Mind-Body-Spirit Connection
"In recent years a great deal has been discovered about the intimate interplay between mind, emotions, and body. We have clear evidence of how emotions are intimately connected to physical distress and illness. Yet for all the exciting new therapeutic approaches for working directly with the body to restore health and awareness, the value of Full Body Presence is still not well recognized.
"The aspect of sensory awareness in Full Body Presence — the grounded connection with our body and the world around us — can play a major role in healing physical symptoms and illnesses. It can assuage and ultimately transform fear, doubt, and alienation into a sense of trust and confidence in oneself and life as a whole. Developing sensory awareness is also a powerful means of personal transformation. The strong therapeutic presence that emerges is of vital importance for both the caregiver and the one receiving care.
"Full Body Presence also leads us to a more solid connection with our innate spirit and energy. And this connection can become the ever present background against which we live our lives — instead of the serendipitous minutes of connection and ecstasy we may otherwise experience occasionally.
"In many spiritual traditions, heaven is synonymous with being fully connected to the Divine, to our spiritual source. Yet this visceral sense of connection — which is or should be a given — slips away from us as we are socialized to fit in to our hierarchical and compartmentalized culture.
"Unfortunately, elements of our educational system, cultural practices, and even religious doctrines speak in terms of dominating the world and our environment and of controlling our bodily functions and thoughts — as if we were somehow separate from the rest of creation. Our emphasis on speed, instant gratification, outward appearances, staying competitive, and retaining power without regard to the long-term outcome leaves us little time for feeling and meeting our deeper physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.
"In this milieu, our deeper felt needs are relegated to a lesser status. With regard to large or small issues, the wisdom of the body and its signals are suspect and not to be trusted in our culture. We typically give our thoughts more weight than our nonlinear inner knowing. We put our trust in outside experts to figure out what to do in our lives, rather than taking external data and going inside ourselves and connecting to our deeper wisdom to learn what is best for us. When we don't trust our internal awareness, we neglect our sensory awareness and create a sense of separation from our world, which is reinforced as we continue to ignore our inner world."
