Can I separate my body from my emotions, please?
“OMG - I want to separate my body from my emotions!”
I absolutely had to start this blogpost with the word body. That beautiful, awful, pleasure giver, emotion capturer. It annoys, destroys and amazes us with its fantastic presence. We all have our own relationships with our bodies. For some it’s healthy, for some it’s complicated. I presume that for most of us it’s the latent.
Our bodies store a lot of knowledge and wisdom. Not only that, they also store a lot of experiences. Our beautiful skin wrapped bodies remember the good and the bad times. Remember that time when you somehow knew that something bad was about to happen and your whole body got tense? And then you realised later on that you somehow knew and were right. Call it intuition or similar. But is it the body that remembers? Is it not the mind?
Do you need to prove that you’re embodied? Cmon now
Are they one, body and emotions? What if they are?
There are many books written about the body mind connection, such as Deb Shapiro’s “Your body speaks your mind“. But doesn’t the need to prove that there’s a connection between the body and the mind sound odd, and obvious? I personally love this kind of books. To me it has always been obvious that we’re complex living systems. If we go back to the question of whether we can talk about the body without talking about the mind? Well, babes. I don’t think so. Can you really exclude one from the other?
Emotions live in your body - let them shine!
There’s this study made by Nummenmaa lab where emotions were mapped in human bodies. They did a study where total of 1026 participants took part in the study that was supported by data from 9821 brain-imaging studies. (I know it’s pretty scientific now, I’m sure you can handle it.) They defined the organization and determinants of a feeling space involving 100 core feelings that ranged from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations and common illnesses. The feeling space was determined by a combination of basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping and neuroimaging meta-analysis. In the study they assessed
for each feeling, the intensity of four hypothesized basic dimensions (mental experience, bodily sensation, emotion and controllability)
subjectively experienced similarity of the 100 feelings and
topography of bodily sensations associated with each feeling.
The findings revealed a map of subjective feelings that are categorical, emotional, and embodied.
Image: Nummenmaa Lab
We truly are embodied. Our feelings cannot be separated from our bodies. We cannot separate the experience in the mind from experience in the body. Oftentimes, we ignore this. Why? Maybe because we’re told to put our emotions aside as they were a weakness. Emotions and how they feel in the body can sometimes be difficult to comprehend and to connect with what’s happening in our lives, to connect to the bigger picture. My question is, why aren’t we using our bodies more at work instead of pacifying it?
What yoga taught me about the mind and the body connection?
During my yoga teacher training this year, I realised how important it’s for us humans to stop and feel our bodies, stop and listen to ourselves and just be. How can we know what our bodies are telling us or what the body and our spirits really yearn for if we don’t listen?
Every time we make decisions that aren’t aligned with our mission in life, it seems that our body reacts. Your body is wise and it guides you. The body always knows before the mind - at least this is my subjective experience. And I have validated this in my personal empirical study for a few of years now.
Rest is fuel for your body and mind
A very smart person sent this poem to a group I’m in last week and I think it’s brilliant. Because it’s brilliant like you, I’d like to share a slice of it. It’s by an English poet David Whyte
“REST is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bulls eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.”
And this ->
“To rest is not self indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.”
Yoga taught me to listen more carefully to the whispers my mind and body is trying to tell me. I’ve learnt that the most important thing for people to feel psychological safety is to be able to rest and be in a place where nobody, not even you, causes your reptile brain to feel alerted.
Somehow I got curious about the power of unwinding, rest and calming the nervous system. That’s led me to organise yoga, meditation and yoga nidra sessions in Helsinki regularly. Contact me to hear about the next occasions, or message me if you want to know more of how to get offer your mind and body some well deserved REST. And really, I would never want to separate my body from my emotions as the topic asks. I think the embodied experience makes this life pretty stellar.