Читать книгу The Language Your Body Speaks - Ellen Meredith - Страница 11
ОглавлениеDIVING INTO THE LANGUAGE OF ENERGY
Language is more than just words and sentence structure. It embraces all the ways you codify your experience and how you exchange with others. Similarly, healing is more than just finding techniques to fix what is wrong. Using the language of energy to heal includes finding ways to address and shift how you experience and interact with life.
Some years ago I was captivated by the film Arrival, starring Amy Adams, which really brought this concept of language home to me. In the film, Adams plays a linguistics professor recruited by the army to figure out how to communicate with an alien spacecraft, one of twelve encircling the globe. Adams is in a race against time to discover who these beings are and what their intentions toward the planet might be.
The bulk of the film shows how a linguist can figure out the workings of a language (and whether a language even exists) when the speakers don’t use sound, words, or other linguistic building blocks we are familiar with. In the case of these beings — spoiler alert — Adams comes to realize that they communicate by emitting smoke-like glyphs, a kind of bar-code language, in conjunction with telepathy: mind-to-mind shaping of experience and concepts.
Most fascinating to me was that the film does not stop with the linguistic triumph of cracking the code of the language. It shows how Adams’s character learns to understand the mindset of these visitors — their conceptions of time, space, and connection — that make them clearly kindred spirits. The film is not about learning vocabulary and grammar. It is about communication itself — finding shared expression, dialoguing, expressing meaning (the aliens need help to save their world) — and about the relationships that form when communication is successful.
Each time you enter into energy dialogue with yourself, you are investigating what your body, spirit, and mind are trying to express in a multidimensional language that is not composed of words and sentences. Through this dialogue, you are building a deeper, more-engaged relationship with yourself.
Sylvia, who was diagnosed with two kinds of metastatic stage IV cancer, had a similarly urgent mission to learn how to communicate with a body that was screaming at her in life-and-death terms. She needed to learn the language of energy and to dialogue with her body, spirit, and mind in order to figure out what would save her planet.
A hard worker who gave selflessly to her many children and grandchildren, Sylvia kept a family business going and was the glue holding a whole extended family together. As great as she was at caring for others, her selflessness took its toll on her body. She sought medical care too late and was not a candidate for chemo. Essentially, she was sent home to die.
Because the diagnosis was so severe, it liberated her to think outside the box. She decided that whether she was going to live or die, she would make each moment count. She would listen to her body and let it guide her and teach her each moment she had left. Using what she knew from parenting preverbal infants, she tuned in over and over again to perceive what her body wanted, needed, and was trying to communicate.
Her focus was not to delay death but to catch hold of life.
Sylvia learned simple energy medicine techniques to get her energies circulating and interacting more effectively. She engaged in an hour-by-hour experiment to recognize what her energies were asking of her, rather than following a preprogrammed cancer protocol. She listened to what foods spoke to her, and she brought in more life force via fruits, vegetables, and juicing. She experimented with other nutritional supports that showed up on her radar in synchronous ways.
Most important for her self-healing journey, she focused her ability to care for others onto herself, reassessing what mattered to her, letting go of all agendas except for dialoguing with her body, taking in the love her family gave her, letting go of needing to be the glue for her family, and deepening her spiritual practice.
A year later, she was pronounced cancer-free.
Sylvia didn’t discover some formula for using energy medicine (or nutrition and spiritual inputs) to heal cancer, since it wasn’t cancer that got healed: It was Sylvia. The cancer was a very loud shout from her body saying something had gone wrong in her body-mind-spirit communications. The path to healing was how Sylvia dialogued with her energies, supporting her three selves to draw in the behaviors, substances, and healthier storyline that allowed her immune system to find a new normal.
