There Is No Path To Peace. Peace Is The Path

(Mahatma Gandhi)

January 2012 marked my 10-year yoga anniversary.

Through the practice I have discovered Life. While my body is always present, my mind is often elsewhere, caught in projects, worries and analysis. Yoga and meditation have given me the tools necessary to keep my mind in the Now. Life is only available in the present moment. The past is already gone; the future has not yet arrived.

When we establish ourselves in the present moment we are able to get in touch with the healing and nourishing elements that are always within us and around us.

One month into a new year, as we progress on a renewed path, we often have ideals we think we should be living up to. We put expectations on ourselves to improve in some way.

Difficulty is inevitable in human life, but what causes misery is not the difficulty but our assumption that we are meant to have everlasting happiness. When life becomes difficult or painful, we feel that something has gone wrong.

We pressure ourselves with the idea that if we could only do the right thing we would have everlasting happiness. All this brings is stress and anguish against a self-perceived imperfection.

Science explains how the stress hormones produced by our mental state can affect our weight as much as the amount of calories we consume. I am willing to bet that we all know someone who has either gained weight or not lost weight while restricting calories on a diet.

We are souls with a body, though often we treat ourselves as a body with a soul.

Yoga has taught me that a pose can’t heal me as much as the degree of love I feel while in it. If I can’t feel free with who I am right now, I will be nothing more but a skilled practitioner of breath and alignment. I may learn to reduce my stress but overly focusing on the body will never satisfy the soul.

The path informs the destination. We will never be satisfied with achieving our goals if we don’t learn to be satisfied right now.

A disease is no longer dis-ease if we find ease with it.

Each yoga practice ends with the pose Savasana, in which we are asked to let go completely and allow everything to be as it is.

Can we find a hint of savasana in every pose no matter how challenging? Can we do the same when we are no longer on the yoga mat?

Living Our Dharma in 2012

Here we are. 2012. Great. What’s for dessert?

We all live our days wanting something delightful. We might choose healthier or less healthy pleasures, but the desire is the same: to fill the need for delight.

We’re always thinking about the next best thing; hence the tradition of New Year resolutions.

What were this year’s resolutions? Changing the shape of our body, or improving our health or lifestyle?

If that’s the goal, we’re in trouble! Statistics tell us that we stand very little chance of fulfilling our resolutions.

It seems there is never going to be a number on our scales or in our bank account that will meet our desires. We tell ourselves that we know this, but do we really? “If I can just achieve this goal, THEN I can be happy.” How misleading.

No external goal will resolve the deepest question nagging us all; “Who am I meant to be?”

Each of us is unique with a role to contribute in this lifetime. The extent to which we fulfill our purpose is the extent of our happiness.

Regardless of money, or body weight, if we have not found and begun to live for and commit to the desire of our personal purpose, nothing will satisfy us.

For those of us who practice yoga (or engage in other mindfulness practices,) we have to take care not to lay the same expectations on our practice. No arm balance or backbend will meet such expectations. While yoga will aid in calming the restlessness, it is a tool, not the answer.

Some of us are dealing with professions or obligations that discourage us. We wish we could pour our energy into something we truly love and believe in. This sense of dissatisfaction is our Dharma calling: a desire for our purpose.

Purpose is not about profession. Purpose shines through all aspects of life. It shines through relationships to self and others as well as to each living moment.

When we seek the means to fulfill our purpose and have a healthy relationship to this purpose, we have a natural urge to be healthy in order to reach our fullest potential. Our resolutions can serve as tools but they are not the destination.

Let us seek pleasure, intimacy, kindness, and warmth. The soul longs for expression.

If you are focused on becoming healthier, ask yourself why you are doing this. We all have desires, but some are more helpful than others. Be clear on your purpose. What is your body here to serve you in doing this lifetime? Reflect: look inward and ask questions.

If You’d Like to Gain Weight, Go On A Diet

Just prior to Thanksgiving, many of the health and wellness blogs and articles shared the common focus of helping people control their appetite during the holiday.

