Coming to life
Coming to Life – Learning to inhabit your body
The spiritual path and the path to health are both concepts that probably hold different meanings to all of us. Both are concerned with the relationships to self, to others, to the environment and ultimately to whatever metaphysical belief you hold. Both are also concerned with connection, or the making whole of ourselves. Integrating the mysterious and complex relationships we have with ourselves and others in the world, so we can live fully and wisely and well. It’s a strange paradox isn’t it, that we live in a material body yet our experience of mind is clearly something else.
The practices that help develop effective emotional self regulation, resilience, well-being, and the ability to establish successful relationships and effective personal boundaries, can be the catalyst for healing the spirit as well as the body/mind.
In both cases the path involves a ‘waking up’ or a ‘coming to our senses,’ literally, by learning to pay attention to what we experience. When we practice being present with experience we can in time, begin to see the underlying patterns or programs of behaviour that run our daily interactions. These are mostly conditioned responses, that have roots in early development and influenced by culture, and have a mostly fear based or defensive bias. For example the programme that says, ‘I need to accumulate more stuff to give me status so that I will be valued and therefore feel safe’. Or, ‘I must always please others so that I will be valued and therefore feel safe’. Or I must be right all the time so that people will respect me and therefore value me, so I will feel safe. etc., etc.
But there is a middle ground, something between the ‘I am better than others’ script and the ‘ I am less than others’ script. All that stuff is stories we tell about ourselves, according to how we’ve been programmed (in innocence) through our past experience. So what is the ‘middle ground’? The middle ground is just ‘I am’.
‘I am’, has the script - ‘I feel safe enough to be me, without judgement, just as I am’.
Fundamentally we are all the same, we are all born into the world as pure beings, the original synthesis of mind, body and spirit. Then, as we grow and begin to navigate our way through our own particular interpersonal landscape, we start layering on the protective programmes and conditioning that become our personalities and behaviour patterns. But underneath all of our stories, we all share the same fundamental consciousness we were connected to at our conception.
‘Wholeness is not a vague ideal, but a lived experience. It is a potential, inherent in our human nature. To be whole is to be conscious and in contact with ourselves everywhere in our body, to live within our body. When we inhabit our body, we experience ourselves as an undivided consciousness, a subtle, unified ground of consciousness, pervading our whole body and our environment at the same time’. (Judith Blackstone, Trauma and the unbound body, 2018).
In the Coming to Life workshop we’ll be exploring some of themes that Judith Blackstone is interested in, to inspire our own enquiries into what we feel. For example most of us are familiar with body awareness practices – what the sensations you feel tell you about your body. But what does it feel like to actually ‘inhabit’ the body? This is a subtle change in perceptive quality, and requires a slight shift in consciousness to get to grips with – difficult but fun.