Your body has the inbuilt ability to heal, to adapt, and to function under diverse circumstances. No one else heals it: not the doctor, the shaman, the energy healer, the beloved, or the medication. When we heal, we are not attacking disease; we are finding ease. We are not eradicating illness; we are redefining wellness and living it. We are not just seeking absence of pain or symptoms; we are listening to and responding to the pain and symptoms in recognition of what they are communicating. This is what Sylvia’s body taught her.
Pain and symptoms are messengers. The goal, before we sedate or mute them, is to receive the message, thank the messenger sincerely, and then offer that messenger what comfort is possible within the context of responding to the messages.
Cultivating wellness moment by moment will support the body’s amazing ability to heal. Here are some major keys to self-healing you might find helpful:
•Come back to the breath.
•Step into the now.
•Engage in authentic dialogue with your energies.
•Affirm core truths.
•Make space for your body to heal.
•Choose actions, thoughts, and environments that support well-being.
This can’t happen if we are busy blah-blah-blahing to the body with chemicals, blasting it with complex and expensive treatments, expecting practitioners to do all the work, and buying into disease models that the body can’t understand. The body understands wellness. When it falls away from that, the key to self-healing is to get creative in finding ways to guide it back home!
FIRST LANGUAGE
Like the language used by the aliens in Arrival, the language your body speaks is much more complex, dynamic, and multidimensional than merely sounds organized into words, arrayed in sentences and paragraphs. If you have ever been blessed to be around infants and watched them engage with the world around them — learning sounds and gestures and how to communicate their needs — you have a baseline familiarity with this first language.
Right from the start, infants have ways of communicating. They don’t say, “Please pass me a new diaper”! They wriggle, shift their breathing, or turn red and wail. They look around or fix their gaze. They turn toward the loving arms that are holding them, or they stretch and go rigid and struggle to move away. Any experienced parent will tell you that infants are each unique in temperament and in how they communicate. That is part of the fun (and frustration) of parenting. What is going on for these little beings, newly arrived? Who are they, and how can we communicate with them? How can we soothe, nourish, love, protect, teach, and stimulate them and speak their language?
When you were an infant, long before you learned your native tongue, you were activating the language of energy. You vocalized, babbled, and explored sounds that communicate and move energy. Researchers believe that babies babble sounds from every known language, only gradually reducing their range as some sounds get reinforced by people around them and others receive no echo or response.
Your infant self did the equivalent with your physical being and evolving mind: You touched, tasted, felt, looked at, listened to, smelled, and attuned with objects, people, and energies. You explored both your instrument and the world around you using movement, gesture, facial expressions, and all your senses.
You also perceived and communicated energetically. You knew instinctively even then how to react to unspoken tension, to differentiate between heavy silence and calm loving silence, and to recognize authentic attention versus rote action on the part of your caregivers.
Most infants can see or otherwise perceive energies. We recognize that in some ways. We say: “Little Michael really reacts when his dad is stressed,” or “Alethia is comfortable with some strangers and not others.”
Because many of us in Western culture don’t tend to believe ourselves capable of directly perceiving subtle energies or of telepathic, energetic communications, we dismiss the uncanny stares, unexplained responses, and prescient comments made by young children as imagination. Over time, most children learn to filter out their inborn abilities to perceive energies in favor of perceiving what the shared belief systems will affirm.
SENSORIMOTOR
Developmental psychologists call the first two years of life the sensorimotor stage. It is our time to explore, investigate, experiment, sense, and discover our instrument and build up an understanding of the world around us. This understanding is as much a part of the language of energy as the particular words we eventually learn to speak. If I have no experience with a ball, then I can learn that word in several languages and still not understand it. If, on the other hand, I have direct experience with a ball — I have felt it, smelled it, tasted it, rolled it, banged it, and so on — then that becomes my energetic baseline understanding.
Like many people, you may find that this early phase of learning concepts was also fraught with learning fear, caution, negative blowback, dismissal, stress, or restriction, depending on what was going on in your childhood home. The body chemistry that arose from that energetic learning is coded into your mind and nervous system and creates a level of stress that your logical mind can’t calm with thought or words. Your energies need direct energetic communication — tapping, stroking, crooning, bathing in a soothing color, sound, shape, gesture, or smell — in order to calm.
