YOUR BODY REFLECTS YOUR THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS🔗

Take a good look at your body. How do you feel about your body? We all carry impressions, ideas about our own bodies. We carry a lot of negative feelings about our bodies. You may not even be aware, but in your unconscious mind you will be carrying deep negative impressions about your body. Understand, most of these impressions are not even your own! Almost always, you have picked up these impressions from other people's opinions of you. Very, very rarely have I come across someone who is completely comfortable with his body. To be comfortable with one's body does not mean assuming everything about your body is good. It is just being at ease with your body the way it is. The attitude that we constantly carry towards our body is reflected in the body itself. Our body carries a powerful bio-memory. When I spoke about samskaras, we saw how the physical body stores the tamas (inertia) engrams. Similarly, any thought or emotion we experience is immediately recorded in our body. Have you noticed how many physical and chemical changes occur in your body when you are overcome by a powerful emotion like fear, desire, anger or pain? Your thoughts and emotions are all powerful energies! Because the body picks up and stores these energies created by our constantly changing emotions and thoughts, we all have disturbances, energy blockages, complexes and imbalances in our physical system.

Right from a young age, we learn to suppress our natural emotions - because in society, we cannot always express ourselves as we wish! For example, when you get angry, the body immediately produces the chemicals necessary for fight. The body produces enough energy to attack a man! Because anger is an essential survival tool for all animals, the body prepares you for fighting the other. But in our civilized society, we can't always express our anger. The other person might be someone you are afraid of - maybe your boss, or your wife! So whatever energy is generated, remains unused. This excess energy stagnates in your body and creates a block in the energy flow. The same thing happens with all emotions - desire, fear or grief. Most of the time, you are afraid to let your body express itself. You live in deep fear and mistrust of your body. You think that your body doesn't know the language of civilization; that it doesn't recognize the rules of society. If you set your body free, who knows what might happen? Who knows what your body might do? So you think you have to control; you have to repress. When you continuously suppress your emotions, not only do they create blocks in your physical body, they eventually lead to mental illness as well. For instance, continuously repressing anger can lead to hysteria. In the same way, mental disturbances can manifest as physical diseases. Not only cardiac disease or migraines, even skin allergies and peptic ulcers are caused by stress. Recent research has shown that over 80% of our diseases are psychosomatic in nature - that is, our physical and mental states are both responsible for these diseases.

Many of the meditation techniques are deep cleansing processes which can help you dissolve these blocks and repressions in your body. Once you are free of these blocks, you will see for yourself how your body blooms naturally. Your body begins to look more beautiful, more divine. You will enjoy a beautiful and friendly relationship with your body.

When I tell you, ‘You are Consciousness’, I don’t mean that you are a point of consciousness hiding in some corner of your body. No! I mean, your very body is made of consciousness. Your very cells are centers of consciousness. The body is the most visible expression of your consciousness.

Understand, your body is a powerhouse of conscious energy! See, electricity is also energy, but it is a blind energy. Electric current does not have its own intelligence. If you fix a bulb in the socket, it will glow. If you put your hand in the socket, it will give you an electric shock, that’s all! It doesn’t know where to go or how to work. But the energy in your body is not like that. It is a conscious energy.

Your body is not a simple mechanical system as you think. It is a highly evolved system of distributed intelligence. Understand, every cell in your body has intelligence! We have been taught that the center of our consciousness is in our brain. We think that we control the body through our brain; it is the brain which controls respiration, digestion, blood circulation, and all such activities.

Now there is a new field called epigenetics, which is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. One of the pioneers in this field, Dr. Bruce Lipton, an eminent biologist, has been doing research in the field of epigenetics for over ten years.

In his book, ‘The Biology of Belief’, he states that our brain does not control our body. There is evidence of intelligence in every cell, even in the cell’s membrane! In recent research at Sandia National Laboratories, USA, scientists studied how cells responded to a harmful substance called an antigen that attacked the cells in the body. They concluded that even the cell membrane had a unique structure to fight the antigen so that it could not enter the cell!

The biggest miracle of cellular intelligence is the growth of a baby from a single cell! The human body starts from a single cell, which replicates and becomes about 250 different types of specialized cells performing different functions in the body. Which means, the same cell knows whether to grow into a bone or a muscle or a blood cell, depending on where it is going to be used! And just to maintain and coordinate the activities of all these cells, millions of things need to be done each second. With all this, your body manages to function as a single organism, a harmonious whole! Your body is the best example of distributed intelligence.

Because the body is always with you like an old friend, you simply take it for granted! You are not even aware of the daily miracles being performed by your body. Every day, your body converts bread into blood! Do you know any machine that can do that? In fact, the whole process is so complex, that if we wanted to set up an industry that could do the same job, it would run into a few miles! Not only that, the body beautifully regulates the body temperature, blood pressure and blood sugar and heart function without any help from you! And do you know, your brain is only about the size of about two fists?

