Mind and Body Healing?
I saw an advertisement for a talk. The speaker was addressing how illness has underlying emotional patterns. He titled the talk “Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind”. Then he expounded on all the techniques for using your mind to heal, and even said “You will learn …the purpose of all healing and why complete healing must start with healing the mind” It seems he’s a bit confused! Do we start with the mind, or do we use the body to heal the mind. Chicken or egg?
He seems in the right neighborhood, but I am guessing he’s new to this idea that the body matters, and is capable. Why not actually use your body- instead of systems such as TFT, EFT, EMDR, etc? These methods create structures that take you out of your experience, fostering dependence on magic healing.
You don’t have to trick or dis-empower yourself to heal. Simply by paying attention to sensation, and refusing the impulse to create a hierarchy of experience, you can hone your awareness. Your habits will naturally come up for re-evaluation. Using the newer, better data, you can make new and better choices.
Choice doesn’t have to be conscious. Most choices are actually sub-conscious, and so are the majority of changes in habit. Just by changing a few details, we can affect our perception of our self. What we call normal will shift.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Plato.
Our healing depends on our habits. We can change, and we can heal. And the change that matters is not an arduous mind game, but a playful exploration of our bodily experience. Why not simply stay with our own experience, and cultivate our native physical intelligence?
5 Comments
Great post Dan!
It seems the “mind-body” influx of techniques which are now becoming more mainstream are becoming pigeon holed and put into the world of dualism just as badly as other more westernized views of healing and medicine. The trouble seems to be the moment we put a name to it (ex. mind-body, mindfullness, body based awareness therapies, alternative medicine etc.) it no longer holds the same valence or potency. The number of factors interacting towards “healing” are infinite and change constantly, making it a tricky, yet never boring beast to study and work towards…….. keep on writing! IRene.
Way to keep it simple!
Thanks John! I hope you a re having a great Summer :-))
Hopefully we’ve come full circle now, and the body/mind disconnect can be put to rest. When you see a baby enjoying his or her body’s movements, there is no objectification of the body. The disconnect begins to emerge later, when we learn to value one organ/system (“brain”) over another (“musculature”). In fact, they are different sides to a many-sided coin. Thank goodness, because when we are ill, we can come at an imbalance from different ways. I love all your posts, Dan.
Body and mind do have relations. If you have “peace of mind”, you’ll be healthier, trust me.
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