Why do the truths we carry in our bodies translate readily into understanding, but the truths we learn in our minds rarely find their way into our bones?
Our mind is like a gifted student, and our body a sage. The knowledge that the student learns, the teacher lives and breathes for years.
The forgotten intelligence
We are addicted to certainty, and we fear mystery. We have been systematically trained to respond to and seek evidence of certainty. Because of this, we perceive the mind as the highest power a human can exert. It becomes our anchor, even when it floats loosely in the air, high above the ground.
What truly connects us to the ground is our earthly flesh and bones.
Our body as a whole is a much more sophisticated intelligence than our mind.
It is our body that combines multiple dimensions of comprehension we possess, one of which is our intellect.
Visible light belongs to only a small segment of the whole electromagnetic spectrum, while the rest creates the entire universe. In the same way, our intellect takes up only a small fraction of the spectrum of human intelligence.
What we can explain with the limited capacity of the mind is not everything our reality is made of.
Mind is an instrument that can help aid change, but not be the cause of it. Especially when the change we hope to make is of a larger and deeper proportion.
If what we are trying to alter are the conditionings from childhood and behaviours that have been an integral part of our identity, a mere insight won’t do much.
How real change speaks to us
Certain words penetrate deeper than others.
A certain gaze sees much further than the rest.
Why is that?
Why do some words have the power to charge the forgotten cells of our body and mind?
Some would say those words go deep enough to speak directly to our limbic brain.
Others might say they carry a frequency that stirs us anew.
A few would state we woke up ancient wisdom stored deep within our collective mind.
Either way, they feel like they carry more warmth and love than all the others combined.
The Tender Nature of Transformation
How do we offer that warmth to ourselves? How do we touch these tender parts of our subtle body? How do we trigger the change we want to create?
It’s on each individual to explore and find the combination of practices and techniques that works best for them, without one being the ultimate solution that works on its own and for all.
But what we all need to remind ourselves of are three things:
- Patience and compassion are the key components – what we create without them won’t be real;
- Humility is our anchor; grace is the current on which we ride;
- The final destination, the point of ultimate resolution, does not exist.
Techniques and practices aren’t what cause us trouble. Where we struggle the most is forgetting about the nature of initiating change.
It can’t be done out of fear, urgency, and hate.
In its core, change is tender, warm, and accepting.
It embraces us just as a mother gently rocks her baby.
Mother accepts the cries, knowing it’s a natural state of her perfectly healthy baby.
We are safe in the process of change, just like a newborn in its mother’s embrace.
It’s shaky and loud, it rocks us from side to side, but what it truly does is soothe us into the calm.
We don’t carry our body – our body carries us. When we surrender to it – to its wisdom – we are in our mother’s embrace.
The rhytm of being
To be human is not to hop from one point of clarity to a clearer point of clarity, with no contrast in between. We are riding a wave of human experience, and the wave hits highs as much as it hits lows. Everything is a continuity from what was before.
The wave gets us to phases similar to the ones we experienced before. We oscillate from a 30-year-old to a 3-year-old as frequently as needed, until the change slowly becomes palpable.
What’s left in the end is to trust.
To accept, listen, try to learn and understand.
The river is not wrong if swimming upstream doesn’t bring us far.
What we can do today is have faith that one day we’ll be able to understand with our mind what our body understands and asks for right now.
Having patience that the timing required for certain processes to complete, for integration to happen, is out of our hands, and therefore irrelevant.
What’s left to do is to take it step by step, wavelength by wavelength, and to surrender to the way we’re being embraced by life.