I wondered if someone were to follow any of these suggestions to help curb their appetite, would they feel empowered?

The modern mind has become a master at transforming self-improvement into self-blame. We get trapped into feeling stuck rather than empowered. All these articles seemed to speak to our fears and shame rather than our strengths.

We live in a dieting culture where diets are beginning to create more problems than solutions.

Almost every study shows that 99% of humans who lose weight on a diet gain it back within a year or two. Why do people diet for years on end even though it isn't working?

Chronic dieting (i.e. endlessly dieting 'on and off') has become a seductively destructive epidemic. For most, it enhances self-judgment and unworthiness. In our culture it has become totally acceptable (and somewhat expected) to diet.

Well, here are six reasons why ongoing dieting doesn’t work:

1)  The body’s response to food restriction is to slow down metabolism. This is a natural survival response to prevent death by starvation. If the body senses there is a famine, it will slow down caloric burning to sustain itself on less for longer. We can actually gain weight or not lose weight when eating fewer calories.

2)  Dieting puts the body into a ‘stress response’. Mental cycles of self-judgment and self-hate increase our stress hormones, cortisol and insulin. “I’m no good, I’m too fat” is a physiology that pulls away from our digestive power, hormonally negating muscle building and fat burning.

3)  Most dieters will be a little fat deficient and protein deficient. When we are missing essential fatty acids and essential amino acids, our thermal efficiency is slowed down.

4)  Many dieters cannot find pleasure in their food. Part of our digestive power is fired in the cephalic phase in which the brain senses pleasure through the senses. When we are not getting the pleasure, metabolism is weakened. This is also why eating too fast or when distracted weakens digestion, as the senses are not involved.

5)  Many dieters skip meals, eating less in the morning and more at night. When we skip breakfast and eat a late lunch, we lose out on the heightened hours of digestion. 12-1:30pm and the hours prior to that are the strongest caloric burning hours.

6)  If we have less food, we can take in oxygen less efficiently because the body is trying to slow down its systems. Oxygen enhances the proficiency of our bodily functions.

Calories have little power over the power of the mind.

While diets can be useful and healing short term, a chronic dieting mentality is anti- weight-loss. If it worked, we wouldn't need to continuously diet!

There are a tremendous number of health issues that are a direct result of chronic dieting. These include fatigue, poor digestion, low mood, immune problems, headaches, binge eating, skin, constipation, and more. These conditions are often misdiagnosed as the problem rather than a symptom of nutrient deficiency.

When we are stressed about eating, our body is incapable of properly digesting.

To change our patterns we need to change our thoughts. We need to learn how to relax into the process. While there are many paths of personal growth and evolution, I can speak to the path of yoga, as it has been a pillar in my own personal development.

The path of yoga aids in improving health and weight for various reasons such as caloric burning, cleansing, and mental stress reduction that soothes our emotional drive for overeating. More than that, yoga works because it changes the stress physiology, which prevents us from losing weight no matter how little we eat.

What are your methods for changing your stress physiology?

Related Articles:
The 100 Year Diet Cycle
Are We Overestimating Overeating?
Understanding Macronutrient Balance

What We Judge We Can't Digest

Our number one goal is to become relaxed eaters.

Recently I sat down to eat lunch; a home-made stir-fry of homegrown kale and organic grass-fed beef. Sounds pretty healthy. And yet as I was about to take a bite, a thought popped into my head about the “pesticide ridden tomato” I mixed into the stir-fry. A tomato I bought last minute at a local 7/11 just for the convenience. Was I really judging this beautiful meal as unhealthy due to a tomato?! I put down my fork, took a breath and took a long look at my food. The kale began to look greener, the smell of the beef got juicier. My digestive system had turned on. It looked amazing and I was once again excited to eat.

