Words From The Master - 10 April 2008

Listen to your body

A popular sports gear advertisement reads: If your body tells you to stop, tell your body to shut up.

Most of the time we tell our body to shut up instead of listening to it as we ought to. No other living creature needs an alarm clock to wake up or a sleeping pill to go to bed. We, in fact, pride ourselves on how we abuse our body.

Our body has tremendous intelligence built over 600 million years of evolution as a living being.

A vast majority of our body activity is controlled by the autonomous nervous system that takes care of us with no inputs from us consciously.

We breathe, digest, maintain our balance or even regulate our sleep-wake cycle without any conscious effort on our part. If we had to worry about doing these things we would be tied up in knots.

Our body survives in spite of us, not because of us.

This is the miracle of body intelligence.

Every single cell of our body is gifted with intelligence to carry out its own functions and to coordinate with the functions of related cells. DNA, carriers of our genetic code, are embedded in our memories and emotions, imprinting not merely physical but mental, emotional and psychic characteristics as well.

As our DNA is, so is our perception of the world.

Our mind and body interact very closely and influence each other in amazing ways. Over 85 per cent of our physical ailments are influenced by the mind and are psychosomatic.

The mind has the power to both cause and cure diseases.

In a path-breaking experiment in Japan on allergies it was found that patients reacted even when the plants to which they had no allergies were placed on their skin and they were told that they were allergy-causing substances.

What was more amazing was when the allergy-causing leaves were placed on their skin and the name of a non-allergy-causing plant was mentioned, there was no allergic reaction in the patients.

Make peace with your body. The body and mind are not separate entities. They are fully integrated.

Be aware of your body – for then you can sense what the body needs, even before you consciously become aware of the need.

Your body tells you what it needs – remember this, for you have the intelligence to listen to it.

Drop the idea of controlling your body. Do not tie yourself up in knots – this causes pain to yourself – when your body cries out to you to stop torturing it.

Trust in your body wisdom.

Only through meditation will you ever learn to understand your body, with clarity and compassion.

You will then be able to find a way to go beyond the body.