I woke up this morning feeling especially invigorated, my body felt light and ready to be moved.
Instead of ignoring this call my body was asking of me and heading straight into entrepreneurial work mode, I spent the next 90 minutes fully present in my body. I started with light stretching and moved on to a full yoga sequence and a short kettle bell workout, followed by lymphatic rebounding, and finally 10 minutes of free form dancing, all while listening to an upbeat workout playlist I created for myself on Spotify to keep the motivation flowing.
I’ve spent most of my life actively distracting myself from the signals my body was giving to me. Living with the debilitating symptoms of Chronic Lyme Disease made it simply too painful to have my awareness within my own body.
This act of consciously placing my awareness in my body is still quite new to me.
Practicing yoga on a beach in Portugal in 2012
While in Peru last year, I came to realize the importance of being aware of our body’s messages and the spiritual affects of taking time every day for intentional movement. This awareness came from a deeper place than the intellectual, “Every body needs to exercise for x, y, and z health reasons.”
It was more of an inner knowing, an intuitive sense that in order for my body to develop into it’s highest potential, I need to keep the flow of energy moving within me through physical movement.
Slowly, I’ve begun to trust that there’s an intelligence within the cells of my body that knows exactly what is needed for my system to thrive. It knows what to eat, when to detox, when to move, and when to rest. It knows how much is too much, and how much is just enough. It knows things that my conscious mind can’t even begin to understand, but I’ve learned that I can trust its wisdom.
For me, it hasn’t been an easy transition surrendering into my body’s insightful brilliance. Old habits really do die hard, and I’ve often found myself wanting to ignore the message my body gives me to move, instead thinking, “I’d rather just stay in bed..” as I did for many years before.
The amazingly beautiful world of nerve cells, located throughout the entire human body.
Alright, now I’m going to get a little metaphysical on you to share what I’ve learned in my most recent exploration of consciousness and how it relates to our physical bodies.
We normally interact with life through our five physical senses— sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. What most of the world doesn’t realize is that there is a deeper, more subtle form of sensing the world around us.
Many ancient traditions talk of the energy body, a part of ourselves that exists beyond the physical realm. From Yoga, to Taoism, and ancient Egyptian Alchemy, these well-established belief systems universally accept the notion of an extension of the physical body beyond what we are able to perceive with the five physical senses.
To go into too much detail about the inner workings of the energy body, also known as the light body, would be beyond the scope of this blog post, but each of these ancient wisdom systems generally agrees that this energy body is what animates life. It is our life force. Think about when someone dies. Their physical body remains, but what makes them “them” is gone. Or at least, it is unable to be perceived from the physical realm which most of humanity inhabits at this time in history.
The Egyptian Goddess Isis has much to teach us about working with our light body.
What I’ve learned is that through careful practice and discipline, we can refine our senses enough to be able to observe the deeper, more subtle realm of energy that currently lies right below our level of conscious awareness.
It is from this place that life flows.
Most of us in the western world are so overwhelmed with sensory input that in order to simply survive in this world without going crazy we’ve had to numb ourselves to the more etherial dimensions. But, through the practice of present moment awareness we can begin to turn the metaphorical radio dial of our minds into the correct frequency that will allow us to play with life through the world of energy.
When we become more consciously aware of the deeper realms of existence, we tap into an inner knowing that can sense the bigger picture. We better understand the reasons for the happenings of our life. We let go of lower vibrational emotions (i.e. fear, anger, worry, etc) more easily, and we step more fully into unconditional love. Our intuition is heightened, our creativity flows freely, and we align with the infinite abundance of the Universe so that the fulfillment of our needs is more quickly manifested into our reality.
It is through entering into the physical body that we breakthrough to the oftentimes undervalued world of our light body. It is through conscious, loving attention to the physical body that we begin to dance with the divine within us, which is the essence of who we are as spiritual beings.
It is through dancing with the divine in every moment of our lives that we begin to awaken to our higher potential as human beings.
