Mind-Body Awareness

Ever heard of the mind-body connection?

Did you know that our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes can positively or negatively affect the functioning of our body. So our minds can affect how healthy our bodies are!

The relationship with our mind and body is complex. What we do with our physical body (what we eat, how much we exercise, even our posture) can impact our mental state (again positively or negatively).

The mind and body was treated as a whole about 300 years ago by almost every system of medicine in the world.  But then during the 17th century, the Western world started to see the mind and body as two separate entities. In this view, the body was kind of like a machine, complete with replaceable, independent parts, with no connection whatsoever to the mind.

This Western viewpoint has had it’s benefits, there have been advances in surgery, trauma care, pharmaceuticals, and other areas of medicine. Unfortunately though, it also greatly reduced scientific inquiry into humans' emotional and spiritual life, and it has downplayed their ability to heal.

In the 20th century, this view has gradually started to change. Researchers  are now studying the mind-body connection and can scientifically demonstrate complex links between the body and mind. Mindfulness, meditation, yoga and other mind-body practices have all been proven to help.

So rather then seeing them as two separate entity’s we can call it the mind-body.

Try this exercise/visualisation:

Get comfortable either seated or lying down and close your eyes.

I want you to imagine that you’re in your kitchen, you’re standing in front of a counter, and on the counter there is a cutting board, there is a lemon and there is a knife.

Pick up the lemon, walk over to the sink, turn on the water and wash the lemon.

The water is cool, and feel it against your hand, turn the water off, take a paper towel, dry the lemon, really feel the towel in your hand, feel the lemon and then walk back to where the cutting board is lying on the counter.

Put the lemon down on the cutting board, keep one hand on your lemon and pick up the knife in your other hand.

Feel the weight of the knife in your hand, it’s a little heavy because it’s a hefty knife, and now keeping one hand on the lemon take your knife and slice the lemon in half.

When you slice through that lemon, a little bit of lemon juice squirts out and you feel it on your hand, and its cold.

Now you’ve got half of the lemon in one hand, I want you to put that half down on the counter on top of the cutting board and I want you to cut through it again.

A little more lemon juice squirts out and now you’ve got a wedge of lemon. Put your knife down on the counter, take the wedge of lemon and I want you to put it up just under your nose and take a deep breath in.

Now take a bit out of that lemon—did anything happen, did your mouth water or did it pucker up?

If like so many people your mouth watered or you puckered up just thinking about that lemon then you just had a mind-body response.

If just thinking about a lemon can make your mouth pucker, can you imagine how thinking about other things affects our bodies too?

Take a minute to reflect on other ways that your mind changes your body. When you’re about to speak in public, do you get butterflies in your stomach? Or maybe your hands sweat a little bit? Or maybe your knees shake? When you’re stressed out or upset, do you get a stomach ache? Or a headache?

See if you can make more connections like these and notice the mind-body connection.

Think about the fight or flight response. When this happens cortisol gets realised in or bodies. Our bodies get tense and this can result in pain and illness if it is happening all the time. Cortisol also lowers our immune system.

By becoming aware of how stress negatively effects our bodies we can notice when it is happening. We can become the observer and choose how we want to react.

Doing a body scan meditaion can promote body awareness and stress awareness. It helps to release any tension and promotes relaxation. It can teach you how to listen to your body.

Visualisation taken from www.mindful.org