The Body: A Bridge Between the Outer World and You
As a human being, from a spiritual perspective, you may believe that your life will change when you learn that everything you experience in the outer world is connected to your inner world. But it doesn’t quite work that way. Because accepting this knowledge doesn’t mean you fully understand all that it entails and its vastness. Knowledge, unless brought into the body, can create stress and even guilt for not being able to apply it.
The body is, in fact, an external map of your inner world. Whatever you are experiencing in your emotions, thoughts, and feelings, the body attempts to make it tangible and communicate you to yourself. As Erich Fromm says in his book *Dreams, Fairytales, Myths*, “The body is a symbol of the soul.” With this in mind, you may come to the conclusion that instead of searching for your inner world far away, it makes more sense to look for it in your body, here and now. The symbols are right beside you. You are reading this with it right now.
But have you ever thought about why you overlook all that the body is trying to tell you? This, too, is something that is easy to understand intellectually but difficult to practice. When people are in pain, they are usually focused on alleviating the symptom at that moment. Their primary goal is to neutralize themselves. The ultimate pursuit is to remain in that neutrality, that peace. However, if you follow a suppression-based approach to achieve this, the same problems will continue to grow and suffocate you.
For this reason, it might be necessary to ask, “What is my body trying to tell me?” But even then, the body will ask for more.
It will ask you to remember it throughout the day, throughout your life; to stop treating it as merely a structure that serves the mind. It will ask you to remember that it is the body that hosts the mind.
It will ask you to care for it not only when it is in pain or experiencing problems but at all times.
It will ask you to stop feeding it what it doesn’t need and to understand its real needs and nourish it with those.
It will ask you to accept that there are people it doesn’t want to be around and to take it to spaces where it can truly be itself.
Perhaps it will ask you to rest it, or perhaps it will ask you to move it…
To truly listen to what your body is telling you, you need to build an authentic connection with it.
As long as you try to dominate your body instead of establishing this connection, the battle will never end.
And the body will want to end this battle, but perhaps you won’t hear it…
To hear it, first, remember that you have a body.
The body is the first layer of the problems you face in the outer world.
The body is a bridge between the outer world and “you.” Without walking across the bridge,
you cannot connect
to the world
or to yourself.