You are the Experiment!
These days I am reading a lot about epigenetics. This is a subject that I am fascinated by; the idea that we change ourselves as we interact with our world. We are all in evolution, changing constantly. We couldn’t be otherwise, so to me it makes perfect sense that our bodies would have the capacity to respond on the deepest cellular level to what occurs. And now, this has been proven, shown, in the most practical, logical way in studies that show how cells behave. But long before there were scientific studies, there were humans who used their own bodies and their own experience to study the nature of things. I could digress here into a discussion of world religion, but more importantly, since we have made a new religion of keeping our bodies healthy it make sense to examine our own experience with each and every substance we encounter.
You are your own living experiment. Each and every day what you do, say, eat or drink becomes an invitation for change, growth or resistance. And each and every thing you do has an impact, a result, even if you can’t or don’t notice what that is. It is continually amazing to me how this works. Our bodies, these wonderful instruments of life, continue to play their tune whether or not we listen. But when we do listen, there is so much there to learn, to play with, to enjoy.
What if you listened openly, objectively even, to the way your body speaks to you? You body doesn’t use words. Your body uses sensation and feeling, even thoughts to get your attention. Yes, even your thoughts can arise from a physical source. Just think about how mad you get when you stub your toe or in my case, bang my head on the car door and get a huge goose egg. Maddening. I hopped around, my eyes tearing with anger and pain. Hmm. Strange, isn’t it, how powerful a simple accidental sensation is to get our attention and produce a feeling, an emotion. It is easy to think we are in control of bodies, or better yet that we’d like to be. In fact, in this ongoing relationship between our bodies and our minds there is little that we control. What if instead of talking down to the body, you listened, allowed for the fact of it, the simple fact that pain may have a say?
Letting your pain have a say is honoring, respecting the bare fact of it. And respect is about our willingness to look again and again at where pain IS, where it steps in for each of us. Honoring pain is about listening, really listening, without agenda and without expectation. Not to the words because there aren’t any, but to the quality, the feeling, the knowing in your own experience. It is there. For sure.
What do you hear?