Your healing may require a return to a sensorimotor style of interacting with the world.
You may need to be willing to return to direct encounters with energies and to build up new, cleaner concepts of the world on a visceral level, piece by piece. Illnesses arise from accumulated stresses if, as a child, you learned a baseline distrust of the physical world, other people, or your ability to perceive a situation and respond appropriately.
Maralies was a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. Her mother’s mother, Elsa, spent a number of years in a concentration camp as a young girl (Maralies never knew many details), and she married one of the American soldiers who helped to liberate the camp. Elsa moved to the United States and did her best to put her life in Germany behind her. She embraced American culture to an almost exaggerated degree. Maralies’s mother, Bettina, described Elsa as a terrified-perfectionist-Betty-Crockerwannabe.
Money was tight, but Elsa and her husband scrimped and saved so Bettina could go to college. Bettina and her husband were both lawyers, and Maralies felt she grew up with almost too much support: She had music lessons, art lessons, math tutoring, and expectations that she would engage in sports, get great grades, and basically perform well in everything. Maralies was very accomplished. But she described life growing up with her own mother as never being enough. Every achievement was a prelude to the next great achievement. There was always this sense of the unseen enemy or danger and the fear of a misstep, which was probably passed down to her from her grandmother Elsa.
When I met Maralies, she had a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease and a tentative diagnosis of lupus. She had turned her considerable talents to figuring out how to manage her diet, exercise, rest, activity, and every other aspect of her life to keep her symptoms at bay. She wanted to see if energy medicine could clear the Crohn’s and lupus from her energy field. She was treading water with her management plan and felt exhausted from constant vigilance.
I spent a few moments feeling my way into Maralies’s energies, and I realized that I was communicating with a being who was on constant red alert. Although Maralies seemed calm on the surface and seemed to be practicing excellent self-care, underneath was a siren going WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH every time we discussed what she was doing for herself. It was as if I was dealing with an unheard infant, wailing because no one was responding to her cries.
I asked her about that sense of an inner alarm, and her grandmother Elsa’s story emerged. She said: “I feel like I am somehow still reacting to her experiences, even though I never even heard details!”
We talked about this and experimented a bit. We interacted with several of her energy systems using energy testing and found they were disorganized. Then I handed her a teddy bear to hug. She hugged it, and several of the energy systems we had pre-tested now had become organized. I asked her what associations she had with teddy bears. She said: “None. I think I had one as a kid, but I don’t remember being that attached to it.” So I invited her to imagine she was a preverbal infant and to explore that teddy bear as if she were seeing it for the first time.
Maralies had a good sense of drama. She rubbed the teddy bear all over her body, even lifting her shirt to feel it on her belly. She put one paw in her mouth and sucked on it. She gazed into the teddy bear’s eyes. She put it over her nose and inhaled deeply; she hugged it and made baby sounds, cooing and squealing with delight.
After about ten minutes, she said: “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, and this is extremely weird, but I felt my gut unclenching and the pain in my intestines went from six to three on the pain scale.”
We retested her energy systems and now they were all even stronger. We tried the same thing with a few other objects sitting around my office: a water glass, a pen, a toy porcupine. With each experiment, doing some basic sensorimotor exploration caused the energies to strengthen and her gut to feel better. After about twenty minutes, her gut was no longer hurting her.
Energetic responses to the world are often passed down from generation to generation, which is one reason addictions, illnesses, and psychological problems seem to run in families. Part of what was happening for Maralies was that a learned level of danger and stress (probably from her grandmother Elsa) was built into whatever other understandings she had gained of the world. Because it was built in at a preverbal, unarticulated level, it was nearly invisible to her.