Our digestive efficiency is dependent on our nervous system which in turn is dependent on our mental state. When our body is under stress it goes into a state of “fight or flight” which physiologically halts our digestive efficiency. The same switch in the brain which turns on stress, turns off digestion. Digestion is at its strongest calorie-burning power when we are in a relaxed state which is when we breathe deeply and feel okay with ourselves and the foods that we choose.

We could be eating the healthiest of meals, but if we feel any degree of stress, anxiety, fear, or judgment, we are unable to assimilate its nutrients. Hence, we decrease the nutritional value of the meal because our metabolism is impaired.

It is basic science and yet we are never taught this. Everything to do with advertized diets has to do with food and not with ourselves. Quite simply, this type of information can’t be packaged and sold.

Stress will decrease the blood flow to the gut needed for digestion, and will prevent the production of important growth and thyroid hormones. These hormones boost metabolic rate and are important for growth and healing, building muscle and burning fat. Stress will cause the excretion of vitamins and minerals. When we are under chronic low-level stress on a daily basis, we decrease our oxygen intake.
Stress will increase inflammation, change the chemistry of our cells, and alter the physiology of the digestive system. Inflammation is a major contributor to weight gain, blood sugar imbalance and diabetes.

If we are multi-tasking or rushing our meals,  we are eating under stress. If we say to ourselves, “I’m too fat, I shouldn’t be eating this, food is bad; this will make me unlovable,” these are all stresses.

Even if we eat less food, we are still chemically training the body to store fat because that is the body’s natural response to stress.

Our ongoing process is to recognize our mental state when engaging in activities of self-nourishment. Not just with food, but also in conversations, our exercise (movement practices), or anything else we do to nourish ourselves. 

We can create a powerful difference if we learn to modulate and influence our state of mind and heart.

Overeating? It's NOT Lack of Willpower! It's Physiological...

"I'm glad you're overeating," I told my friend, who was complaining she has no willpower around food and consequently is overweight.
"How do you feel right after you eat?" I asked.
"Guilty," she answered.
"And before that?"
"Calm."

Exactly!

Overeating, or any other symptom or unwanted behavior always has a beautiful reason for its presence. In my friend's case, her overeating calms her, fills her, and medicates her. While it may have negative consequences in the immediacy, it is relaxing. When we are overly stressed we have to do something overly relaxing. We each have tools to bring us down.

Our nervous system is structured in a way that we can respond to each moment in a way that contributes towards either stress or relaxation. Its either/or.

If we are concerned with weight issues, impaired digestion or matters of immunity, we often examine the body and forget to take into account the effect of life itself on health, weight and metabolism.

When we are affected by stress, we contract both physically and emotionally. When our emotional energy is stuck, metabolism is stuck. We can continue to try to battle the symptom, but unless we learn ways to increase the relaxation response and care for ourselves within times of stress (career, relationship, finances,) symptoms such as overeating will most likely prevail.

Overeating is not the problem. It is the symptom.

Overeating has little to do with willpower!
Why is it that we find ourselves eating more than we think we should or make unhealthy choices despite "knowing better?" How is it that we eat a meal and hardly remember what it tasted like?

Stress desensitizes the pleasure response in the body. When we experience stress, the body is programmed to go into fight or flight, making it hyper aware of its own pain as a survival mechanism. Decreasing sensitivity to pleasure will increase sensitivity to pain. (This is why deep relaxed breathing reduces awareness to pain.)

Without pleasure we can't physiologically enjoy the foods that we eat. Stress shuts down digestion so the neural connection between the gut and brain is severed. Without this connection, the brain can't radiate pleasure to the gut and the gut can't signal fullness to the brain. When we feel full in the belly but the mouth still wants more, the connection between gut and brain is impaired.

When calm, we are able to connect to the parts of the brain that govern wisdom and reasoning around food and digestion. Under stress this part of the brain containing the knowledge of what foods make us feel good, what makes us bloated, what energizes us, or what gives us a headache is neurologically isolated. When the survival part of the brain is activated and the connection between gut and brain is impaired, it is neurologically harder for us to listen to the wisdom around which food types or quantities make us feel more guilt than pleasure in the long run.

