Over the years, in my work with clients and spiritual seekers as well as in my own experience, I have learned the importance of being in touch with our bodies. This premise may lead in a variety of directions, but my particular interest here is in “ways of knowing.” Most of us in Western culture tend to be familiar with mental knowing, the gifts of the mind, reason, intellect. What might embodied knowing offer?
When we overlook the body, we not only miss potentially important information but also possible avenues of insight, healing, and guidance. When you think about being inadequate/unworthy/lonely/fat/angry, what do you notice in your body? What do you experience? Our initial response may be “nothing” or perhaps we refer to a thought: “Well, I think that….” So many of us are head-centric and out of touch with everything below the head! But we can learn to attend to body sensations, even a little at a time.
The Place of the Body in Spirituality and Religion
A question that arises for some: does the body have a place in spirituality and religion? It depends on your perspective. Some religious orientations have traditionally dismissed the body as “flesh,” a source of temptation or at least of mistaken identity. The challenge is to tame and control bodily appetites, or ultimately to realize “I am not my body, I am essentially soul/spirit.”
But to the surprise of some, the body often plays an important (but overlooked) role in spiritual/religious life. In many traditional or contemporary paths, somatic practices are significant: The Five Times Prayer in Islam, crossing oneself in Christianity, bowing before an altar, fingering prayer beads, sacred dance, lifting the hands in praise, meditative walking, gestures of blessing, chanting (which also has powerful effects on the body). Often the somatic experience of such practices is ignored – but we can practice bringing attention to what has become habitual, conscious awareness to what has become automatic. Honoring such gestures and bodily experiences has the potential to open up new avenues of meaning and new insights.
I suggest that it’s not necessary to identify with the body as one’s ultimate reality in order to find value in listening to the body as a relative reality! If I am oriented towards soul or spirit as the “ultimately real,” I can still explore somatic sensations as an initial path to understanding and relative relief. And it’s important to recognize that many of us in modern culture find that it takes a while to become more comfortable with dropping our attention “below the head.” So whatever our starting point, we may need to move slowly with this so that we don’t feel discouraged, like “failures” at the task. We can simply be curious… and patient.
Three Centers of the Body
A number of traditions recognize three primary centers in the body. Although they are given various names, essentially they are head, heart, and gut. The head is pretty familiar to us, especially in modern Western culture. The heart may have slightly different locations in the body, but is not simply the biological heart: the heart center is often felt deep in the center of the chest (and this is usually where people point when they are describing a heart sensation). The gut is the lower belly, below the navel. In Japanese culture it is known as the hara, and located about three fingers below the navel and deeper in (not on the surface) – but sensations may be felt in various places in the belly.
The heart center often holds sensations of sadness and grief. Some may describe this as heaviness; there may be a color (dark, black), and the sensation may be more on the surface or extend deep into the chest. When we try to pay even closer attention, we may find that “it radiates out from the center” or “it pulsates.” There is no right answer: it is a matter of paying close attention and finding words to express what is felt. The heart center may also, of course, be described as warm and radiating, usually associated with an experience of love. Or there may be a sense of “tightness” or constriction, as if there is a knot or a dark tunnel reaching deep inside.
The belly center tends to be a bit harder to access, but may hold heaviness, or constriction, or knots, or turbulence, or volcanic heat. Anything may show up. The gut center may also provide a sense of feeling rooted or grounded (“sink into the pelvis”), solid. Again, there are no rules.
If inviting our attention into the chest area or the belly doesn’t open up a new avenue of experience, we may first need to explore some gentle breathing and physical relaxation.
Exploring the Body’s Wisdom
No rush, just being present, being open. We can practice being available to our own experience. We may find it helpful to ask ourselves orienting questions, to open up deeper noticing. “Is there a color? Does it have a texture? How big an area does it take up? Is the sensation mostly on the surface or does it go deeper in? Is there any movement there?” If our attention is on the heart center or the gut center, we may ask ourselves to check the other center (not in those words!) and see what we find there. Is there a sensation connecting the two areas, or does such a connection feel possible ?
Any experience of embodied knowing may open us to unexpected insights or deeper realizations, which may in turn offer surprising spiritual or religious meaning. We may begin with a sense that “my faith is what gets me through the grief” or “I feel lost without the anchor of the beliefs I used to have” or “I feel so guilty, afraid God will judge me for being so angry with my mother/father/husband/wife.” In such a moment, what if we learn to ask ourselves “when I say that, can I just notice how that feels in my body?” “Can I take a few moments to let those words drop down into my body? What do I feel there?” Such a shift of attention often opens the door to a new experience, a deeper sense of meaning, an unexpected reverberation.
Stephen Porges, American psychologist and neuroscientist, suggests that many religious rituals (involving breath, posture, and vocalizations) have important effects on vagal nerve pathways that support an experience of connectedness to others and to a deity or ultimate reality.
Embodied knowing, embodied relationship with the sacred: a powerful and often overlooked dimension of human experience.
(Vagal nerve: The vagus nerve, also known as cranial nerve X, is the longest cranial nerve in the body and a key part of the parasympathetic nervous system.)