Spiritual Wisdom Through the Physical Body
The COVID-19 pandemic served as a very important moment in the collective awakening process. Within a matter of days, entire lifestyles were shut down. People lost their routines, their convenient comforts, and their distractions all at the same time. Without those distractions, many individuals became aware of the darker aspects of themselves but had no way of knowing how to work with that energy. Depression and anxiety became more common than ever, and intoxicants like alcohol and marijuana became a primary coping mechanism.
That period of time was a rare opportunity for the body to take the center stage without risk of being muted or ignored. And most people had couldn’t handle it.
It’s important to highlight that the body communicates with us through feelings, sensations, and emotion. These signals communicate important messages, and usually when they are ignored, they will get louder with time. So when something like mandatory “shelter in place” orders take effect, everything that you have been ignoring will suddenly be right in your face.
Big emotions or intense sensations like pain can be really challenging energies to work with in real time. Most people find ways of tampering them down so they don’t become all-consuming. But again, I want to highlight that when we ignore the body’s communication, it will only get louder with time.
I have been exploring this concept over the past several years of my physical therapy practice, given that I often work with individuals suffering from chronic pain and illness. Recently, I’ve been studying the specific effects of attention on pain. While working with my patients, I will coach them through a process of identifying regions of their body that is creating any kind of sensation (i.e. pain, discomfort, tightness). I will ask the patient to focus their attention on this region, and to simply observe what happens as a result.
What I have found is that simply attending to these regions of discomfort in the physical body can alleviate the symptoms, much like shining a flashlight into a dark corner. There’s nothing that needs to be done but listen. Oftentimes, important thoughts, emotions or memories will surface in relation to the physical region of discomfort that provide clues into what the body may be trying to communicate. In other words, the physical sensations of the body are like breadcrumbs that lead to a place without ourselves that we’ve been neglecting.
This is a powerful shift in our understanding of pain. Maybe pain isn’t something that needs to be fixed, but rather treated as an important message. I was working with a patient who grew up as a gymnast, and had excessive mobility through her T10-L1 segment of the spine. As I energetically tuned in with her body, I asked “What do you need to communicate today?”. The message that came through was beautiful and empowering.
Her body said that it’s easy to overly rely on things of familiarity and comfort, much like my patient was depending on this one segment of her spine to provide most of her movements. But over time this can create imbalance and dysfunction. We need to learn how to look at the areas of ourselves that aren’t as familiar, maybe areas that are even stiff or awkward. Because simply by looking at them, they become familiar. We learn how to move them, how to work with them. And in this process, we balance ourselves out.
In the middle of this session, I remember immediately thinking “I have to share this message”. What I realized in that moment was that the physical body can teach us the steps of spiritual growth. By practicing feeling the physical sensations of discomfort, we can learn to feel into the emotional places of discomfort. We can approach challenging aspects of ourselves with less fear, and more curiosity. By simply asking yourself “What do I feel in my body?”, you become the observer of your experience and your truth.