Pleasure helps regulate our appetite. When the body feels pleasure, the brain is able to communicate to the gut the right amount of food that will maintain pleasure. When under stress we can't feel the pleasure so we eat more in search of it.

Overeating is not about willpower. We simply don't have the proper physiology to register what we're eating and how much. When stressed, the body requires more food to taste the sense of pleasure.

Stress is not bad: it is natural. Often it keeps us on our growing edge. Detrimental stress is the self-induced kind created either by our thoughts or by holding on to stress that is no longer prevalent.

We are naturally self-correcting beings and we can physiologically produce powerful healing in the body by learning to modulate our frame of mind and heart.

As a start, make sure to improve your conditions around meals. Fast eating activates stress, multi-tasking when eating causes stress, negative self-talk or judging your food ("this food is bad for me") equals stress and equating food as fat or viewing it as the enemy is ultimately stressful eating.

Making our meals more relaxed can be as simple as adding 5 minutes to breakfast, taking 5 breaths before and after each meal or turning off the computer at lunch.

Fast eating is a reflection of fast living, i.e. living in a way that is not always self-nourishing. When we slow down, we connect to feeling. The switch in our brain that turns on relaxation turns on digestion and body wisdom. We can be eating healthy foods, but if we eat them in stress or judgment, we change our metabolic chemistry.

Where else do we move too fast? Usually we are too fast in our interaction with others- a true sign of not being present.

How Being Healthy Can Be So Unhealthy

Modern culture has taught us well to obsess about our looks. We knowingly apply toxic chemical products to our hair and skin for the sake of appearance and deal more and more with eating disorders.

Whether consciously or not, we often sacrifice our physical or emotional health for the sake of our appearance.

While it is fun and important to feel beautiful in our bodies, we often are driven to do so by stress rather than self-love. This is an inevitable result of a culture that has little focus or education around how to nourish the spirit.

Hyper concentration on the finite body is based on our fears. We fear that we are not good enough or attractive enough. We fear that we won’t be liked or accepted.

There is no way out of this obsessive suffering without shifting our attention internally from finite to the eternal-self, the love that exists in us all. Self-awareness leads to non-violence, both mental and physical, against ourselves and others.

The Journey Will Inform the Destination.
However the journey looks is the way the destination will look. If we hate ourselves into exercise and diet, it will end with more hatred. Even if we lose the weight, we will either gain it back or keep hating ourselves fearing its return. The Biggest Loser educates us how to shame ourselves into weight loss. While I am in awe of the strength that each participant emanates, I suspect that unless each found further guidance in self-love, he or she will live forever in shame of their bodies regardless of the number on the scale.

There are two types of people who heal themselves of their health challenges: Those who do it from love and those who do it from fear.

If we are working on self-acceptance, why are we spending all our energy on external results? This leaves little room for focus on the process of self-acceptance.

In my early 20’s I discovered the practices of meditation and yoga that revealed to me a whole new world of mysticism and self-revelation. Up until that time I had been very self-conscious of my body. The movement of my long limbs always felt very awkward and somewhat lifeless. The more time I spent exploring this internal world, the more I started to connect to my body as a sacred space. As a container for my spirit, there was much to honor and be grateful for.

Unknowingly I started to walk differently, I started to be noticed more, and I felt comfortable being seen. By connecting to something greater within myself and in seeing it in others, I felt worthy to take up space in the world. My muscles naturally started to tone and my stride became more confident.

I realized that the state of my body had everything to do with my mind. The subconscious need to “blend in” is what had prevented my body from shifting its shape.

Weight or any other health challenge is the way we express our deeper challenges in the world. In our healing process we are learning lessons that can be very powerful to our growth. These very challenges are the signs pointing us towards our personal development.

Learning to heal involves learning to love ourselves into healing.