But to date, scientists around the world have not been able to replicate tasks that the brain does so effortlessly. I read a recent research report which said that ten linguists, working full-time for ten years, could not program a computer to learn a language as perfectly as a human baby does! Just think, when your body can grow, digest food, pump blood, fight disease, learn new things, adapt to change and perform a thousand other complicated tasks without help, you are still worrying, 'Will my headache get better on its own, or should I see a doctor? Do you see the foolishness?

Your body has a natural self-healing power. There is an automatic intelligence which is constantly rejuvenating and even replacing the cells in your entire body. If some part of the body is damaged, your body intelligence can heal or replace the damaged cells. You can see it at work when you see a cut or a wound healing itself even without any effort on your part. But when the ego or mind interferes, this natural process is interrupted. Constantly, cells replace themselves and the body repairs itself. You might ask, 'Then why does the same disease occur again and again in my body? If my body is again and again replacing itself, rejuvenating itself, then why do I carry the same disease?' This happens only because you strongly believe that the disease is continuing! You carry the same mental setup that strongly believes that you are not well. This is what stops the self-healing process from happening in your body. All you need to do is just trust the automatic intelligence which is in you and relax.

Energy is intelligence. Your being is intelligence.

The problem is, you never trust that your being is intelligent. You measure yourself only by your weakest link, and you are not your weakest link. Be aware, you are far more than your weakest link! The strength of a chain can be measured based on the weakest link, but the strength of your being cannot be measured this way, because you are something more than what you think you are.

Actually, your body has the capacity to heal every disease, physical or mental, however complex it might be.

Once a young man came to me and asked me to help him quit smoking. I asked him how he picked up the habit in the first place. He said, ‘One day, I had gone out with a group of friends who were all smokers. I happened to meet my father on the street that day. Seeing me with a group of boys who were all smoking, my father assumed that I had been smoking too. When I returned home, he accused me of smoking, and refused to believe me.

The next day, I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, just to spite my father! In that way I gradually got addicted.’ He asked me how to drop the habit. I told him, ‘Don’t drop it! Go ahead and smoke. But don’t do it to prove anything to anybody. Don’t do it to spite your father. And don’t imagine that you have become mature and independent by smoking!

Every time you pick up a cigarette, do it silently. Be conscious of why you are smoking. Consciously feel the smoke entering your system. Be aware of how you hold the cigarette, how you put it in your mouth. You will realize on your own.’ After just a few days the boy returned to me. He said, ‘Swamiji, I am not able to smoke anymore! Doing it consciously, I started wondering how I could send so much smoke into my system! Also I realized that smoking is not that important to me after all.’

When we become conscious of what we are doing, many things drop on their own. This is the only permanent solution. Of course it may take a few days to awaken the body intelligence. Your body intelligence may have gone to sleep, because you haven't used it for so many years! During that time, the important thing is, not to lose hope and fall back on the borrowed intelligence that you have picked up from society. Have trust in the natural intelligence of your body, that's all. Don't try to control the body, because whatever you try to control will express itself in some other way. The body will refuse to be controlled! Just bring awareness into every action, and trust in your natural intelligence.

As I told you, you have an independent intelligence in your system which runs your life beautifully without your interference. Whether you accept it or not, whether you believe it or not, that tremendous intelligence is operating every single moment. Because you don't realize this, you constantly feel that life has to be different from what it is at the present moment. Trusting that intelligence and relaxing is what I call devotion. Surrendering to that higher intelligence is true surrender. Living in harmony with our natural intelligence is living a spiritual life.

Q. Swamiji, it is better to start with a sitting meditation or an active meditation?

A. In the beginning, it is better to start with active or dynamic techniques. When you are just entering into meditation, there might be too much disturbance inside you. All the garbage you have collected over the years will be sitting inside, waiting to jump on you! Straightaway, if you try to sit still and meditate, all you will be witnessing is the terrible disturbance inside. Understand, meditation releases tremendous energy and awareness inside you. Whatever you have suppressed, all the physical and mental disturbances, everything will start bubbling to the surface. If you try to witness all this, you will just go crazy! You won't be able to cope. Dynamic meditation is like wiping the slate clean before you start writing on it. Dynamic meditation is like de-addiction! It is a deprogramming process. Have you noticed, when your body is active, your mind can't move? When your mind is still, all the chaos in the deeper layers of your system has a chance to come to the surface and be thrown out. These techniques are outwardly chaotic, but inwardly, they can lead you to an experience of peace, of silence. That is why I allow your chaos, your madness! When you move your body wildly, you will see that the opposite experience begins to happen inside you. You become aware of a silent point within you, untouched by the chaos on the outside. See, the opposite is always the focus of awareness! When you try to sit silently, you begin to be aware of all the madness inside, all your suppressed thoughts, your words and confusions. When you are moving chaotically, you become aware of the stillness and bliss inside you.

So when you are just getting into meditation, choose dynamic techniques. Once you have settled into meditation, once you have cleaned out your system, you can try any technique you want.