How to listen to your body
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How to listen to your body
Actually we can 'hear' our body all the time, we just deliberately choose to ignore the constant communication it is sending our way.
For example:
- Have you ever felt tired at the end of the day and over-ridden your body’s need for sleep?
- Have you ever drunk alcohol and felt hung over afterwards?
- Have you ever eaten something and felt tired / bloated / heavy afterwards?
All we need to do is choose to NOT ignore our bodies and simply tune into their messages.
The first step is ceasing the background noise of life. This requires a stop. It is very difficult to listen to the voice of our body if we are busy and distracted by life and its demands. Taking some time out every day to bring everything to a standstill is essential if we are to develop a deeper relationship with our body.
The next step is establishing a quality of presence that is more natural to our body and closer to our natural way of being and living. This allows more openness and therefore a greater and deeper connection with our body.
The Gentle Breath Meditation® presented by Universal Medicine is a very simple and practical technique that supports this awareness of the quality of our presence through observing the quality of our breath.
By becoming more aware of the quality of our breath and learning that we can consciously choose at any time this quality and therefore the quality of energy in our body, we can support this closer connection with our body.
Re-connecting to the quality of gentleness in our bodies through introducing a gentle way of breathing opens us up to greater body awareness.
The Gentle Breath Meditation® provides a great marker of gentleness in the body, which supports us to detect anything else that is not of the same quality as this gentleness.
For example, becoming aware of how we are breathing and then choosing to breathe gently allows us to observe more clearly and honestly how we are feeling in our body; e.g. do we feel tired, anxious, tense?
Establishing this first marker of gentleness in the body is a great form of medicine in itself and one that we can easily practise daily.
In time, with practice and commitment, we may be able to deepen this quality of gentle-ness in the body to tenderness or even stillness and become even more aware of this quality within.
Our body has an amazing capacity to feel everything that is occurring energetically around us and within us. Stopping and re-connecting allows us to feel, observe and read any situation before us. This lessens any reactions we may have to situations that contribute to stress, tension, altered mood, anxiety, etc in our lives, which may contribute to physical symptoms.
The above steps take time to develop, especially if we have been ignoring or over-riding our body and our awareness of our feelings for some time, but they are one of the cheapest, most effective and most accessible forms of medicine we have!
We all know in everyday life that it is impossible to have an intimate or healthy relationship with anyone if we do not commit to spending regular quality time with them... and the relationship with our body is no different.
It is truly amazing how much more we do know today about the body through science and the advances of modern medicine, but imagine if we added to this the enormous wealth of wisdom that our body holds and is very willing and able to share with us?
If we start listening to what our body is saying, we can have a much deeper relationship with our body that will lead to greater awareness and connection within ourselves that will support us to know how to live in way that fosters true health and wellbeing.
Filed under
Body awareness, Well-being, Meditation, Gentleness, Intimacy