The Body Knows Best - Respecting My Symptoms

Six or Seven years ago I was diagnosed with severe digestive complications and was told I would have to be on medication for the rest of my life. Within a year I was off my medication and besides a few minor episodes over the years, I have been free of symptoms ever since.

Nutrition works!

But nutrition does not represent the entire picture. A holistic notion of healing treats not only the body, but the mind and spirit as well. To credit healing entirely on external influences is to underestimate one’s self-worth and inner-power as well as the body’s internal wisdom.

Each physical symptom we experience, whether it is weight, pain, or disease, carries an important message. The body is a mirror of our inner thoughts and beliefs. Every cell responds to every thought and every word you speak. No matter what disease or symptom may be present, it carries important messages to help us develop our individual path.

Symptoms are messages from the body to slow down, look deeper, and listen. Welcome the symptoms. You are being asked to really explore how to better nourish yourself, listen to your gut and start over. What is the symptom saying, how does it express itself? Symptoms love stress; we need to explore the stresses in our lives. 

The body speaks through sensation, pleasure, and pain. Relaxing into life entails learning the language of the body.

My initial thoughts when I first got sick and was diagnosed were all on the lines of  “Oh no! I’m screwed!”

How wrong I was! I began to explore and journal about all the belief systems in my life that would cause my gut (intuition,) to be so heated and over protective. I explored both my diet and the internal workings of my mind until I learned what was needed for my personal growth at the time. Addressing the cause, released the symptom. My digestive issues had become my dearest friend, a barometer for my internal stress levels. 

A couple of weeks ago I started to experience cramping in my stomach. My old friend was showing early signs of a visit. I was confused, as nothing had changed much in my nutrition or lifestyle in recent weeks. I sat with the question, “why are you here, what are you here to say?”

On the evening of the third day of cramps and sitting with the question, it occurred to me that I had recently declined a great professional opportunity in the field of nutrition. The decision came from the voice of reason while in my body there was a huge urge and curiosity to explore this opportunity. While I felt at peace with my decision, I realized that in doing so, I had shut down the excitement stirring in my gut.

What happened next has still left me amazed! I mentally acknowledged my belly, letting it know that I had heard its voice and decided to take a different route that was better for the whole.  In that instant I felt a shift, a subsiding of pain and the next morning I woke up feeling as good as ever. 

When we ignore our symptoms we act irresponsibly and disrespectfully to our body. While modern day medication is extremely valuable, many of us take over-the-counter medication a little too often, anytime we have the slightest onset of discomfort. The symptom is masked and we forget it was there or how often it appears. We keep it under control and choose to keep riding the wave of our stresses, refusing to truly slow down and listen.

Calorie Free But Loaded With Stress

Stress is a natural body mechanism for survival. The classic scientific definition of stress is “a real or imagined threat and the body’s response to it.”  Hence, each time we experience stress, the brain interprets it to the body as a threat to your survival.

In primal days, stress (fight or flight) was the body’s reaction to a potentially life threatening experience, such as a lurking predator. In response to stress, the body shuts down the digestive system in order to supply more energy towards survival mechanisms.

Most of us function on low-levels of stress all day every day. While some stresses can help motivate us to get things done on time, much of our stress is created by “stressing ourselves out” in our own heads. The quality of our thoughts affects the stress levels in the body.

Low-level stress reduces your ability to burn calories and can minimize the flow of blood to the digestive tract by up to four times.

Stress levels will rise from anxiety, judgment or attack mode against self or others. Fighting people, lack of forgiveness, and unresolved past experiences will all raise our stress levels. Any thoughts or words that degrade self and others will cause stress. A simple thought such as “I’m five lbs over weight and that sucks” will elevate your stress levels and tell your body not to digest or assimilate.

The same switch in your brain that turns on the fight or flight stress mode will simultaneously turn off digestion.

The stress response will eventually show up as weight issues, immune issues, digestion concerns, blood sugar levels, heart disease and cholesterol levels.

