A YOGI CHA BLOG

Something is trying to express itself

SOMETHING IS TRYING TO EXPRESS ITSELF

Your body is a blueprint of your life: what does this mean?

It means that exactly everything has a reason for being, we could even call it karma.

Every action has its consequence. 

It means that the way your body is holding itself up, the size of each part of your body, the muscle structure, the fat, everything has a story behind it. Everything that has happened to us, every experience is traced.

Nothing can go away.

We can call this “charge”. If everything is made up of energy, each event the affects you, leaves a trace of the energetic charge inside of you.

A thought has a charge.

You know that – you can feel a rise or decrease of your energy levels just by thinking one thought.

What we need is the translation of this charge when we begin the work of self discovery. The manual, the map to the land that is my body. It truly is an unfolding of a secret pathway.

Let me give you an example from my own life: a few years back while I was in Mysore, practicing with my teacher there and having as only concern, my daily ashtanga. I had developed a real love-hate (more hate to be honest) relationship to one of the deeper twists and noticing that it was mainly on one hip that I had big difficulties. One morning, I realised that I had lots of thoughts and even images coming to me during this pose and, feeling rather sensitive, I laid down for a long rest as I came back to my room. I realised that a traumatic experience 7 years earlier had left a much deeper scar than the small visual one on my lower abdomen. Back when it happened, it was just my body that went through a minor surgery and had never felt a need to process any of it on an emotional level.

What we don’t always realise, is that there are hidden charges within an experience. For instance, it is only during this “flashback” that I realised the fear of pain that I have linked to this experience. That fear had underlying beliefs of vulnerability, of not being enough just as I am and even fear of intimacy.

I wasn’t even aware of that when it happened, I took it for face value and just wanted to get over it.

After this realisation: it took me another couple of weeks and I mastered the pose. Today it is one of my favourite poses.  True story. 

But all of it was charge in this experience. Unlike animals (think ducks after a fight), humans don’t turn around and shake the overload of energy off of them. It stays and becomes a story of itself. It becomes a part of your armour – of your body.

The stronger the armour: the more blocked energy we keep. The more crystallised, the more structured we are, the more we follow exact patterns that were traced for us. There is righteousness and honour and pride in that. A strong and detailed tailored persona- i.e social identity. And the stronger the persona is, the darker the shadow is too.

When we block the energy in parts of the body, that we rather not deal with (tuck it away in the shadow), we numb that part.

Understand that the tightness you experience is not imposed on you by an external force. You are doing it to yourself. You don’t feel like you are, but you are. The same way you make your heart beat. Involuntary. You don’t need to focus on it for it to happen, yet it is your own doing.

When we numb parts of the body, when we numb our feelings, we disconnect. When we disconnect we feel isolated, we feel fear. We can’t choose to numb out just one type of experience, we disconnect from our feeling body and so we cannot feel positive things either. This is how we start to develop an incapacity to enjoy things, especially the small things in life. We need more and more to experience any kind of excitement. We become addicted to adrenaline and like any addiction, we need more intensity to keep the effect of it going.

When we come to a point where we need to stimulate more and more to even just feel anything, we have depleted our being of its own essence: sensations.

The physical manifestations are of course tiredness, lack of excitement, feeling incapable to engage with others. The typical symptoms of depression.

Everything is dull.

We need to break out of the numbness in order to actually feel again. And to feel is the first step towards ALIVENESS.

Now here is the nut to crack : you need to allow yourself to feel the pain first of all. You need sit with it and even though it can seem unbearable, it is truly the only way to open to all other sensations again.

“When things feels unbearable, underneath that, the heart is the strongest.” Mark Nepo