Remain Grounded in your Body
Lately, I’ve been hearing statements like “I’m always looking for healing in my mind, but it feels like I’m leaving my body out of the process” more frequently. It’s clear that the mind’s processing power is increasing day by day, and we’re experiencing excessive activation in the head region, leading to restlessness, headaches, tension, and even an anger that we can’t quite explain.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, we should keep our heads cool and our bellies warm.
This simple explanation summarizes the importance of keeping our life force centered in our bellies and keeping the mind as calm as possible instead of letting it race. This equation is nearly impossible in today’s world because, no matter how much of the brain’s potential we use, our lifestyle encourages us to overwork the head region rather than engage the whole body.
We’re trying to understand life through videos we watch from our seats, lessons we listen to, assumptions we think about, and what our two eyes can see but not feel. We feed our lower body things it doesn’t want, we don’t understand its mechanism, and we essentially numb it. This is often seen in a sedentary lifestyle. It can also happen in physically active people because every movement we make without listening to the body carries the risk of harm.
As modern society’s individuals, almost all of us are “sick” in some way, and we’re searching for our own normal. Especially after the drastic transformations brought about by the pandemic, we’ve started to accept that we need to search for a new normal because we’re experiencing the truth of Freud’s words, “The price of civilization is paid with neurosis,” to the fullest.
The critical question is, how can we stay true to ourselves and continue living from our center in this civilization? Most people with a certain intention or goal find a branch to hold on to in life, but if not, they get lost. With digitalization, the mind’s power has increased even further, and our internal conflict is now reflected in our bodies.
On top of this, we’ve learned some new phrases—or think we have: “surrender,” “accept,” “show yourself compassion,” “cancel all negativity,” and so on. The pressure of trying to apply these phrases we’ve heard has increased, and as we fail to do so, we’ve started to feel more stressed, adding a new layer to our pretense. We pretend to surrender, pretend to accept, pretend to show ourselves compassion...
The toll these pretenses take on the body is quite severe.
This is because a serious internal conflict arises when the idea in the mind, the actions, and the emotional structure deep within don’t align. You may even manage to align your actions with the idea in your mind through effort, but transforming your emotional state will require a different kind of work.
In truth, we don’t fully know what we mean when we say “mind.” We’ve reduced it to the brain, but there’s no concrete evidence that the mind is created in the brain. So, it’s possible to think of the mind as something that encompasses the body, an elevated perception.
In other words, we can bring the mind down to the body and think of the mind and body as a shared space.
By doing this, we can stop alienating our head region and develop the practice of thinking through the body in our actions.
To think with the body, it would be useful to create spaces where the body actively participates in action—meaning, areas where the body takes the lead, rather than movements that have been decided by thought. Therefore, working with improvisation, rather than being confined to specific movements, and creating a dance based on the music, mood, surface, and togetherness of the moment, would be more functional.
Over time, we’ll more seriously understand the importance of returning to our bodies, and starting slowly now would be a valuable investment in the future.
Stay with your body. The body may not be our only reality, but it is a big part of us.