Dieting and Stress

Any strategy or remedy that creates stress, any diet or exercise that is driven by stress or asks you to hate yourself is harmful and counter to healing.

When the body is under stress it is less connected to its gut wisdom, the neural information regarding digestion. We eat when anxious or stressed, a time when the appetite is most deregulated. If we over eat it is not because we have will power problems, but rather the brain has not registered “I’m full, nourished and satiated”. When we are relaxed, the brain is fully engaged in the digestive process and is making choices from body wisdom. When we relax, the digestive system is at its best.

When the body has an excess of stress hormones, cortisol and insulin, it slows down calorie burning, sustains fat and refrains from building muscle in order to maintain energy. This is an evolutionary survival response to primal time famines. This is the main reason why people often gain weight on diets. If the body doesn’t get the calories it needs, it believes its in famine and goes into survival mode.

Eating less, exercising more, pushing yourself, hating yourself and beating yourself up does not work. The stress response can over ride any of the wonderful healing dietary strategies that we choose.

We must integrate tools to relax in all the key realms of our life so the body can be in a natural state of healing. Then all the healthful nutritional strategies will really take hold.

How you eat is as important as what you eat. Take 5- 10 deep breaths before and after each meal to signal the body that you are eating in a relaxed environment. Take a moment to notice if the mouth has started to salivate, and you will know that your digestive juices have started to flow!

Approaching Your Health, Weight (or Yoga Practice) From a Place of Wholeness

Perennial philosophy is the philosophical concept, which states that each of the world’s religious traditions share a single universal truth.

We are each an individualized consciousness that is the manifestation of a Divine Ground. As human beings we possess a double nature, an egoist self and an eternal Self, which is the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. A human’s life on earth has only one end purpose: to identify the egoist self with the eternal Self and so to come to the united knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Our religions share a similar story: a tale of how we started as a whole, connected to the divine, until something occurred to create separation. In the Old Testament we learn of the temptations within the Garden of Eden, the wounding and our fall from grace.

We start to believe that we are alone, separate from the divine. We forget about the internal glory of the divine and focus fully on external victories, out-winning “others”. Our approach of ‘self against else’ leads us to hatred, violence and destruction towards others or ourselves.

Many of us struggle with health, weight and body image issues. We can spend decades of our life resenting our bodies until we exhaust ourselves fighting these issues. We often need to reach exhaustion before we have an awakening. We realize that in a physical and psychological battle against ourselves there is no winner.

Having spent years resentful of our bodies, we get trapped in the limited belief that medical and nutritional ailments can only be healed by medical and nutritional strategies. As an example, we are taught that excess weight can only be lost by less food and more exercise or by the use of a drug.

While this holds some truth, it does not paint an entire picture. For many of us the issues are not nutritional, they are psychological. Every issue we face with the body is somehow linked with heart, mind and soul. Thoughts, feeling, and beliefs all affect nutrition, too. While we can heal ourselves by dietary means, we need to move deeper into ourselves if we want to create true healing.

We carry the divine spark within us; we are perfect as we are. Yet there is a journey and on this journey, we receive clues. Each of our symptoms hints towards the things that we do that is not an expression of our authentic self. When we learn to understand our symptoms, we learn what we need to let go of.

When we don’t listen to the mild symptoms, they get louder until they grab our attention. Rather than attack our symptoms or try to rapidly get rid of them, let’s listen and learn from them. As we authentically evolve, the symptoms will dissolve.

One of my clients recently shared how once she realized that each pound of her excess weight carried a divine message, she began to feel lighter in her body. The embodiment of lightness and sense of universal support has made it easy for her to embrace a healthy lifestyle and lose weight with no feeling of fight or depravation.

Our health challenges are doorways to deeper places in our lives that call for healing. The body lives downstream to the soul. Improved health or achieving a healthy weight is the result of our practice but it is not the practice itself. The practice is carrying out our authentic service to the world.

