Contending with the Warrior (Part 4)
This is Part 4 to a series where I am exploring the relationships between language, culture, and individual identity. In Particular, I am pondering how the inherent violence contained in many of the words of our language is shaping how we interact with the world, and I am considering how to find another way…
In Part 3 of this series, we started to look at shifting our perspective and finding power in words of kindness, beauty, and love. Let’s look deeper into that alternative and see how we change both our lives and our world using this shift…
"We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
Above is the longer version of the quote: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” But it emphasizes the point of “as within, so without.” Starting with your own body.
Notice with the actions you take, are you being kind to your body?
Are you giving your body what it needs to thrive: nutrient dense foods, sleep, movement, contact with nature?
When you engage in healthy activities, such as exercise, are you doing so with kindness and the intention to nourish and satisfy the needs of the body self? Or do you do so with a dictatorial, punishing attitude - full of willpower and the need to conquer your body’s tendencies?
How do you speak to yourself? If someone else were to speak to you that way, would you feel supported, loved, and cooperative? Or would you feel shamed, resentful, and resistant?
Do you believe your mind needs to be a “warrior” against your own body?
Deciding to treat ourselves with kindness is the first step towards building a kinder, more loving world.
The Buddhist contemplative practice of “Metta”, or loving kindness, emphasizes this point. The prayer, or meditation, here is to to practice compassion through the phrases:
May you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering…
and so on.
But the catch of the teaching is that you cannot truly offer compassion toward others until you are able to fully offer it to yourself.
Sometimes the mind acts as an obstacle to self-compassion if it thinks of itself as better than or in control of the body. It’s helpful to realize the body is much more intelligent than we tend to give it credit…
The sensations that the body communicates with our minds is the closest connection we have to the intelligence of nature. For all that the conscious mind can discern on a moment to moment basis, it is akin to about 40 bits of data per second. Whereas, the body is interpreting 11 million bits of data per second. The eons of intelligent evolution contained in the body far surpasses the capability of the mind to comprehend. So, use this wisdom and learn to listen to the signals the body consistently offers us.
Even if the body is not doing what you want it to be doing.
Even if you do not feel well in your body… Injury and the processes of disease are also intelligent signals.
How might your perspective shift if you decided that the body is doing exactly what it should be doing considering all the factors of your life so far? What might we learn and how might our actions change if we truly listened to our body on a moment to moment basis?
I believe, knowing this, we can start treating our bodies like a close friend - we can listen, acknowledge, and follow its signals when the body is part of our trusted team. In order to do this, we need to speak to the body with kindness, and we need to spend time with internal focus, such as in meditation and mindful moving, learning to comprehend the language with which the body is speaking to us.
This includes how we treat our bodies with our movement and exercise. With kindness in mind, we neither neglect our bodies with too little movement on a daily basis, nor would we punish our bodies with a too aggressive approach to exercise.
Some think that the call to listen to what the body wants and to treat the body kindly will result in laziness - sitting on the couch, eating junk food. In the long term, this is never so. It is possible that you are already so stressed, overworked and under slept that the only message the body is able to get through to you is to rest. Once you begin listening, it’s possible that rest is needed for a little while. However, when the energy reserves are repleted, the body will inevitably begin calling out for movement again.
Whether you are at a stage where the body is yearning for movement or not, a couple strategies for tuning in and understanding what the body is trying to communicate are:
Body scan - mentally scan through your body. Take time to try to acknowledge any sensations from each part of your body - from the feet to the head. Get details - temperature, texture, steady or pulsating sensations, acute - like a pin point, or generalized. A question Eckhart Tolle uses in one of his meditations is: without looking at or touching a part of you, how do you know it exists?
If you identify a particular sensation, you might imagine it as a character, or object: ask questions about what it looks like - color, shape, size… then, if it were some being outside of you that could talk, what would it be expressing through that sensation?
Can you have compassion for whatever it says?
Ask the part and sensation: what do you need from me? How could I help?
The key in this process is observation, and through asking detailed questions you may find you evoke a sense of curiosity. This curiosity is critical toward developing a more compassionate relationship with yourself and toward self-discovery. I’m tempted to say, without curiosity, nothing new arises and nothing changes.
If your curiosity leads you to hear negative, shame filled, or cruel messages about yourself, try to stay in the observational place in your mind. Where did they come from? How are they serving you? What are they trying to protect? Usually, underneath those messages is a wound, or scared part of yourself. instead of believing the negative self talk, tending to the wound and soothing the fear, like you would with a scared child or helpless animal, is the way toward healing.
This is not to deny the negative messages entirely, but to look underneath them toward the source. In Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), there’s a concept of “dirty” or “clean” pain. The pain from a wound (physical, emotional, or mental) is very real and needs to heal and be tended to- that’s clean pain. However, there’s another type of pain that comes from “what we make of” the wound. These are the narratives and stories about the pain, that actually cause more suffering and keep the original wound alive and festering - that is dirty pain.
A quick example is: if you hit your hand with a hammer - that injury is clean pain. But then if you mentally attack yourself, calling yourself stupid and clumsy and chastise yourself wondering how you could have done such a thing and remark how that’s just so typical and shows why you can’t do anything else right either… well, that’s dirty pain.
Dirty pain can draw us in and keep us stuck and suffering - which is why it’s important to stay in the observational mind with curiosity. It gives us space and opportunity to tend to the real wounds, understand where the narratives came from, and choose how we would rather move forward.
In her book, “You Can Heal Your Life”, Louise Hay points out that we wouldn’t have much of a reaction if someone told us, “You’re a purple pig!” - the statement is a bit ridiculous and odd and we don’t have much attachment to it. It’s easy to brush that off. However, if the statement is “You’re not good enough,” or “you don’t matter,” etc… somehow those words creep in and attach to us with much more force.
Our practice is to recognize that all statements that cause us to feel worse are simply not true.The truth will always make us feel cleaner and lighter.
We may not like it, and it might go against what we wished, but somehow the truth doesn’t cause more suffering - only the stories we tell ourselves around it can do that.
So what we can do, after we’ve tended to our wounds and disbelieved our stories about them, is to shift our focus away from our suffering and toward the life we do want:
Focus on our ideals and values and feel how our body responds to those thoughts.
You might then notice how your body responds when you focus your thoughts on those things you believe you have to fight against.
Which thoughts actually make you feel better?
Part of developing compassion for ourselves is to give our bodies what actually soothes and feels better - focusing your attention on your dreams, ideals, and values may be the nourishment your body needs.
On top of that, all the manifestation techniques seem to agree- what you focus upon expands.
So, not only will you feel better, but you’ll find yourself edging toward a life comprised of your ideals and values if you give more importance to those thoughts than anything you are tempted to fight against.
So, let me ask you this:
Can your language both to yourself and others reflect the life you envision?
Once again, notice when you speak if your words (both to yourself and to others) carry that vibration and energy of the world you envision…
[Next time, we’ll review where we started in part 1 and explore how these shifts in language and perspective might affect in the world.]