meditation as self-reliance

Meditation as loving self-connection empowers the amazing healing powers of the body. Don't let anyone dissuade you from this healing silence. When empowered to do so, the body has amazing powers for healing itself physically, emotionally and spiritually.  In this way the practice of meditation and mindful movement are powerful tools in supporting health and developing an increasing sense of well-being. 

The body is a product of electronic signals. Electronic movements of ions make our hearts beat, pulls breath into our lungs, creates flows of energy between the neurons in our brains. We are a self-organizing electronic fields. You can feel this as tingling in hands or feet, shifts of tension or relaxation within the body. The body is a miraculously intelligent organism that is sometimes not empowered to work to the best of its ability. 

Historic trauma causes constriction, numbing and avoidance that impedes the best working of the body. Instead of embodiment, the traumas of life can cause dissociation and various forms of subtle paralysis. 

Meditation and mindful movement support embodiment and doing so gives your marvelous body permission and support in healing itself. We don’t have to know how the body does this; its mechanisms are faster than thought and before thought so it is not in the range of our understanding.  

People who’ve experienced terrifying traumas sometimes lose their connection to their body’s healing power. They can lose hope, trust, a sense of self-connection and ability and feel trapped and uncomfortable in their skin. Even if we've suffered trauma that makes us feel uncomfortable in our own skin and willing to dissociate from the body, we can look inside ourselves and find pockets of comfort and happiness in our bodies and empower our bodies to do their tremendous healing work.

We can honor the body and soul together through the practice of meditation or embodied mindfulness. In meditation, please give yourself permission to rest in the goodness and healing power of your body. Please rest in the intelligent interdependence of all the body’s vital organs and the kaleidoscopic and electronic interplay of body, soul and mind. Your body is waiting to love you and support you and help you remember forgotten things. It is always waiting to love and support you. 

A Buddhist sage, Jetsun Milarepa is famous for living in the mountains of Tibet in order to develop his spiritual life. He wore hardly any clothes and ate mostly a food known as stinging nettles. He never married or had children. Milarepa had a friend in his body, though. He taught that the body was a “tutelary deity,” meaning a powerful protecting force in our lives. We can see that the body is indeed a protecting as well as healing force. In meditation, we can feel very safe within this natural brilliance, warmth and intelligence, and feel very nourished by that vital electricity that we can feel tingling in our hands, nourished by the warmth that we can feel radiating from heart, from gut, or anywhere else. 

We can nourish our bodies by letting our bodies nourish us. In this way the practice of meditation and mindful movement are powerful tools in supporting health and developing an increasing and autonomously arising sense of well being.  It may be that few ever truly understood what a miracle the body is, not to mention the soul. Just as one can bask in the sunshine, we can bask now in the warmth and brilliance of the body’s natural and loving support and intelligence.