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Your Body Is Your Guide And Compass
by Michele Germain, LCSW


Your Body Holds Your Personal History

Your body speaks its truth, it never lies. Its posture, movement, vitality, quality of your eyes, the flow of your breath, and overall energy are an expression of your emotional state. Your body carries your personal history and holds all your memories from childhood and throughout your adult life. How does this occur?

None of us go through our life with out experiencing hurts, disappointments, betrayals, negative or critical messages from our environment.

When your feelings are not felt and allowed expression, because of some disapproval in the outer world, there is a tendency to block the feelings and disconnect from the body where the feelings reside. This pattern begins as the child interfaces with parents and significant others. The child learns to block the emotional pain by tightening the muscles and stopping the expression. These unexpressed or unresolved feelings get stored and buried in the body. This is a self-protective mechanism. Over a period of time, this pattern becomes unconscious and the muscular tension patterns are no longer felt. The body becomes mechanical loosing its grace, vitality, instead of the balanced, pleasure and guidance it is meant to provide.


Your Body Is Always Talking To You

How connected are you to your body? What is the relationship you have with your feelings and your body?

Your body is sending you signals to help you to be fully present with yourself. It tells you when you are in balance with yourself or out balance, if you are open, soft and flexible or tight and constricted. It is letting you know if you are fully present to your anger, fear, sorrow and joy. Or blocking these feelings and holding back your expression and movement by tightening your body on a muscular level. Your body is telling you when you feel comfortable or uncomfortable. Basically, it tells you if you are speaking and living your truth, or hiding from it.

When you anchor your awareness in your body, an opening occurs, feelings surface and a release of tension takes place. If you are not listening to your feelings, your body will speak its mind in many forms, through chronic pain, minor tension, inflexibility or fatigue. Or, perhaps through stomach pain, head aches or back aches and even through minor and major disease. The louder the signals get the more dramatically the body speaks. Is Your Body Trying To Get Your Attention? Are you listening?


Learning To Listen To Your Body

Practice Listening throughout your day, by pausing and taking a few moments to drop down into the center of your being. First connect with your breath and ask yourself how you are feeling. Do you feel tense? If so, where? Do not force anything. Just continue to breathe slowly and deeply, embracing whatever tension is there. Do this when you are alone or when you are with others. When you are doing something fun or when you doing something you don’t want to do. When you are walking and physically moving during the day, when you reach out and hug someone or someone reaches out to hug you. Pay attention to what your body is doing and saying to you. As you embrace yourself and feel your body you will begin to read the signals and learn what words and feelings that are behind the sensations, tightness, movement, the physical pain, or the illness that may be occurring.

Try the following visualization to help you drop into the center of your body when you have some quiet time alone.

Visualization

Pretend that your body is a building and the top floor is your head and the bottom floor is where you stand with your feet on the ground. Now imagine that an elevator is moving up and down in the center of the building and the center of your body. Start with the top floor, the top of your head and visualize the elevator moving down through your head into your neck, shoulders, chest, waist, stomach, hips, thighs, knees, ankles and feet. Do this very slowly, occasionally pausing. Visualize the movement down through the center of your body, until you arrive at your feet. Stay, aware and non-judgmental. Do this several times. Now find out what your learned by answering the questions below.


Consider the following questions.
  • Is your neck or throat tight? Are your shoulders pulled up close to your ears or down and relaxed?
  • Is you’re breathing easy and deep, allowing your chest and abdomen to move easily, or is it shallow and constricted?
  • Are your eyes soft and wide open or set narrow and tense?
  • Is your face relaxed or do you feel your jaw stiff and tense?
  • Do you feel, fluid, open and light in your body, or tight, weak, numb or frozen?
  • Do you feel pleasant vibrations and sensation moving throughout or do you feel lifeless, anxious, restless, or over stimulated?
  • Is your heart feeling soft and open or closed, empty or tight?
  • Do you feel the earth below your feet and the bottom of your feet touching the ground, or do you feel constricted in your feet and barely feel your connection with the ground?
  • Does your body move gracefully or do you feel off balance and stiff as you walk and move?


Anchoring Your Awareness in Your Body

It is important to trust the intelligence of your body. Your body holds the wisdom of your deepest self. It is where your life force flows. By anchoring your awareness in your body you stand at the threshold of becoming fully alive with all of your energy and pleasure. Being fully present will be the gift you give to yourself. Only then can you use your body as a guide and compass to navigate yourself through your life.


Michele Germain is the author of The Jill Principle – A Women’s Guide To Healing Her Spirit After Divorce Or Breakup, published by Llewellyn Worldwide. Phone counseling is available. She is licensed as a Clinical Social Worker and Marriage Family Therapist in California. She is a Certified Bioenergetic Analyst, specializing in the mind/body connection, an approach that resolves the emotional pain remaining in the body. She is a relationship expert, and helps individuals find the spiritual gift in their crisis or breakup. She has appeared on radio, cable television and in print media, and has lectured aboard major cruise ship lines such as the Royal Caribbean. For more information visit www.michelegermain.com or www.TheJillPrinciple.com or www.beyondbreakup.com