The Miracle Of Body Intelligence

A small story:

One man was alone in the house when the doorbell rang and a saleswoman stood selling dinner sets.

She took out the knife set to show to him but accidentally cut her finger and it started bleeding profusely.

He gave her first aid and sent her away.

Some time later, another lady came in selling the same things.

The man explained: 'Another lady was here a few minutes ago, trying to sell me these same things. In fact, that's her blood here at the doorstep'.

The terrified lady turned and ran away!

You see, anything that even remotely suggests pain causes us so much discomfort that we would like to run away. However, pain is a basic necessity of our lives. Just imagine, were there to be no pain we may start styling our faces and limbs as we do our hair everyday! We would twist and turn our noses and ears and hair to make them look the way we want them to be. Pain is a sign of our body wisdom and renders us as integrated humans.

How many times do we think that by torturing the body, we can make ourselves better? Look at yourself when you are working out in the gym. You have this idea that only when you tire yourself out to the maximum and your muscles are crying out will you be able to build your body. There is nothing wrong with building a fit body but when that leads you to ignoring the signs of exhaustion and pain in the body, you are damaging it. Look at yourself in the gym and see how many times you are pushing how fast you can run on the treadmill based on how fast the person next to you is running.

I tell you, do not put limits and goals on yourself based on comparison with others; rely on your body wisdom and immense innate potential. Then, you will not just reach but you will breach the artificial limits that you have put on yourself. There are also people who torture the body as part of spiritual practices. In most cases, this only leads to insensitivity.

From a young age, we are taught that we are heroes if we ignore our bodies, if we push it beyond its limits. We are taught to tell our bodies to shut up if they complain. When you are in pain, you think that it will be less intense or go away if you ignore it.

I tell you, if you have pain in a part of the body, focus on that part. Giving attention is like giving energy. Attention is energy. When you focus on that part of the body, you give energy to that part which is exactly what it needs because the part is lacking energy.

In fact, we invite pain upon ourselves through lack of moderation in whatever we do. We actually often enjoy the pain as it brings us attention. It is established that humans can stay alive without food for 90 days but develop serious mental trauma if we are paid no attention for 14 days.

To sustain ourselves, we create a low energy pool of ailments and gladly suffer cold and cancer. Pain and dis-ease are often substitutes for lack of attention. They are signs that we are desperately seeking, begging and demanding attention.

A small story:

A man used to complain bitterly about the lunch he brought to work every day. He would open his lunch box and look at its contents with no joy and crib.

His friends would offer him part of their food and often he would refuse, and appear to suffer as he ate his own lunch.

His friends, one day, finally asked him why he didn't ask his wife to cook something he liked to eat, rather than suffering this way.

He exclaimed, 'What wife! I am not married. I cook my own lunch.'

Just like this man who made his own food and whined about his own creation, we too live our lives much the same way. Through lack of awareness, we invite pain upon ourselves, complain about it and resort to painkillers. We do not mind being afflicted by the same ailment again and again, since we do not identify ourselves as the cause of the problem. Responsibility for the pain is always some else's, never our own.

Pain is caused by absence of attention. Therefore it stands to reason that pain can be relieved by attention. Pain is a negative energy; it does not exist by itself; it is the absence of a positive energy. In the same way as darkness has a negative presence meaning it is just the absence of light and the presence of light removes darkness, pain is the absence of awareness eliminates pain.

When you hurt yourself, energy actually gushes to the bruised part to heal it. The rushing of this energy we feel as pain. But when we feel the pain, we start resisting it and then the energy flow to the part stops and healing also slows down. Instead, if we could focus on the pain with awareness and feel the healing happening with all that pain; feel it intensely; feel it until the pain becomes concentrated, shrinks in area and finally become a pin point and then disappears! You will find that if you do this, there will be no pain as you perceived it earlier and the part has healed as well.

The next time you have some pain in any part of the body, try this:

Lie in a dark room with eyes closed and focus upon the point of pain to the exclusion of all else. As you experience the point of pain, drop the notion of 'pain' from your mind. Focus all your attention at this spot and soon you will find it shrinking. Concentrate further and you find that the pain has disappeared and in its place you experience pleasure; pain and pleasure are the same sensation with different tags. Your awareness of pain has caused it to disappear and bring in a positive energy of pleasure. Just try this.

I tell this from my own experience:

Once, after I got out of a car, the driver closed the door accidentally on my finger.

My crewmembers started panicking.

• I told them to keep quiet. There was intense pain but no suffering from it. I could distinctly see the finger swelling. I could distinctly feel the energy welling up in the navel center and flowing towards the finger to fill up the lack of energy.

I could see healing happening.

It became alright in just a few minutes.

