Beyond Sex and Soup: How to speak your body’s language

By Anna Parkinson /www.o-books.com

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how rapidly your body is ‘thinking’ for you – how many actions it takes on your behalf, right now as you’re reading this? Maybe digesting your last meal while also calculating how long you have to take in this information, judging whether to keep or discard it, perhaps also catching glimpses of activity in the space around you. What you think you’re thinking at this moment is not what your body is thinking. Your conscious thought is the outer layer of a pyramid of logical process that takes place every millisecond of your life. American neuroscientist David Eagleman has been exploring this process in the brain for 20 years, ever since he fell from a roof and experienced what seemed like a lifetime of reflections before he hit the ground. He later calculated this ‘lifetime’ happened in 0.6 seconds of measurable time. 

However swift the process in the brain, there are local reactions in your body that may be even faster. We need them to be, so that we can go upstairs when we want to, swallow our food, run, speak, or lie down to sleep. The silent intelligence of our physical bodies is astonishing, and we let it get on with its tasks until something goes wrong. One day we find our bodies don’t work as we wish them to, or we develop ‘out of the blue’ a physical problem. 

That is what happened to me, nearly 20 years ago now, when, after crippling headaches and double vision that I had successfully managed to ‘work through’, a diagnosis of a brain tumour stopped me in my tracks. A devastating diagnosis like this is inevitably one of the darkest times in your life, even if you are lucky enough, as I was, to find a way through it and come back to health. Yet, as you will hear many times from anyone who has overcome severe physical illness, the greatest light in your life can come from the darkest times.

The ‘way through’ for me was to begin to understand my body’s language and, once I understood it, to realize that my body was holding memories, emotions, desires and expectations for me that my conscious mind had long since decided were no longer relevant. And yet these silent feelings were not only shaping my experience on a daily basis, they were so present as energy that a healer could actually see them. Hearing the recognizable picture of my old emotional energy come back to me from this healer, Martin Brofman, was one of the biggest shocks of my life, and also the start of my healing.

The discovery of such perceptible inner energy felt so profound that I began to learn how to understand this silent language for myself. Eventually I was able to heal the tumour without surgery, and I began to give healing to others in the way it had first been given to me. I learned to recognize and understand a body’s energetic expression and the multiple layers of non-physical experience it retains at different levels of its functions. Healing seems to work like ‘magic’, and it is true that its effect is beyond measurement with our normal analytic tools. Yet I have always regarded it as a universal language that we have forgotten how to use because we are so busy with the business created by our conscious minds. 

We tend to think of humans as possessing five senses: smell; taste; sight; touch and hearing. Yet we know that everything that is important to us as individuals is outside these senses: perhaps the remembered effect of them in our memories, or the dreams of possessing them in our imagination, or the comfort of gratifying them in our expectation. The inner world of memory, emotion and imagination motivates the senses, not the other way around. Our external senses are there to keep our physical bodies safe, so that we can live in them and do something with that intangible thing called ‘life’. 

People who speak the language of healing know that our bodies do not distinguish between physical and emotional pain. They swiftly translate one into another, so that a deeper connection to our own unique emotional experience can enable us to release a physical block that has stood in our way. The language of healing is the language of energy which emanates from all physical material. Human beings have the capacity to see and understand this energy just as other animals do. 

You can experience the way emotional reaction changes the flow of your physical energy every day if you pay attention. Next time you are watching a drama on television, or hearing the news, pause and check what has happened to your heart rate or your breathing pattern. As soon as your attention puts you ‘in’ the picture, your body behaves as though you were physically there. Physical changes happen with even greater intensity when we have an emotional reaction to our own current experience. Our body’s ‘normal’ function, dealing with our need for food, for sex as part of our natural reproductive cycle, is also constantly bombarded with the effects of our anger, jealousy, fear, anxiety, ambition, guilt, shame, joy or delight. We often feel that we should not express these feelings. We feel it is better or safer to keep them to ourselves. While we may not express them, our bodies do not forget them, and while the self-healing mechanisms in our body are powerful, my experience as a healer shows me that our bodies normal systems eventually break down and express damage when it finds these hidden stores of emotion toxic.

This sounds alarming. We’ve been reacting emotionally to our environment since birth and even before, when we drank in our mother’s experience along with the nutrients she passed to us in her blood. But the potential interaction between our conscious thought and the unconscious actions of our bodies is also a powerful tool. Becoming aware of what you have been ‘thinking’ at an unconscious level frees you, like clearing old data from the hard drive of a computer. Your body is a responsive ‘vehicle’, constantly moving and changing. It serves you like a king or queen as you travel through your experience of life. The methods by which you can become aware of obstructive reactions you may have been carrying are simple and accessible to everyone. I work as a healer and I love being able to pass on the power of healing, but my consistent intention is to help people stand on their own feet. I have always been interested in the tools of self-healing and the ‘invisible tools’ I have derived from the many wonderful teachers and traditions I have worked with are at the heart of my new book, ‘Beyond Sex and Soup: Living a Spiritual Adventure.’  Everyday emotions can have a powerful destructive effect on your life and your environment. Once you find the root and let them go, you simultaneously feel in tune with your own natural power and potential.

Beyond Sex and Soup: Living a Spiritual Adventure” by Anna Parkinson is published by www.o-books.com  and is available from where ever books are sold.

Book Link: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/o-books/our-books/beyond-sex-soup-spiritual-adventure