In my previous post I was pondering on the topic of fear influencing our life decisions. After years of personal development and “working on myself” I still find myself at times not being able to control my emotions, especially when it comes to the negative ones, like fear, resentment, judgments, anxiety, etc. It’s not that I want to have these emotions out of my life – I accept them as a part of our humanness and I am fine with that. The problem arises, however, when I feel that these emotions are ruling my behavior, preventing me from acting from my core, and speaking my truth. After years of studying the principles of personal growth I still seem at times to be helpless in front of these powerful emotions.
I kept asking myself the question: how can I learn to recover quickly, how can I connect to my core in front of this emotional hurricane. My last experiential discovery was the first attempt to answer this question. And the solution lay in connection to my core.
According to the law of the universe: ask and it is given, I found myself recently attending the workshop of Wendy Palmer: “Embodied Leadership”. And this is where all the answers to my question started emerging powerfully. Wendy Palmer runs a series of workshop on Conscious Embodiment, and in her work she offers ways of understanding mental and emotional habits of attention from an energetic viewpoint. She gives a set of tools to help people to recognize how our mind and body habitually react to pressure, and to access more skillful and unified responses. The core of her work is the principle of full inhabitation of our bodies, listening to it and acting according to our inner guidance.
What amazed me the most about these techniques is the fact, that they are so simple, yet so powerful. In fact, it takes only a few seconds to connect to our inner wisdom and act upon it. Can it be that simple? – I asked myself. In fact, it is so simple. However, it requires great deal of practice to incorporate these techniques into our daily life. We are used to emotions ruling our life, that we simply are not able to consider any other way to response to these overwhelming emotions. So it requires practice to discover this other, wonderful way of listening to our somatic intelligence. And it needs courage to trust our body. Our “thinking mind” tends to underrate our bodies, telling us: “What does the body know? How can it give you any guidance. You think, therefore you are!”.
However, I experienced so many times during that workshop, how intelligent and powerful our body is. The Body Mind. During the workshop I suddenly remembered the article I read in Geo Magazine some time ago about so called hara, the second brain in our belly. In this article the American scientist Michael Gershon from Columbia University in New York, presents the findings on his research on hara center. He found out that in the center of our belly resides “the other brain”, hara, which is composed of the same cells, active substances and receptors as our brain. This “belly brain” is responsible in the large extend for our emotional responses. The researcher have also found out, that our two brains: “belly and head brain”communicate with each other and can influence each other.
Some may argue with the above findings are true or not. For me, however, after experiences from the Embodied Leadership workshop I know I am stepping on the path of conscious accessing the power of my body. Because it does me good and its wisdom is beyond measures!
. Listening to relaxing music during this exercise magnifies the result. I especially recommend the beautiful relaxation music by Deuter, as in the below video – music for our soul!