The devotees were shocked. I told them that this is what I preach and this is the truth so there is nothing to be surprised about! I showed it practically to them at a time when they were not ready for it! Usually only in the meditation hall these things are experienced when one is ready for it. Here they saw it happening in a very practical situation.

Descartes said, 'I think; therefore, I am.' Vedanta says, 'When you stop thinking, you are.' Descartes could not reconcile the mind-body connection.

There is no mind and no body: it is mind-body; it is one. Scientists now know that intelligence resides at the cellular level; not just in our brains. Every single cell of our body is gifted with intelligence to carry out its own functions and to coordinate the functions of related cells. DNA, the carrier of our genetic code, is embedded with our memories and emotions, imprinting not merely physical but mental, emotional and psychic characteristics as well. As our DNA is, so is our perception of the world!

We are not even integrated within ourselves. We mostly live the upper part of our body. When you try to recall someone's name, you always try to put the name to the person's face, never to the lower limbs of the person. Even when you try to visualize yourself, you will be able to visualize only up to the chest probably; just try it. Only the upper portion will come to your mind.

When such separation is created, the energy flows only to parts that get attention. Our face and arms feel more alive and sensitive than our feet. Just feel the skin on your face. The moment you touch it, you will feel the touch, able to feel the entire pressure that you apply on it. But if you touch your feet, you will find that you need to press much harder to create any sensitivity in the skin. You have to apply a lot more pressure to even feel the touch. This is because our lower parts have become much less sensitive due to lack of our attention, our energy on them.

Do you ever look at someone's hands or feet and remember the person based on that identification? No! You need to see their face and then your face lights up in recognition.

So coming back to the subject of pain, a small story:

Two men were walking on an unknown forest path.

A sudden flash of lightning startled them.

One of them was frightened and confused and started looking for a shelter to protect him. The other wiser one, stayed calm and used the light that the lightning provided to observe what lay ahead, and moved on ahead in the path.

Pain is like that lightning. We have no control over when, how and why it happens. All we can do is to choose whether to suffer from it or learn from it. If we use the opportunity of that pain experience to look inside us, we discover we are the cause and that only we can be the solution.

When you observe pain deeply, you realize that you are not the body. No pain can affect the real You. When you overcome pain, you experience the rare freedom arising out of non-attachment. You then exist as an Atman, as an enlightened Master. Pain can be the gateway to bliss, your key to enlightenment.

As the great Master, Ashtavakra said, 'An object of enjoyment that comes of itself is neither painful nor pleasurable for someone who has eliminated attachment and who is free from dualism and from desire. Righteousness and unrighteousness, pleasure and pain are purely of the mind and are no concern of yours. You are neither the doer nor the reaper of the consequences, so you are always free.'

What I said about physical pain applies equally to emotional pain as well. We need to accept emotional pains too. When we feel hurt and angry through other people's actions, we need to accept these emotions without judgment of who is right or wrong. Suppressing these emotions can cause lasting harm. When you feel hurt or angry, just watch them; don't feel sorry for yourself: do not direct the anger against another person. With some time, within some days, you will see a transformation of that emotion. You will see your own transformation. All emotion is energy; how long can it last without being fed by additional negative emotions?

When we accept hurt, anger and pain with understanding and awareness, compassion results. True compassion transforms anger, pain and hurt into love and bliss.

We speak of allowing freedom to those we love. Love is unconditional freedom; to talk of giving freedom in love makes no sense; you are holding back. Love can be a door to freedom and joy or to living hell. If you love someone, let that person is yours, he or she will come back. Otherwise that person was never yours anyway.

If you truly love someone, anyone, respond with unconditional love to whatever the other person's emotion is, with no expectation of the return of such love. Initially this may seem difficult, even artificial. Once you try this approach a few times and see the effect upon your relationships you will never wish to do it any other way. People will see the difference in you and respond in kind, with no expectation from you.

To live life without pain and suffering, become aware of that emotion. Then accept the present, the here and now. Awareness with acceptance is the way out of pain and suffering. Suffering is important in life for growth. When you understand suffering though, you will realize how unnecessary it is for you to suffer! This is what is called acceptance. Acceptance is not any passive submission, not any suppression. It is that which happens out of awareness, on its own. It flowers on its own: you don't have to make an effort to accept. When you make an effort, it is submission; when it happens on its own, it is acceptance. People often mistake acceptance to be an effort to compromise or an effort to suppress the true feelings. No. It is that which happens out of deep awareness.

When you transcend both pain and pleasure, which are both one and the same, you experience Bliss, which is perfect harmony, inner silence and total peace.

Emotionally and mentally, pain arises out of our resistance to the present. Such pain is addictive and creates a negative energy field around us that we can refer to as the Pain Body. Emotional imbalance disturbs the physical body; sexual repression leads to back pain; the sense of bearing high responsibilities causes shoulder pain. When you are in unfriendly company, your body seems to shrink. When we resist through all these methods, pain arises and manifests itself in all these parts. Pain calls for our attention because attention is energy.

