I sat down meaning to write about the healing experience I just had…but instead, this came out. A sort of preamble. I’ll chronicle and muse over the actual experience later.
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Every day, my body performs thousands of acts simultaneously, most without my conscious knowledge or awareness. I don’t manage the conversion of a carrot to energy. I can’t picture what happens when I have a thought, or an impulse to say something, or to clean up a room, or for that matter, leave it messy. My sense of myself resides largely outside of the biological and electromagnetic processes inside.
My mother once said she thought “she” lived two inches behind her nose. She asked me where I thought “I” lived. My sense is that “I,” or my sense of myself, travels in the neighborhood of my upper torso. I have a sense of a vaguely cylindrical column inside dipping down to just below my belly, thickening and widening through my heart, and extending up into my head, getting thinnest as it approaches my forehead.
And the sex chakras…ahh. Hmm. That feels like a place I go, a place that frequently calls out to me, whose messages, memories and aromas frequently penetrate my consciousness…but not where I live. I live more between my shoulders than between my hips. Come to think of it, even when I’m having sex, “I” travel into my eyes, into the tips of my fingers, the surface of my skin, my heart, my brain…it’s as if everything becomes sex rather than sex becomes everything.
Once again, I undress. I mean, digress.
I know my body in the sense that I experience an ache, a pain or a gas bubble. I feel food passing through my esophagus, feel water going into my stomach. But I rarely know anything about the deep recesses of my body unless something calls out in pain. I can bring my attention and awareness to certain things: Air traveling in and out of my lungs. The squeeze of my organs as I twist into a yoga pose. The beating of my heart. But what of my pancreas? My liver? My gallbladder? These intimate parts of me remain strange.
Isn’t that weird?
If someone reached into my body and handed me my gallbladder, I’d probably freak out. And isn’t it funny that what lives in our body in most intimate contact with the rest of us becomes not just foreign, but violently repulsive once it leaves our body, and not just to others, to ourselves! Snot. Shit. Blood.
Ewwwww.
The only thing I’ve ever expelled from my body that I didn’t want to throw away afterwards was Cainan. I wonder if this primal disgust, which leads to the elaborate separation from our emissions that we elevate to the art of such things as toilets, fuels the fear of our newborns, reflected in the idea that we “bring babies home” as little foreign creatures--from the hospital, as opposed to help liberate them from their home inside us, where we and they have lived in intimate proximity for months and months. No one new gets brought home from elsewhere. They travel a very short distance from inside us, to (ideally) just against us, barely outside.
Okay, I skipped something: Shortly after Cainan came…the placenta. The placenta is an organ the body creates to nourish a baby. I didn’t really know this. I knew placenta existed, but didn’t realize it was an actual organ—I pictured a gelatinous mass somewhat akin to egg drop soup. I figured it would spill out of me and just add to the glorious mess of birth. Imagine my horror when the midwives produced a thick, weighty slab that looked for all the world like a five-pound hunk of liver.
Meat! They pulled a piece of meat out of my vagina. It was traumatic enough squeezing a baby out, but no one prepared me for this large brownish purple thing that I’d apparently been growing inside me for nine months. Did I want to save it, eat it (!), bury it? I told them to take it away, I’d deal with it later.
Without any conscious awareness or intention on my part, I made meat—the only meat one can eat without killing or injuring an animal—with my body.
On some level “we,” that is, some part of the collection of flesh, bones, organs, impulses and consciousness we comprise, “know” what’s going on. Our bodies do, and fail to do, their many things via predictable algorithms, and get repaired accordingly. Only, again in an interior/exterior split, we have an entire class of professionals who study the inner workings of our bodies so that when they break down, like our cars, we can take them in and have them fixed by professionals.
Here’s where I don’t like that split. I remember being about 10 or 12 and visiting the doctor with a sore throat. She took a throat culture, and said to me, “I have a hunch it’s not strep.” It turned out it was strep after all. Her hunch was wrong.
I could have told her that.
More than a hunch, I recognized with a pretty strong degree of certainty the feeling in my body from the last time I had strep throat. But no one asked me what I thought or felt. Even sadder, no one recognized, let alone valued, the wonderful opportunity missed, for a young person to learn to listen to her own body.
When we dismiss the signals of our own body, we lose out on the chance to deepen the relationship of our conscious mind to our body’s mysterious workings. When we do pay attention to these signals, we develop the muscle of our intuition. Like anything else, our intuitive abilities get better with practice.
If most of the mysteries of our bodies and the rest of the universe still remain outside the grasp of our conscious knowledge, doesn’t it make sense that to develop powers of perception beyond our conscious knowledge could help us tune in to some of those greater mysteries?
If not, isn’t it still awfully damn fun to know stuff?
From early in life, my generation in the U.S. was taught to abdicate authority: to teachers, to parents, and to medical professionals. Rarely were any of us asked what we thought or felt, but rather we were rewarded or punished for behaving in ways deemed valuable by adults: being quiet, following orders, making adult lives more convenient and pleasurable. For most young people, the message still comes through loud and clear: What someone else perceives matters more than what I perceive. Many of us know in our bodies how important our own perceptions are, but it’s still hard to shake off years of being told that what you think and feel doesn’t much matter.
No wonder we dismiss the signals of our own body.
Even the most mainstream of science now advocates paying attention to “early signals” of illness and taking preventative measures. Corporations now spring for such measures as on-site massage, health club memberships and flexible hours to help employees reduce stress, and therefore illness, and therefore the company’s insurance bills.
However, we can bring more of our body’s mysterious workings into our conscious awareness. The most obvious route is to study anatomy. Oh, that feeling is my adrenals stressing out, or that stiffness is a large muscle in spasm. Another route is to pay attention to our dreams. The dream world, many believe, is a gateway between unconscious knowledge, such as the knowledge by which our bodies perform their thousands of operations every day, and our conscious awareness. A man struggling to get a diagnosis from western physicians had a dream about crabs scuttling through his body—it turned out he had a form of cancer so far undetected by the doctors.
Sleeping dreams aren’t the only way in. Through meditation in its various forms, we can enter altered states, ask questions, and receive information from our bodies we might not have been able to get any other way.
Medical intuitives, through a combination of practice and intrinsic ability, use their expanded perception to help people assess and treat illness. Some traditional doctors team up with medical intuitives to help their patients get a broader perspective on their healing.
Another route to hearing our body’s messages is through applied kinesiology, known popularly as muscle-testing. In this practice, we can translate into the body’s own knowledge of what’s happening inside us into simple “yes” and “no” answers. A practitioner can ask the body, Are you producing enough cholesterol? Do you lack this enzyme? How about this one? Would this supplement help? How about more leafy greens? And get accurate answers directly from our bodies.
I’ll end here for now. More later.
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