Your Body Shows You Where You Are

Problems in the body are not isolated events. They are accumulations.

This understanding is not new. Ancient systems of medicine and metaphysical schools of thought have described the body for thousands of years through interconnected pathways, meridian lines, qi, yin and yang, energetic movement, and the relationship between our physical experience and the rest of our lives.

I have tested them in my own life. I have observed them in people I have worked with firsthand. I have watched patterns emerge repeatedly when people begin connecting what is happening in their bodies with what is happening in their behaviors, emotions, relationships, environments, and lives. And I have seen them heal from their emotional and physical ailments after identifying, myself included. The body is a system. What happens in one part cannot always be separated from everything that came before it, everything surrounding it, and everything occurring within the person experiencing it. When energy flows, we experience that flow. When it is obstructed, we experience that too. Those blockages typically end up in symptoms that are given medical terms: cancer, diabetes, obesity, anemia, etc..

However, initially, if you’re paying attention to how a given situation makes you feel, and it makes you feel uneasy, then you can do something to resolve that unsettling.

The Body Is Symbolic

Everything we perceive through our senses carries meaning because we experience reality through ourselves.

What you see, hear, smell, touch, and feel is processed through your own history and experience. Your environment is constantly cueing you, reflecting information back to you, and showing you where you are. Our bodies, environments, emotions, and experiences are continually communicating information about our state.

Behavior teaches us that our histories alter the meaning of present-day stimuli. Something completely neutral to one person can produce an enormous reaction in another because the stimulus does not exist independently of the person's history with it. The skill is learning how to read it.

Your Body Tells a Story

Within energetic and metaphysical traditions, different parts and sides of the body carry different associations.

The right side is associated with masculine energy, structure, rigidity, action, and present-day circumstances. The left side is associated with feminine energy, creativity, receptivity, childhood, previous experiences and, within traditions that recognize them, past lives. The location of discomfort therefore becomes information.

Throat problems correspond with expression: feeling unable to speak, withholding what needs to be said, or feeling stuck in your ability to communicate. Nervous-system problems correspond with stress, fear, worry, vigilance, and remaining in states of internal alarm. The legs and hips relate to movement. When these areas hurt, I look at movement in the person's life too. Are you moving toward your goals? Are you resisting a direction you know you want to take? Are you remaining somewhere that no longer aligns with you? The list goes on. The point is not simply to label a symptom or series of symptoms. It is to understand the pattern surrounding them.

What happened? What are you holding? What are you resisting? What keeps repeating? Where did the flow stop? The body always leaves clues.

We Have Been Conditioned Away From Ourselves

This understanding also conflicts with much of what we are taught by modern institutions. Conventional medicine and traditional education can keep people questioning themselves, detached from their own knowing, and operating through fear-based beliefs. Whether through design, reinforcement, institutional structure, or generations of conditioning, the result can be the same: we learn to surrender authority over ourselves.

We know this feeling too well: Someone else knows your body. Someone else knows what you should learn. Someone else determines what is normal. Someone else determines what is possible. Someone else interprets your experience for you.

Eventually, you stop looking inward. That disconnection limits growth because a person who does not trust their own observation becomes dependent upon external systems to continually tell them what they are experiencing. That you can only get worse, never better. We are capable of far more self-awareness and abilities than we are generally taught to access, but we have to free our minds to get there.

Feelings Are Instructions to Pay Attention

Your feelings matter. They show you where to look and provide information you can use to tailor your behavior. Notice what happens when you enter certain environments. Notice who makes your body contract. Notice what makes it expand. Notice resentment. Notice excitement. Notice anxiety. Notice the difference between forcing yourself toward something and moving naturally toward it. Then look at your behavior. What needs to change?

Release what is creating contention. Change the behavior maintaining it. Speak. Move. Create. Forgive. Leave when leaving is necessary. Stay when staying is aligned. When the obstruction is released, energy can move differently. The body feels lighter. Life feels easier. Your experience changes.

Yin and Yang: We Learn Through Polarity

We experience polarity because contrast gives experience meaning. Yin and yang. Light and darkness. Movement and stillness. Expansion and contraction. Fear and love. Pain and pleasure. All the same feelings on a different degree on their respective spectrums. Trauma is part of the human experience. That does not mean harm should be pursued or inflicted. It means human lives contain difficulty, loss, fear, conflict, and experiences that are meant to change and develop us.

Those experiences provide contrast. They teach us what we want. They teach us what we do not want. They reveal boundaries. They show us what aligns. They show us what does not. We learn what kind of reality we want to create partly through experiencing realities we no longer choose.

Your Environment Reflects Your Internal State

I also do not experience time and environment as simply fixed, separate structures operating independently of us. Our experience of reality is deeply intertwined with perception, attention, history, behavior, expectation, and internal state. Change yourself and your environment begins to look different because you are no longer interacting with it as the same person.

Different things capture your attention. Different opportunities become visible. Different behaviors become available. Different relationships remain. Different ones disappear.

Your internal world and external world continually interact. The environment becomes feedback.

Forgive and Move

Be good to things even when they are not good to you. This does not require remaining where you are mistreated. Love does not eliminate boundaries. It means you do not need to reproduce what someone else gave you.

You are responsible for what you contribute to your universe. Lead with love. Sometimes the other person changes. Sometimes the relationship changes. Sometimes nothing outside you changes at all.

Then the lesson may have been yours to overcome. Take it. Forgive. Release. Move.

Nothing is owed. We are collectively experiencing this space while interpreting it through completely different histories and journeys. Everyone is different. Everyone is special. Everyone is truly unique.

That is not a problem to solve, it's a fun experience to be lived.

The States We Keep Searching For Already Exist Within Us

As we release resistance and move toward greater alignment, our energetic vibration increases. And it feels good.

Humans often pursue substances, stimulation, attention, consumption, and other intense experiences because we are trying to access particular internal states: euphoria, freedom, connection, peace, expansion. But the body is capable of creating extraordinary experiences without drugs or other stimulating circumstances.

Movement can do it. Meditation can do it. Love can do it. Connection can do it. Creation can do it. Breath can do it. Alignment can do it.

Lead by example, lead with what you want for yourself. As you learn yourself, you begin learning how to access states you may have forgotten were available to you. That is where things become interesting.

Remember Yourself

Keep leading with love. Pay attention to your body. Understand your environment as cues and symbols. Listen to your emotions. Notice your patterns. Question what you have been conditioned to believe. Release what creates unnecessary contention. Forgive what you no longer need to carry. Do not cause harm to others.

Move toward what feels aligned, and do it for you.

You may begin experiencing levels of happiness, connection, intuition, awareness, and ability that you have not remembered in a very long time. Your body is not separate from your experience. Your environment is not separate from your behavior. Your “past” is not separate from how you respond today.

Everything is interacting. Everything is information.

And when you learn how to read that information, you begin remembering how much influence you actually have over your experience, and how much fun this life really is.