Welcome to Your Brilliant Body!

Are you aware that your body, right now, is deeply and innately intelligent? If you’ve ever heard the saying, the body doesn’t lie, it’s true! Our body can be our most reliable compass to navigate our lives - day to day, moment to moment. Learning to listen and be in our bodies, is a powerful key to lasting wellness.

Right now, as you sit here reading this, your body is giving you feedback through sensations, how well you’re breathing, if you’re hungry, thirsty, relaxed or contracted. Do a little body scan and see what you notice….

Good job.

Simply shifting your focus to your body brings your mind into present time which is where you can make a helpful choice or decision.

If you step back and consider all the layers and dimensions of the body, it’s remarkable: we have a set of senses to navigate and take in our environment with. We have responsive muscles that flex and relax, miles of circulating blood flow that’s pumped by electrical activity in our heart. Then there’s our skeletal system that protects our vital organs and allows these bodies to move, twist, fold, bend, run and so much more.

The body is a living, breathing masterpiece full of wonder and possibility. It’s time we give our body so much more credit, respect, attention and love!!

Your body will tell you what food it likes, how it wants to move, and it will also support you in processing feelings of anxiety, overwhelm, anger or frustration. It’s designed to hold all e-motion which is energy in motion.

When we are going through a challenging time, the body is a great place to start. Note what you’re feeling: tight chest, lump in your throat, heaviness, etc. Instead of trying to ignore what’s going on internally, try pouring your attention into it for a few minutes and see what happens.

Anodea Judith in her book Eastern Body Western Mind says, “In the body, we can think of sensations as the words, feelings as the sentences and emotions as the paragraphs. These building blocks are the primary levels of our experience through which our story unfolds, giving us meaning. Meaning integrates our felt sense of experiencing the world.”

Not only is our body brilliant, it’s also here to be a safe refuge for us if we give it the chance. Little by little, breath by breath, we can deepen our connection to our bodies and experience the precious gift of being at home in our body no matter where we are or what is going on.

-MK

Ying & Yang: A flame requires wax

"I know you can do more, but can you do less?"

In our culture, doing less can be harder than we think because we place so much emphasis and value on “more” - doing more, being more, having more.

When I did yoga training years ago, I learned about the Chinese principle of yin and yang for balance and harmony. My teacher used the example of a candle to explain that Yin is like the wax of the candle and Yang the flame. Yin nourishes and supports the flame (Yang). Yang consumes the wax (Yin) to burn brightly and give light. They both work together and are essential to each other. When the wax is gone so is the flame.

Our vitality works in a similar way. We need balance. We need to both the inhale and the exhale. To take in and to give away. We need to be able to shift from stress to relaxation and from our sympathetic nervous system to our parasympathetic nervous system. If we burn through our wax (Yin) the flame cannot burn; it’s extinguished.

Consider the things in your life that can help you regenerate Yin energy and shift into rest and restore (parasympathetic nervous system). What in your life nourishes and recharges you? What helps you take a deep breath?

What thoughts have you unintentionally or intentionally formed around “doing less?” This can help you see if you have beliefs that may be getting in your way of cultivating rest practices and experiencing more overall balance and vitality.

As many yoga teachers on my path have asked (including myself), "I know you can do more, but can you do less?"

Think Bite-Size to Reduce Anxiety

I was recently listening to one of my favorite teachers, Eckhart Tolle, and he was talking about how our lives are made up of a collection of little things. Every now and then we have big things in life like planning a wedding, starting a new job, running a marathon, or building a house, but even these “big things” are comprised of a set of little things.

For me, anxiety can show up when I’m thinking about the amount of work required to finish a project or goal. It can be easy to fixate on the seemingly big end result and forget that any big thing is simply a bunch of small tasks strung together.

For this it might be helpful to envision a jigsaw puzzle. You have the box to show you the end product (your vision) but what you’re working with are the small pieces. If the puzzle was already put together you’d be robbed of all the satisfaction of finding the right piece and clicking it into place (over and over again)!

So start to work backwards from your goal and see the steps you took to get there. What pieces of the puzzle were crucial? What kind of journey is this goal going to take you on? Learning to enjoy the process and focus on the pieces is a way to let ourselves off the hook and bring a sense of play and creativity into work and personal goals.