How could our mind impact our physical well being?

Instantly and deeply, as we are proving scientifically. Researchers are showing us that prenatal programming helps us cope with our own, personal family. Mind-generated stresses  and their related physical conditions like tension headaches and tummy upsets are mind-body concepts we are all pretty familiar with, and accept.

It’s not a long step then to the new research that shows us that each thought, one kind of energy, triggers a physical response, another kind of energy. Series of thoughts produce series of physical responses and we call these emotions, or symptoms, depending on what’s going on in our minds.

Curiously, our language uses these symptoms as idioms. We actually say it. For example, if we are feeling overwhelmed, we may be using the phrase, “Carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders,” and have a lot of tension and discomfort in our trapezius muscles in our upper back, shoulders and neck.

Following this line of thought, what kind of messages might your body be trying to send if you’ve had “the rug pulled out from under you,” or “Can’t see the big picture,” or “put my nose out of joint.”

When we start seeing our body as our ally rather than our nemesis, we start to learn more about ourselves, about what drives us, what scares us, what we might want to consider working on. When we consider our symptoms as messages from our unconscious mind sent to us by way of our bodies, we open a whole world of self-knowledge, and free ourselves to love ourselves.

How have I changed from hating my fleshly home to loving my body?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2015 all rights reserved 02092015

Heal Me

Heal Me

We people are so passionate, even when we think we aren’t all that invested in anything. I love how vehemently we believe our beliefs, even when those beliefs make us suffer. These are ideas we are even willing to die for. Many of us have them, and we tend to think of religion and politics as the two biggies, but there are others to which we are so committed.

Health, diet, and exercise are the trifecta.

Why am I healthy? Why does all I consume nourish me? Why am I alive?

I believed, because of a doctor’s casual comment, that I would be dead by the time I was twenty-three. I was working nights at the time, and waiting for midnight was pretty tense. I actually was scared that I would drop dead before the stroke of midnight.

I didn’t.

You might guess that I was almost obsessed with my health, but I was actually more obsessed with illness. My focus was on sick. I had the chronic. Chronic headaches, chronic back pain, stomach issues, joint issues, vision problems, chronic colds and flu. I could always find some symptom in my body to fret about. So I slept poorly. I was so clenched that I ended up at the Mayo Clinic to find out why I couldn’t move my neck or shoulders.

I was obsessed with my diet. I starved me, I overfed me, I went on health-food kicks that left me feeling weak and feeble. I took dozens of supplements at a high cost every month. I was sure that there was a miracle food I could find that would solve all my problems.

I expected the dentist to bring me terrible pain, and was never disappointed. I was sure I would suffer the day or two after a big workout. I was exhausted and lethargic much of the time, even though I was running all day long. And  I knew that by the time I reached middle age I would be crippled.

I’m not.

Why do I enjoy radiant health? What makes me feel my vitality? Why am I energetic?

By processing through our old emo-stuff, we let go. As we let go, specific parts of our body also unclench allowing our life-force to flow there, bring health back to those parts. Our bodies make symptoms in the places that correspond to our idea. When the middle finger is sore, for example, we are often having a “f*ck you” thing going on that is just out of awareness. I had a very experience-y toe joint when I was refusing to “toe the line.” I know it sounds goofy as all get out, but more and more we are finding that the correlation between mind and body can be very specific.

As I have come to soften my hold on my beliefs, I am willing to let go of ideas that make me suffer, like focusing on being sick. When I focus on what feels great, I can often let go of discomfort. If it is very insistent, I will attend to it, and do what I can to uncover my very personal message. I find that relaxing, breathing deeply, and asking good Creative Questions about my health and wellness will often do as much for me as taking a pill ever did in the past, without nasty side effects.

Because I know my body and how it feels so well, I know when I need to address a topic with healers, and when I can just let it run its course.

How have I changed from believing I am sick to noticing how I feel healthy?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 07292014

Everything You Wanted to Know

Feeling wanted is one of those things that is essential to our well being. Because it is so important, it’s one of the places where we can have a lot of feelings, not only the ones we are aware of, but the others, too, the ones that are roiling beneath the surface.

Those “beneath the surface” feelings are so interesting. When they start swirling around, we can feel like we are going crazy. They bump around inside us, but we don’t have any conscious thoughts, no words, no images. We are having physical sensations that, because we don’t know what they are about, feel awful.

I know I am having those big unconscious things going on when I feel dread, or doomed, or even when I have a hunch. You know, those belly feelings. Turns out that we have a kind of second brain in our guts; they are filled with the same kinds of neurotransmitters we have in our heads, and sending information about our being up to the brain all the time.

Since our belly brain doesn’t have verbal language, we have to learn to read it differently. The best way I know to do that is to sit still for a while to let the information resolve into something my conscious mind can understand.

In the course of living our lives, we get stuff wrong about how the world works. We may learn bad patterns from our childhood adults who got it wrong from their adults, all the way back. Things as awful as legacies of abuse happen this way. But little things, like cutting the ends off the roast, like great-grandma did because she didn’t have a pan that was big enough, will be passed along, too.

Our minds and bodies are connected, regardless of our recognizing those connections. Our bodies are conveying important information about our well being all the time in the only way they can, through sensation. As we become more adept at reading those communications, we can make our corrections in our actions, or choices, or thoughts more quickly and get back to our true paths of happiness.

One of my examples was a headache that happened at the base of my skull. It turned out that I got that headache when I was ignoring my wisdom. When I would attend to my wisdom, the headache would disappear. I could also make it go away with drugs, but then I missed to gift of listening to my wisdom.

When I am having physical discomfort, I find a lot of benefit in “reading” it. Maybe it’s like a horoscope, simply giving me a point of view to consider, but maybe it’s actually knowledgeable, and conveying personal and useful information. After all, I listen to it being hungry, or tired, or thirsty.

The more we learn to read the information we are getting from our bodies, the easier we will find our living. Paying attention to these messages will let us know the work we need to do to make our way smoother every day.

When we experience well being in our social lives, our career, our finances, our physical selves, and our communal selves, we feel great. I want that, so I try all sorts of things to get there. And when one doesn’t work, I will try another. Reading my sensations, and Creative Questions are two of my absolutely all time favorites for their high success rates.

How have I changed from ignoring my whole experience to attending to all my information?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 04062014

I know this is a challenging and controversial topic. It has made a huge difference in my life. All I ask is that you consider it. Oh, and + or share, if you like what you find. What makes you feel great?