The Body and Becoming

“To go beyond our current level of consciousness, the body has to be ready to assume the new role that awaits it”

Carl Gustav Jung

Is the body conscious? Or rather, can the body reach another state or level of consciousness beyond what we’re aware of?

With our minds and feelings, we live one thing at a time. Even though, mentally, we can jump from the present to the past to the future in fractions of a se- cond, nonetheless when we’re thinking in the present, we cannot simultaneously be thinking about the past.

When experiencing an emotion of sadness, we can’t at the same time feel happy or satisfied. We may be able to jump almost instantly from one to the other, but each is experienced separately, and in sequence.

The body, though, takes in and organises information from all five senses, from our ever-evolving consciousness and all our mental activity, in a single space that stays always present to itself.

Sometimes we’re not aware of what we’re experiencing, or what we need. When outside pressures build up, for example, we can get confused, like mixing up anxiety with hunger, depression with tiredness, or wanting sex to escape from internal stress, etc.

If we’ve also experienced childhood trauma, our internal stress levels will already be high, whether we’re aware of it or not, making it much harder to make good decisions about what we really need.

Our body takes care in minute detail, down to the cellular and atomic level, of every aspect of our physical, mental and spiritual experience, keeping us in biological balance, whether we’re aware of it or not.

When you talk about something that’s happened to you, something that’s left an impact, have you ever stopped to wonder “where is that experience stored in my body?”

Let’s say your boss treats you badly. Even if you didn’t let it get to you too much, do you know where that unpleasant and undermining exchange now sits within your body?

This may seem like a useless exercise, especially since we’re so used to run our entire lives at a purely mental level. We’re still only just emerging from a time when any kind of painful feeling or experience was dealt with by telling ourselves, and each other, just to “buck up and get on with it” or that “time heals all things”, as if by magic everything would sort itself out, and we could just go on living more or less as if nothing had ever happened.

At last, though, research and neuroscience have shown that the bodyactually registers everything, that nothing escapes, and that the impact of our experience is actually recorded in a physical sense within us.

In this way, we can access these feelings whenever we wish to (for example, when we want to remember something) or, as in the case of healing from trauma, when we are finally ready to address and deal with it, and to integrate our traumatic experiences into our consciousness, in order to overcome their negative impact.

The field of PNEI (psycho-neuro-endo- crine-immunology) explains how the brain influences the body as much as the body regulates the brain. The either-or paradigm that says our mind, intellect and rationality is superior or more valid than the intelligence of our body starts to break down.

Take the joints, for example. If you approach it mentally, some of us might think of the joints as weak points which divide and separate the bones. From a somatic perspective, the joints are of course essential to our bio-mechanics.

Unfortunately most Western therapeutic approaches build from the Western medical view that we are made up of separate, not interconnected parts. They don’t even recognise the role played by sensory organs such as the fascia, the protective layer made up of over 100 million receptors, covering our whole body, that are in constant communication, to help us feel connected and whole within ourselves.

What price do we pay for not feeling? Alexithymia or emotional blindness (from the Greek “a” meaning lacking, “lexis” words or expression and ”thy- mos” emotion) is the incapacity to recognise and express one’s own feeling state, and to distinguish between different emotions and bodily feelings.

High levels of alexithymia are a recognised risk factor for various disorders, and are associated with conditions such as anxiety, anorexia, bulimia and depression, as well as physical conditions like coronary heart disease, hypertension, and gastrointestinal disorders, (Porcelli P., Bagby R.M., Taylor G.J., De Carne M., Leandro G., Todarello O. 2003) to mention just a few.

What would happen if we could sense more deeply the feelings within our bodies? What forms, colours, scents and textures would we observe?

And if we could map out our emotive state, and the unconscious behaviours they drive us to adopt, what images would we use? The physiological state of each individual organ matches our perception of ourselves, others, and the wider world, as we respond and react internally, through adaptation and maladaptation of our environment.

Imagine an artistic representation of your own self, created in the moment as you observe and feel into the way your body holds your whole experience.

Your physicality, your consciousness, your pain, the unspoken words, the desires you’ve yet to realise.

Imagine for a moment if you could listen without judgement to your own body, and walk in that space between what is, and what could be, discovering new potential ready to emerge, inviting us to become co-creators of our own destiny.

Let yourself go, just for a moment, and imagine yourself lying down on a canvas big enough for your whole body, with a soft feeling in your heart, a feeling of belonging to yourself, to the canvas, to the warm light flooding the space. There are colours of all shades, and all kinds of materials and textures, for you to fill up the outline of your body, traced onto the canvas.

You’re there with your body to get to know each other better, to celebrate every part of what you’ve lived to date, and to start out afresh, with a deeper awareness, on the unique one-off journey of this life that you’ve chosen to take together.

Body Mapping brings the sacredness of an ancient practice, the spontaneity of a child’s play, and the freedom of expression of an artistic inquiry.

Each body map is totally uniquely traced and individual, speaking to each person in a language that’s both profound and intimate, and totally your own.

With a warm invitation to discover Body Tracing for yourself, HERE

Contact: Caterina directly on +44 7969347351 +39 3331624218.

 This article was first published by Esistomagazine.it