What are the Roles of the Body, the Mind and the Spirit?
The Mind
Let's start with the mind. When I lead groups and ask people what they use their minds for, I get the following answers:
1) I use my mind to be creative and solve problems
2) I use my mind to organize things
3) I make decisions with my mind
In these answers, there is an implicit acceptance of our mind as the highest source of knowing. When I say it this way many people then say that their spirit is the highest source of knowing. But how often do we ask our mind to quiet down so we can hear our spirit? Too often people tell me they cannot quiet their mind down and their mind seems to run the show... There is a sense that they have absolutely no power over this situation and they give up the fight... When we let the mind run the show of our life we tend to create agitation, resistance, stress, and chaos. I don't believe that is the life we each want... but we often feel trapped in it...
So there is this notion that we need to listen to something wiser than our mind, to listen to our spirit... but how to do that when the mind is so busy taking the whole space?
Our mind is useful. But it uses the past to make decisions and to think about things. It does not have access to new information unless we give it new information. Einstein used to say and I paraphrase: "We don't solve new problems with old solutions!" But that is all the mind can do!
The Body
The Mind
Let's start with the mind. When I lead groups and ask people what they use their minds for, I get the following answers:
1) I use my mind to be creative and solve problems
2) I use my mind to organize things
3) I make decisions with my mind
In these answers, there is an implicit acceptance of our mind as the highest source of knowing. When I say it this way many people then say that their spirit is the highest source of knowing. But how often do we ask our mind to quiet down so we can hear our spirit? Too often people tell me they cannot quiet their mind down and their mind seems to run the show... There is a sense that they have absolutely no power over this situation and they give up the fight... When we let the mind run the show of our life we tend to create agitation, resistance, stress, and chaos. I don't believe that is the life we each want... but we often feel trapped in it...
So there is this notion that we need to listen to something wiser than our mind, to listen to our spirit... but how to do that when the mind is so busy taking the whole space?
Our mind is useful. But it uses the past to make decisions and to think about things. It does not have access to new information unless we give it new information. Einstein used to say and I paraphrase: "We don't solve new problems with old solutions!" But that is all the mind can do!
The Body
And what is the role of your body? It seems all we know about the body is it serves to experience pleasure and pain, and to move us places. We want pleasure and we try and avoid pain. When we do this we split ourselves off from our body... and the result is we cause suffering. Here's how it works. The experience of pain in our body is what it feels like when the energy is trapped. The energy does not get trapped on its own. We contract because of the fear of pain. In contracting our physical body, we block energy and create the pain we were trying to avoid. The body becomes a memory of all the things we have blocked and that is what causes diseases and aging. There is this notion that problems come as a natural cause of aging. I disagree. It is not aging, It is the accumulation of energy trapped inside that causes problems as we age.
The solution lies in acknowledging our body's experience physically. As we do this by accepting and feeling the physical sensations in our body, we release pain, and insights come that help you grow as a human being. These insights never become available otherwise and they are not accessible to the mind until the body is paid attention to.
Yoga is one way to help release these blocked energies is a safe manner. Meditation alone can cause imbalances,
The Spirit
The spirit is your connection to everything. It is you... and so much more than you have experienced as a human being. When we have not experienced our spirit, we do not know what we are missing. It is like living a life as a pauper and having never seen wealth. But once we have seen wealth, we can no longer ignore it... it changes how we see our self.
Our spirit is a source of inspiration and when we access it, we bring new material to the mind, so we can learn to question old tapes and find meaning and joy that we did not know or had forgotten about. It shifts our perception of our self and our purpose in life. We open to contentment we did not know was possible.
Stress as a Symptom of a Need for Integration/Wholeness
We cannot just work with the body or the mind or the spirit separately. It is our responsibility to help them relate to each other. Somehow, as we do this, we realize that we are the ones who have caused the separation in the first place. And at a deeper level, they are not separated... so we spend energy recreating the separation every moment... That is the source of our stress and fatigue!
