Your most intimate relationship may be suffering and you don’t even know it. Your closest ally and greatest supporter is speaking to you. Are you willing to listen? A healthy relationship requires paying attention and responding from love.
When your body speaks to you, do you hear it? If you are hungry, do you eat? If you are thirsty, do you drink? If you need to go potty, do you go? If you need to move your body, do you?
The body sends messages all the time. Hunger, thirst, and the urge to go are experiences you have every day. Are you paying attention? When you need to go, do you go? Are there other messages, perhaps equally as strong, that you heed or choose to ignore? Are you aware of them?
The fact is your body is sending and receiving messages constantly. Our bodies are marvelous sensory processors, gathering information and disseminating it as needed.
The power of the processor you possess known as your physical body is simply amazing. You may actually have the potential of tapping into this network of information and just don’t know how to make it happen.
Imagine having access to every morsel of information that your body has received and stored in its lifetime. If you consider the amount of data that is available, it is overwhelming and inconceivable. You carry within you that storehouse of information about all of the experiences you have ever had, and all the richness that surrounds them. It is unfathomable the vastness of your own knowledge and potential.
Your experiences become energetic impulses not just stored in your brain but within every cell of your being. And when you have a thought about that experience, that thought will have a feeling attached to it. And that feeling is derived from your subconscious belief about that experience, whether real or imagined.
What you think becomes what you feel becomes what is stored in your body. Positive loving thoughts promote well-being. Negative, hurtful thoughts whether towards others or yourself, are interpreted as a threat. At a primal level, the response to the threat is what we know as fight or flight or our stress response. The stress response and all the cascading hormonal and inflammatory changes in the body that accompany that response can eventually lead to disease or ailing health.
Take a moment to consider whether or not you are really listening and responding to your own body. Pay attention to the thoughts and feelings you may have towards your physical form. If your initial response is gratitude and appreciation, chances are you are experiencing a sense of well-being. If your thoughts about your body include what is wrong or needs changing, your health may be suffering. Your health is a barometer of your relationship with your physical body.
How can you have a healthy relationship with your body? First and foremost – be aware! Your relationship with your body is essential to your health and well-being. Second – listen carefully and finally, respond with lovingkindness. Your relationship with your body is for life, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.
A New BMI encourages a healthy relationship with your body, listening and responding with kindness and appreciation, just as you would in any healthy relationship. A New BMI: Body Mind Intentions is an eight week program developed to help you develop a healthier relationship with your body through the practice of mindfulness and physical activity.
