Body – Integration – Body Awareness
by pre.
We discussed body awareness in the second lap around the spiral, describing what the proprioception or kinaesthetic senses are, and noted how they are connected to your sense of balance, and determined by the stretch receptors in the neurons for your muscles.
We talked about how your posture signals your confidence to others and through it’s differing use of muscles groups builds the shape of your frame, the sizes of the various muscles hanging off your skeleton.
Also addressed was your range of movement, which is increased by stretching and actually using the full extent to which your joints will reach, literally using it or losing it.
Indeed, body awareness is so important that throughout the entire second lap we devoted each meditation to an excercise routine designed to increase your awareness of your body, your sense of how you are, how your limbs and balance are orientated.
Like Diet, a good awareness of your body is essential to many of the other spiral skills, and improving that awareness will automatically improve the reach of your skills in those other areas, and vice-versa, each feeding off the next, in the spiral that pushes us to higher levels of consciousness.
It’s been shown that posture can effect your recall of positive and negative thoughts, that good posture will influence your consciousness positively, effecting both your memory and, though that, your mood. Your mood, of course, effects your posture in turn. Simply consciously taking control of your posture can lift your spirits, affect your very cognitive processes.
Using this knowledge and your bio-programming skills you can change your mood by actions as simple as sitting in a relaxed way, smiling, holding that smile and thinking of happy times. You can even use posture to program others, since the way your are stood and your gait, the things you do with your limbs, are all powerful social signals carrying messages about your status and state of mind. These things are carried from one person to the next as though they were infectious. You can make others at ease just with the right touch, and by appearing at ease yourself, a certain boon to your social skills
The more deeply you understand the connection between the awareness of your body, it’s posture and the way you think the more you’ll be able to use that knowledge, that gut-thinking intuition, to put yourself in another’s shoes and build rapport and empathy with them. Empathy is, of course, the first building block of the ethical system we each live by.
Even your health can be improved by a good awareness of your body’s state, knowing when it’s even slightly injured and being able to take the appropriate measures and adjustments to your posture to ensure speedy recovery.
Remember, your brain is a part of your body, you use the very same things (neural cells) to understand the state of your own mind as you use to understand the state of the rest of your body. The same systems which monitor your mind are also monitoring your fingertips. Not only this but it’s not your brain alone which builds your consciousness. Your entire nervous system is one entity, there’s no real dividing line between the cerebellum and the nerves at the tips of your fingers. They are all connected, all a single system, every working nerve cell in your body just a part of the whole. Body awareness and mind-awareness are to some extent one and the same thing.
The Meditation
For all these reasons the walking meditation at the end of this month will concentrate on your awareness of your body, it’s posture, and your control over it.