Jill Satterfield:
The body holds memories and feels emotions and thoughts before the mind actually cognizes them. That’s fascinating to me. If we aren’t conscious of our thoughts and emotions as they arise, they won’t just magically disappear; they go into the body, stay on as a memory, and shape tissue.
So, if we get intimately in tune with our own body, we can feel what we’re going to think and what we might be just about to act upon (and the repercussions of those thoughts turning into actions) before they carry us away. We can feel emotions starting to rise in the body, and with that information and those clues, we can take a moment, pause, make a choice, and not have to be swallowed by or lose control of our emotions. For instance, in the case of someone who’s angry a lot. Once they know their body a little more, they can feel the patterns, the very beginning stages of an outburst. One has time to take a pause and quell, rather than continually losing control. So the body offers us this incredible mirror or portal into the mind and heart. The mind and the heart kind of wear the body. So the body is the physical house for the mind and heart, for consciousness. And our consciousness has a lot of influence and can actually shape the physical body and more frequently than not, it does.
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I haven’t met anyone who can’t benefit from meditation, body awareness, kindness and understanding.
Once we see that we are all in this together, once we begin as individuals to embrace our humanity, to begin to be nice to ourselves and then to eventually be kind to ourselves and to eventually love ourselves, everything opens up. There’s not a separation between me and you, or you and anyone else, or them, and us. It’s about being human. Isn’t a wonderful way to live, to fully embrace our textural, dimensional, colorful, rich humanity?
http://www.schoolforcompassionateaction.org/