Although she could explain that her grandmother had been a terrified perfectionist, and her mother was a get-ahead perfectionist, she never realized that her own relationship to the world included those same stresses, coded into everything she did. The focus on getting ahead that was pure survival for her grandmother, and that was emotional survival for her mother, translated for Maralies as a need to push through and quickly master experiences, rather than relaxing to just live them. She had racked up all kinds of accomplishments but did not give herself permission to just be with things and let go of expectations.
That became her self-care task for a while. To let herself have sensorimotor time. To put aside the notion that she needed to heal her gut and immune system, and instead to just listen to her gut reactions as she directly encountered the world around her. She needed to provide safe explorations with no ulterior motive or goal: just experience for the sake of experience. She decided to do this both as an imaginary infant in the privacy of her home and as an attitude to take into her everyday life as best she could.
Within a month, Maralies was able to report that her Crohn’s was in remission and her lupus-like symptoms had not flared. With the support of some additional energy medicine tools to keep her feeling safe, she reported after a year that the Crohn’s was gone, as was the lupus.
Not all disconnects from direct experience come from our early years. Even if your sensorimotor phase was joyous and supported, it is useful to ask yourself how directly and fully you are able to experience your life now. As we grow from infant to young child to student to adult, we often end up transferring gratification from the thing itself to a symbol. So instead of feeling satisfaction while learning at school, we anticipate and experience the joy of getting a good grade and symbolic approval from parents and teachers. Instead of feeling deep pleasure and satisfaction with each bite of a good meal, we are busy posting photos of it on Instagram or counting calories to assure ourselves eating it is really on our diet plan. Instead of enjoying a hug and cuddle, we sometimes go through the motions while calculating whether this means our partner has gotten over the fight we had yesterday.
The stress of being cut off from direct encounter can mess up your body’s energy communications. It can cause your body to oversignal needs or cause you to miss signals of enough. So it is useful to drop back into that pure sense of direct encounter from time to time throughout the day. Tune in to things you encounter with all your senses. Explore the now in intimate detail. It can nourish and renew you at a baseline level. This is a crucial building block in how you construct wellness and use the language of energy.
TOTAL IMMERSION
Learning language involves both comprehension and expression.
Young children are totally immersed in a world of language that is spoken to them and surrounds them. They comprehend far more than they are taught directly, learning to distinguish specifics from the whole field of language and communication they are exposed to.
They learn to express themselves by constructing language from the ground up: first by learning to produce sounds, then holophrases (single words that communicate a whole concept), then basic two-word sentences, then telegraphic sentences, then joined sentences that link specifics, then overgeneralizations, and on and on.
In learning the language of energy, it is useful to recognize that you are also going through a similar two-pronged process. Your task is to build both comprehension, deepening your ability to perceive subtle energies in the fields that surround you, and expression, developing your ability to communicate using subtle energies.
Too often people learning energy healing (either for self-help or to work with others) just study methods and techniques. They put tools in their tool kits and miss the essentials of both developing their subtle perceptions and constructing an individualized ability to communicate with energies. It is like memorizing phrases rather than learning to converse.
Fortunately, learning to perceive and speak energy is not difficult. You have already gained fluency in at least one language, so your mind is familiar with the process. And your body already communicates with itself using energy:
•Your mind-body-spirit conducts ongoing consultations that are energetic in nature.
•You communicate energetically with people around you, both consciously and below your awareness.
•You move through various energetic fields or atmospheres that are palpable as you encounter them during your day.
Learning (or remembering) the language of energy is a matter of tuning in, awakening to the constant energetic expressions and exchanges, and letting your instinctive abilities help you to gain skill in active expression.