Let me tell you something that actually happened:

A young man was brought to me by his parents. He had suddenly lost his eyesight.

His parents were desperate to somehow revive his eyesight.

They said that the doctors could find nothing wrong with his visionary apparatus.

I requested to talk to the boy in private.

When I spoke to him in private. he confided that his parents had forbidden him to see the girl he loved.

His mind had then decided that when he could not see the girl he most wanted to see. his eyes would rather not see anything and he had actually lost his eyesight. I made him meditate upon a photograph of the girl for a few days and he regained his sight.

It is the mind that causes a lot of seemingly unconnected physical effects. The Bhagavata Purana. which recounts the various incarnations of Lord Vishnu, the Sustainer in the Hindu trinity, especially His incarnation as Lord Krishna, says this about Krishna and Radha:

Radha was born at about the same time as Krishna. Radha would not open her eyes till she was brought before Krishna. When asked about this in later years, she said, 'What else was there for me to see in this world? I was born for Krishna, and He was all who mattered to me. I waited till I came to Him to open my eyes so that I could see Him.' Radha's attention was only upon Krishna even from her birth; nothing else mattered.

Our senses carry deep intelligence. When our actions are contrary to what the senses deeply desire, they stop functioning. We feel so insensitive about what our body feels; we are so ignorant about the intelligence of our body that we end up ignoring it and damaging it.

Most of us hate our bodies. I conducted a meditation program wherein I asked people to write down how they would like to be at the end of the program. The papers came back to me. There were varied notes about how they would like to be, running through physical, mental, spiritual and economic levels. But 99% of the notes had one point in them and that was that they wanted to be more beautiful. A few of them instead of saying this had said that they wanted to be more comfortable with their own body. Both really mean the same, that they did not like their present body. The second set of people was more aware: they wrote that they only wanted enough intelligence to be more comfortable with their bodies.

Our body is such a beautiful mechanism. We can take care of it so lovingly. It is because of this body that you are here today listening to me! The body is your vehicle. It is a temple. It has to be taken care of like a temple that houses the Divine which is really your being. You should take care of it like a flower.

Just look at how many times you gulp down spicy food even though your eyes may be watering and your tongue burning. Just to satisfy your sense of taste, you ignore the pleas of your body and then, when it is not able to handle it and leads to acidity or something else, you complain. Be sensitive to what the body tells you; there is tremendous intelligence already residing in it.

A popular sports gear advertisement reads, 'If your body tells you to stop, tell your body to shut up.' We are advised to ignore our body, to tell it to get lost.

Most of the time, we tell our body to shut up instead of listening to it as we ought to. No other living creature needs an alarm clock to wake up or a sleeping pill to go to bed. We, in fact, pride ourselves on using an alarm clock and sleeping pills. We talk about how much we can drink, how late we can party, how hard we can work and how badly we can treat ourselves and our body. No wonder we need more food to stop feeling hungry, more drugs to overcome illness, more wine to get drunk and more television to stop feeling bored.

Our body has tremendous intelligence built into it. A vast majority of our body activity is controlled by the autonomous nervous system that takes care of us in spite of us. Do we ever give inputs consciously to our body pertaining to breathing, digestion, maintaining our balance or even regulating our sleep-wake cycle? No! If we needed to worry about doing these things, we would be a bag of knots, not with two hands and two feet and a straight spine. Our body survives in spite of us, not because of us.

This is the miracle of body intelligence.

Our mind and body interact very closely and influence each other in amazing ways. Over 85% of our physical ailments are influenced by the mind and are psychosomatic. The mind has the power to both cause and cure diseases.

In a path-breaking experiment in Japan on allergies, patients were tested with allergy causing plants, by placing leaves on them while blind folded. It was found that patients reacted even when plants to which they had no allergies were placed on their skin and were told that these were the allergy causing substances. What was even more amazing was, when the allergy causing plant leaves were placed on their skin and they were given the name of a plant that did not cause allergy, they had no allergic reaction! Similarly, in multiple personality tests, it was found that the same person reacted differently to allergic substances depending on the state the person was in.

PET scanners show that memories evoke different chemical patterns in the brain. Instantly, this information is spread through the body to the cellular structure. We then react to these memories. That is why we say, our body is truly a reflection of our thoughts!

The human body consists of trillions of cells living in total harmony. If you look at the individual cell itself though. it has intelligence by itself and can survive if isolated and even if the nucleus is removed. When it is a part of the larger whole, the body, it is not the intelligence of the individual cell at work but a central intelligence that governs and this ensures that this remarkable system of your human body can work smoothly. The studies by Dr. Bruce Lipton, a Stanford biologist, have gone into much detail to prove this.