As we empower ourselves as individuals, our metabolic power and physical vitality increases. When we learn to step out of our own way, true healing can take place.

Yoga Sutras 1&2: Bringing the Mind to Rest

Now The Discipline of Yoga

Yoga is The Cessation of Mind

Patanjali’s first and second yoga sutras have been a great reminder, a mantra, to center and ease my recent experiences of a tumultuous mind.

I am fascinated by how much more the body can be affected by the stories of the mind than actual life experiences. Circumstantial events, such as my car accident this past summer, are not the worst upsets to the body. As people we are extremely adaptable in times of crisis. Although life’s events can be destabilizing, it’s the mental worrying about our imagined future or perspective on past that truly causes internal damage.

Yoga postures are not really concerned with the body, they are concerned with the capacity to be. It is only in the Now that we can understand the science of yoga, the scientific laws of being. Yoga is an experience, not an idea or belief. Such an experience can only be accessed in Now.

Discipline means the capacity to know and learn. But we cannot know unless we have first attained the capacity to ‘Be.’

Osho describes us as a crowded house of people filled with our various personas. As we currently are, there are many people in our house but we are not there. A disciple is a seeker, learning to feel his/her being, to be the master of self rather than a slave to the crowding desires. To Be is to learn to be alone in your home in silence.

Yoga is the state of no-mind. The mind includes anything thought related: All ego, desires, hopes, fears, preconceptions, philosophies, or beliefs.

I often confuse the mind with something substantial that exists within my body. I can physically feel the effects of its turmoil. The second Sutra reminds me that the mind is just a function. The mind is an activity just as talking is. If we stop talking, talking stops existing. When we stop ‘minding’, minding stops existing. The problem is we’ve forgotten how to stop. We have lost the capacity to Be in Now.

These two Sutras serve me as a reminder to recognize the turmoil of the mind and to simply remember that this “minding” can be put to rest.

It doesn’t matter how many times the mind wonders off or for how long. What matters is the moment we realize the wondering of mind and bring our attention back to the experience of now, feeling the breath. To recognize the wondering of the mind and to attempt to shift back to present is the ultimate act of compassion for our process and ourselves.

Bodies @ An Airport: (living outside our bodies)

I recently learned from health practitioners in hospitals and nursing homes that they can tell when a patient is close to death. They all describe it as ‘seeing’ the life force withdraw away from the limbs towards the center of the body. The hands feel “lifeless” although the patient may still be moving them.

While it might be more noticeable in the frail, many of us live our lives energetically withdrawn from our limbs or disconnected from the totality of our body.

When practicing shiatsu, I’ll often sense the receiver’s energy stop flowing in the chest, neck or shoulders. The meridians of the arms feel depleted of chi (life force) even if the individual is young, strong and healthy.

I am currently blogging from an airport. There is a couple sitting near by, both holding their chest high reflecting a personality of a proud achiever. They both seem too congested in the chest to make any space for relaxation, trust or tenderness in their communication. Some of the passing travelers walk through the world (or maybe just through terminal D) while holding everything inside. Each one has a holding pattern reflected in another part of the body. In contrast, others have the posture and stride of someone who can't seem to hold it together at all. The body is a mirror of they way we most commonly approach life.

We are not a culture that is living in our bodies. Who ever designed the chair I’m sitting in definitely did not have the health of my spine in mind nor was there much thought to my physical or mental health when planning out the airport’s food choices. We are not taught to listen and understand our bodies. Instead we are expected to learn from external resources. Similarly to the dying person, we withdraw our energy away from the whole and into the part. Energetically withdrawing into the thinking head we can no longer hear or comprehend the messages our body is trying to convey. We find ourselves confused about what to eat, how much to rest, when we are hungry, or when we are full.

Separating from the experience of our body, we separate from the roots of our existence. Our body is the container that enables our entire earthly experience. It is the flute that transforms air into music or the flower that manifests its vibrant colors. Without it we would all be floating potential unable to manifest.