"Happiness... is listening to your body."
hikean...@yahoo.com
I feel somewhere deep in my back that I may be getting a tiny start of
a cold. Big deal. But what is interesting is that I feel it before I
get it. That all the hints are there. That these subtle, partial,
hint-like ways of mee sensing things are already there. It could be a
particular appetite that you have or don't have on a particular day.
Could be a small sense of a something somewhere.
It tells me something. It tells me 'listen, I've got something to
say.'
I learned the following exercise from a woman, a young yoga instructor
who believed very strongly that all of a person's emotional happinesses
and sadnesses are stored somehow, somewhere in the body, and that you
can feel them subtlely and eventually you can train your emotions and
your body (emotion happiness, body happiness) to throw those negative
emotional beliefs right out of your body.
EXERCISE:
In yoga, years ago, I learned this great exercise.
Call it self-body-assessment. Call it 'what does my body say?'
Simply, it is that you will
1) take off your shoes
2) stand on the floor and close your eyes
3) front side. scan the front of your body, looking for signs,
listening for signs, feel like a wash of cool water, from a natural
spring, from the top of your heads laterally across and across your
body along the front side, then do the same scan with a pleasant
warmth, like a happy sunshine, scanning across and across (forehead,
cheeks and nose, beautiful smile, gorgeous swan-neck, majestic chest
for men and women, thougtful stomach, strong hipbones, and down, down
to your toes) 1-2 min
4) back side. Then do the same for the back of your body, scanning with
a cool wash and then with a pleasant warmth. 1-2 min
5) balance. Now, just feel with closed eyes your body firmly over your
feet - feel the happiness of listening, feel that the warmth is still
inside you. 1 min.
6) colors. now with your eyes still closed, imagine a color for the
front of your body, a color that either emanates from the front of your
body, or a color that seems to go well with how you feel in the front
of your body.
shake off that color, and choose a color that you feel from the back of
your body.
7) open your eyes, shake it off, enjoy.
The question is why did you choose those colors for the front and back
- are they bright open colors, are they dark or muted. What might that
tell you about how you perceive your front and your back? How you
might trust and rely on your front and your back. What might your
choices of colors tell you about how healthy you perceive your front
and back as being?
Cool, until soon!
hikean...@yahoo.com
view their own bodies....
So many people at one time or another are unhappy with something about
their bodies (yes! sure, it's happened to me too!) And what's
especially interesting is you would not be able to ask a person, 'well
how do you feel? are you unhappy with your personality today?'
It's fascinating that people sometimes say, 'oh, I wish I had his or
her body,' but you wouldn't catch either your best friend or your enemy
saying that he/she wanted somebody else's personality. It's too
personal to us - it's too much of who we are. It's what we like about
ourselves, our personalities.
So, the conclusion? What do we like about ourselves in our bodies?
What about your body makes you really happy?