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Body n MindLook At Your Emotions - Your Body's Reaction To Your Mind
There is a very powerful connection between "body n mind".
Our minds are the repositories of all of our pre-programmed reactions and response patterns.
Our bodies are the vehicles through which our emotional reactions arise and are expressed.
Emotion is your body's reaction to your mind. Emotion is the felt response to a thought, so for those of us who tend to identify very strongly with our thinking (which is to say most of us most of the time) there is a corresponding emotional response of equal or greater strength. When we go through tough times we generate a lot of emotion and the "body n mind" effect of this can be quite overwhelming. I know from my own personal experience that learning how to anticipate and manage my own responses to difficult situations is hard work. In the article "my experience of mindfulness" I have shared an anecdote about how I learned to deal with a particularly stressful business on a large project I was involved with about 12 years ago.
These were the key lessons I learned:
I learned this three-fold lesson fairly quickly, not because of any great insight or spiritual maturity on my part, but, as a matter of simple personal survival! Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh summarises this beautifully: "A feeling or an emotion arises, persists, and then disappears. Mindfulness enables us to be calm throughout the appearance and disappearance of feelings. To acknowledge feelings with an even mind is the very best way; while we are acknowledging them in mindfulness, slowly, slowly we come to a deep realisation of their nature. It is that insight which will enable us to be free and at ease as we face each feeling." [The Blooming of a Lotus] As you explore this site you will see that the practise of mindfulness is referred to on many occasions and this is because mindfulnes really is one of the simplest and most powerful ways of managing the "mind n body" relationship.
Many of us have a tendency to "over-think" things and create additional emotional reactions in the form of stress. In my experience this is particularly true when we are experiencing tough times. It becomes a habit to carry all this stuff around with us, for many of us it as though there is (what we have come to regard as) an acceptable of "internal static". In fact many of us are quite disconnected from our true feelings. This is where the practise of mindfulness provides deep insight and clarity as to what is actually going on inside of us. The "body n mind" connection can be extremely useful in determining what our true feelings are in a particular situation or with a difficult decision that we have to make.
How to think - Main Themes
Supporting Articles
The following articles develop and support the main themes and should be read in conjunction with the main pages under the relevant theme. Please see:
Return from "Body n mind" to "Tools of the mind"
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