Not everything can be talked out on the mind level. Some things need to be felt, addressed and red through the body and within the body.
When we think about life goals or making our dreams happen, we often think of creating a concrete plan, writing down our goals and executing them, step by step. Although the planning and executing process is super important, you may miss something really powerful- the entire map of information, wisdom and knowledge, that comes from your own body. Our body is constantly whispering to us. As with everything in life, it is our choice, what we do with it- are we listening to its whispers, learning our own body language and using it in our favor? Or we blindly walk through life missing our entire support system towards conscious and fulfilled living.
From body awareness to self awareness
Our body is a gate to understand the outer and inner world
Whether you are aware of it right now, or not, your body is constantly working and adjusting into whatever you are going through and whatever you experience. And vice versa. Whatever we experience, is going to influence our body map and memory it holds.
The way we use our body, the way we are aware of it, will influence the way we communicate with others and about ourselves. It will have impact on decisions we make not only in our daily life, but decisions that influence our entire life direction.
We can say, that our self awareness starts with body awareness and bodily sensations we experience in connection to it:
- discovering how we feel in certain situations
- how our body reacts to triggers
- what makes us comfortable and what not
- what is our readiness to go out of the comfort zone and how it empowers us: how does it really feel on the body level?
This all brings us into a deeper self awareness. We are learning ourselves through embodied sensations we experience, through our posture, movement and nervous system reactions. This opens us up for a self discovery journey of who we are and how we function in this world.
Being aware of your patterns, schemes, attachment styles, the way you feel in your body about others and about certain situations – all of it will show up through bodily sensations and nervous system reactions first, before the mind will form it into opinion. The body will tell you more about yourself than anything else. Just learn to use it!
How body awareness can help you to achieve your goals and dream life?
In the study conducted by Alejandro Lleras and Laura Thomas ( Swinging Into Thought: Directed Movement Guides Insight in Problem Solving. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review) researchers talk about “embodied cognition,” which describes the link between body and mind. We all tend to think that our mind is a separate concept, disconnected from the body. But the research shows that we can consciously use the body and movement awareness to influence how we think and how we solve problems. We can simply use our body to help us think, make conscious decisions, strengthen emotional intelligence-and all of it play crucial role in consciously creating life we dream about:
- Body awareness helps us to consciously reduce stress and empower ourselves. If you ever participated in yoga class where you perform poses which help you to open up the body, you immediately feel the emotional release and more space in your own body. This influences the way you feel but also the way you see stressful or challenging situations: once you open your body physically, you feel more space in your heart/chest area or you simply open up your arms as you would open up the wings. It creates an empowering effect and you see stressful or difficult situations with more possibilities to solve them. Contrary, if you experience stress or difficulties and you start to close up your body physically (contracted movement, closing your arms, your chest, fallen shoulders)- all of it will contribute to experiencing much less light in the situation. Feeling hopeful, empowered, calm and spacious in the body can quickly influence the way we will approach any project we want to develop.
- It is our embodiment telling us what we are afraid of, through sensual experiences in the body. Thus we can learn what can come on the way in our planning as fear or anxiety, influencing our decision making process and we can consciously work to overcome it
- It is through the body that we can learn about our limiting beliefs which give certain sensations in the body and stop us from moving in a certain direction. For years we may not recognize limiting beliefs about money, love, success on the conscious mind level. Yet, if we pay close attention to bodily sensations in triggering situations we encounter, we may learn deeper layers of limiting beliefs through our body reactions.
- It is through the body we can actually feel whether our goals and dreams are ours or we inherited it through family expectations, society, education or culture. You may ask yourself: does it feel comfortable in my body because it belongs to me? Or am I only used to some dreams, goals and ideas because of family/society/culture conditioning? This will show through sensations via our embodiment. Our mind will not tell us immediately what the body may show quite quickly through sensations. If we listen.
We simply can’t discuss the separateness of the body and mind anymore. Embodiment plays a main role in living this earthy life. We see a fast growing area of somatic/body therapies, which focus on healing through the body. The old schools of psychology, where we only talk through our experiences are now complemented by body psychotherapies.
We also now know that traumas are hidden in the body, in the nervous system and they cant be talked through, thus whatever we experienced in life, however we were formed- everything going to be visible through our body. So if we want to create our dream life by setting aligned goals, we better make an effort of knowing ourselves and making body awareness one of our actual life goals.