Your body is designed to perceive energies using all your senses and receptive faculties (which I discuss in chapter 3):
•Seeing, either with your mind’s eye or physical eye
•Hearing, either literally or in your imagination
•Smell
•Taste
•Touch, feeling, and physical sensation
•Direct knowing
•Intuitive hits
•Animal instinct
•Attention, or being drawn to notice something
•Energy shifts, or recognizing changes in pattern or affect
Further, you can communicate with your body’s energies using the following energy vocabulary (which I explore in chapters 4 through 6):
•Touch
•Gesture
•Imagery, symbols, visualization
•Light and color
•Sound
•Rhythm
•Movement
•Breath
•Shapes
•Scent
•Taste
•Intention that helps guide behaviors of subtle energies
•Field energies, including environmental placement and nature
• • • PLAY WITH IT • • •
Find a place in your body that is uncomfortable or catching your attention in this moment. Notice how you tune in to it: Are you feeling your way in? Scanning your body with your mind? Getting a mental image? Perhaps your mind just went directly to the place, or you thought, My left knee. Each of us perceives in unique ways, so it is useful to get to know your go-to style of perceiving.
As you tune in to the place in your body, what sensations is it communicating to you? You might feel pain, tightness, heat, or vibration. You might see a color, hear sounds, or smell something. Open your mind to whatever and however that place in your body is communicating. Some people get images or even messages as that part of the body speaks to them.
Now, review the above list of ways you can communicate with subtle energies. Choose one to experiment with.
Example: When I do this, my attention is called to my left knee because it feels tight and sore; my eyes are pulled there, too. Looking over the list of communication tools, I feel drawn to “rhythm.” So, I listen to my inner being for a moment to see if a rhythm wants to emerge, and the rhythm I hear or feel drawn to is the lub-dub rhythm of the heart.
I tap using this lub-dub rhythm all around the knee. Because it is a heart rhythm, I place my other hand on my heart, intensifying the linkage between my heart lub-dub and the lub-dub I am tapping on my knee. I experiment: Does it feel better when I tap with my fingertips or my palms? Do I want light taps or sharper staccato ones? Or would I rather just hold my knee while playing a strong rhythmic beat on the table next to me?
When you play with this, at a certain point in your experimentation, you will feel done or else drawn to another tool. Keep tuning in to the body part to see how it is feeling and what it wants. The goal is not necessarily to fix the problem but to respond to it, to open to what your body is communicating and dialogue lovingly with it using the language of energy.
PRACTICE TIPS
The language of energy is not a foreign language, though it might seem that way at first, if you are used to thinking about your body in chemical, biological terms. Since it is our first language, learning it is a combination of awakening to what you already do to communicate with yourself energetically and of building on that situationally, the way an infant learns language.
•Track all the ways your body communicates with you throughout a twenty-four-hour period. Does it signal with aches or pains? Does it send sensations of hunger or fatigue, aversion or attraction? Do you feel like it pulls the plug or puts you into overdrive to get your conscious attention? Does it fidget or tighten muscles? Does it stumble, drop things, shift your mood, play movies in your head? Like getting acquainted with an infant, explore how your physical self signals desires and needs.
•When stress shows up in your mind or body, take a few minutes to respond with direct energetic communication: tapping, stroking, crooning, or bathing in a soothing color, sound, shape, gesture, or smell. What consolation can you bring it, as you would a screaming infant?
•Several times a day, drop into a sensorimotor experience of the world. Tune in to see, feel, hear, smell, and taste what is unfolding in your now. Turn off thoughts and just focus on direct encounter.
•Spend a few moments describing your parents, grandparents (and even great-grandparents, if you can). What descriptors best fit each of them and their energy? Was Grandma tense and controlling? Was Grandpa expansive and invasive? How do those energetic qualities play out in or influence you?
•Make a list of what gratifies you. Then sort the items into three groups: (1) objects, people, or actions that gratify you through direct experience; (2) ideas that gratify you; and (3) gratification that comes as a result of achieving a goal or aspiration. Notice where most of your gratification comes from. Make an effort to find more moments of direct gratification throughout your day: Taste your food, sink into the comfort of a nap, play with your dog or child with undivided attention. Notice what happens to your sense of connection and gratification when you are multitasking or delaying gratification to power through the moment.