Take the example of Lance Armstrong, the famous biker who has become the epitome of courage and grit. Lance was a very successful professional biker who was ranked the number one biker in the world. He won a number of prestigious tournaments and was at the top of his career when he was literally forced off his bike by an excruciating pain. To his horror, he was diagnosed with cancer that had spread all over his body. But his courage and determination, the power of his mind, gave him tremendous potential to not just get back to normal but also gave him the strength to get back to his passion for biking. He totally recovered from the deadly disease. He trained hard enough and returned to not just participate but to win the most strenuous cycling championships, Tour de France, 6 times! What to most people would have come as a lethal blow, killing the spirit and eventually the body, became a turning point for this man who has now become a great source of inspiration and hope for thousands of people.

When you stress yourself out with too much of work or lack of enough rest, be aware that you are damaging your mind and body. Research has shown that under constant stress, the neurons in the pre-frontal cortex, which is the region of the brain responsible for emotions and decision-making, shrivel up and die.

Whenever we face any perceived threat, either internal as in an infection or external, the mindbody goes into a defensive mode. This causes blood to be diverted from growth areas of the body such as the intestines, heart, lung etc. to exterior limbs such as legs and arms, so that we are better prepared for either flight or fight to save ourselves.

If such adrenalin rushes happen frequently, without adequate release potential, serious stress to the mind-body results. Repeated fear strokes of imagining ghosts or spirits every time one sees a shadowy movement in the dark can reduce one to a nervous wreck. Such is the power of the mind over body.

Threat of fear is more dangerous than fear itself. We can cope with fear by facing the fear. In the case of threat of fear, we need understanding. Terrorists take advantage of this human weakness. All they have to do is to keep one under the threat of fear without having to actually commit any act of terror. That by itself can reduce even the strongest person to a fearful one.

Understanding why our strengths can be depleted through fear and greed and other negative emotions can help us use our energy sources better.

We have immense energy, the entire cosmic energy at our disposal; we only need to know how to tap it.

Let me narrate to you a real incident that happened in my life:

I was in North Bharat as a young boy amongst a group of spiritual aspirants. The place we were in had a number of tigers that used to be on the prowl after nightfall. It was the practice to ring a huge bell if anybody sensed danger so as to alert the others. One day, the bell rang and all of us hurried to the nearest shelter possible. The next morning, when we assembled, we noticed that one of us was missing. Fearing the worst, we started searching and calling out for him. We heard a feeble voice coming from one of the makeshift shelters. We hurried to it and asked the person to come out. He replied. 'I cannot. There is a huge stone blocking the door and I cannot move it.' A few of us young boys managed to go into the shelter through the window. We saw a huge stone next to the door and it took all of us collectively to move it away. After we came out, we asked the man how the stone reached there in the first place. He replied, 'Last night, on hearing the bell sounding the alarm, I was terrified and ran towards this shelter. On the way. I saw this huge stone. I just lifted it and put it behind the door to ensure the tiger can in no way open it.' All of us were amazed as at how one person could have lifted this huge stone himself and now,

when the threat was gone, how he could no longer muster the same energy and it took three or four of us to move the stone, leave alone lift it.

You see, under tremendous fear the energy in us just opens out and becomes available to do things. This hidden energy is not available to us during non-emergency times because then our mind is not geared up for that kind of activity. However, during times of emergency, the energy simply opens out beyond the control of our mind. Even if you feel fatigued, the energy gush happens and makes things work.

Our body has access to multiple levels of energy including this layer that opens up when we are faced with fear, with the instinct to survive. A woman who would normally be terrified when she sees a vehicle speeding towards her, will suddenly find the energy to rush into the road when she sees her child's life in danger of the oncoming vehicle.

Realize that our body and mind have much more potential than we typically use them for. At the same time, they need to be respected for their potential and not abused by comparing our abilities

with others and wanting to be like others. All of us have been given all that we need. However, we do not have all that we want because our wants are based on just what we see around us and want to have.

Both our mind and body are expressions of the same consciousness. The mind and body are rooted in consciousness. They cannot and do not function separately. Unless we respect both equally, we can never be integrated individuals. Contrary to what some may believe, I say that the way to spirituality is only through the body.

Make peace with your body. Become aware of your body. You can then sense what the body needs, even before you become consciously aware of the need. Drop the idea of controlling your body. Do not tie yourself up in knots causing yourself pain when your body cries out to you to stop torturing it. Trust in your body wisdom. Only by deeply understanding your body with clarity and compassion, will you be able to find a way to go beyond it.

Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita said: This body, O son of Kunti, is called the field, and one who knows this body is called the knower of the field.