Make peace with 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. We gloat about how much we can drink, how late we can party, how hard we can party, how hard we can work, and how badly we can treat ourselves and our body. No wonder we need more food to stop feeling hungry, more drugs to overcome illness, more wine to get drunk, and more TV to stop feeling bored.

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, such as breathing, digesting, maintaining our balance or even regulating our sleep wake cycle. If we needed 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 with 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% of our physical ailments are influenced by the mind and are psychosomatic.

Both our mind and body are expressions of the same consciousness. They cannot and do not function separately. Unless we respect both equally, we can never be integrated individuals. Contrary to what some yogis may believe, I say that the way to spirituality is only through the body.

Make peace with your body. You can then sense what the body needs, even before you become consciously aware of the need. Drop the idea of controlling your body. Do not tie yourself up in knots causing yourself pain when your body cries out to you to stop torturing it. Trust in your body wisdom. Only by deeply understanding your body, with clarity and compassion, would you be able to find a way to go beyond it.