All quotes are genuine responses from participants in my research. These participants were clients of Co-Active Coaching and their coaches who filled in diaries about their Aha moments just after coaching sessions.
We think that knowing ourselves means understanding what’s going on between our ears, as if that’s even doable. It’s not. It’s laughable.
First, we’re not in control of our thoughts and second, we’ve been stuffing them down into our body since childhood. As infants, none of us felt completely safe or valued or listened to. Growing up, the idea of dwelling on thoughts like this was too painful so we buried them in our body where they transmuted into painful feelings. Eckhart Tolle calls these balls of frozen traumas collectively the ‘pain-body’. I might say your issues are in your tissues!
Keeping your issues locked up in your tissues is a recipe for disastrous living. You think this burial strategy protects you from fear but the opposite is true. You’re letting hidden feelings of fear and terror control you. A much better strategy is to learn to winkle out your feelings rather than deny them and stuff them down. You might find they have something to tell you:
“Instead of immediately going for cover I ask myself what this sensation is trying to tell me” (S.H., client).
It is the very unconscious nature of terror that grants it its power. When we bury emotions, we block the power of our whole energy body to communicate its wisdom to us:
“I got a very clear picture – a realisation that I felt in my heart, my gut, my bones. It came from some deep dark place that I was afraid to visit” (S.M., client)
If we don’t visit the deep dark places, our emotions remain free to create stress and dis-ease in our lives. Whenever life is not going to plan (which is pretty much always), or someone says something we don’t like, or looks at us the wrong way, up pops the pain-body and any sense of ease or relaxation is immediately obliterated. No matter what it looks like from the outside, you are the one who suffers when the pain-body is in charge. Always, only YOU.
The rational antidote is to wake up to the wisdom of your body by cracking open the pain-body to release it. When you commit to staying with your internal feelings, you are rewarded with a visceral, undeniable Aha moment. It resonates throughout you because it is not a thought, not an idea or belief, but the direct experience of an intuitive knowing that is prior to thinking. The lumbering mind is left scrambling to decode the insight only after the event:
“My body senses it, my heart opens and my brain finally registers its meaning”. (S.H., client)
Your mind is a very slippery fish that can persuade you that you’re feeling your feelings when really you’re still taking refuge in your head. You need to get underneath the stories in your head and into your body, into your heart:
“Telling my story rather than getting underneath it. Keeps me safe. Coming from my head more than my heart.” (S.T., client)
Our culture brainwashes us to ‘come from’ our heads. Four hundred years ago we accepted ‘Cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think therefore I am’ – and from then on we in the West were screwed. Descartes made this pronouncement after protracted self-reflection. Ignoring his soma (body) and Spirit, he decided that only his thinking mind was beyond doubt. With that, he reduced all wisdom and compassion to the thoughts in our heads, God help us. This reductionism has not really been challenged…until now.
Recent studies show we don’t just ‘come from the head’. Their findings overturn the orthodoxy that the chemicals involved in transmitting emotions cascade down from the brain into the body (hence ‘neuro’ peptides). These chemicals are not confined to the brain but are scattered throughout all the body’s systems. They are like molecules of emotion whose job it is to decide which thoughts and feelings to allow into consciousness and which to block out of awareness by hiding them away in the body. In this way, the body is the unconscious mind.
These molecules of emotion appear in very high concentrations in the heart and the gut. This has huge implications for understanding and healing the body-mind. Having a ‘gut’ feeling becomes more than a metaphorical description, it’s a source of somatic knowing that sparks ideas:
“Aha! Confirmation of the truth from my gut – ideas popping in my head”. (A.D., client)
We must turn our thinking on its head, pardon the pun, to see the value of connecting to the feelings and sensations in the body and receiving their insights. Instead of allowing yourself to be indoctrinated by a brain-centric worldview, encourage body-based Aha moments to reveal the bigger picture.
You may come to the huge realization that your whole body-mind is an orchestra exchanging information about your emotional states. All you have to do is tune out of your head and into your body, and with the help of Aha moments, become emotionally intelligent. When you have felt and released all your painful emotions, your body will be free and clear to transmit all of its intelligence to you. Embodied insights can dramatically affect everything:
“Goosebumps all over, neck hair standing up, blood rushing through my veins, tears in my eyes and a funny feeling in my tummy”. (M.L., client)
Practices for Revealing Body Intelligence
Start by simply getting to know your own body. Become aware of your body ‘geography’ – how you hold your body, how you walk, sit, move, breathe.
Play with changing normal actions – use your left hand instead of your right, try walking in a different way and at different speeds, sit with a straight spine if your tendency is to hunch up.
Get creative with ideas about new ways to hold and use your body. If you’re sitting at a desk for hours, get up at regular intervals and stretch your body, noting where pain or tensions arise. Note also how pleasurable it is to feel that you are in your body, stretching it, using it, enjoying the strength of it.