The Head vs The Body: Who’s in Charge Here?!
We’re told, in so many subtle and obvious ways in our culture, that rational and logical thinking is the highest order of knowledge and knowing.
For example, the phrase “the head of the household”, is generally thought to be the person in charge of the family.
Or, “the head of the company” is the person in charge of the company.
In Christian scriptures, it states that Jesus is “the head of the Church”(Ephesians 5:23).
In all these phrases, it’s clear that the head is the thing that’s really in charge, while the body takes a subordinate, secondary role. The head is the decision maker, the executer, the one that takes everything in through the senses and then makes rational and logical decisions for the benefit of the rest of the body. The head steers the ship, while the rest of the body just kind of goes along for the ride.
And yet, as many of us have experienced, there are times when being in our head, actually keeps us from understanding ourselves on a deeper level.
Clients in a counseling session can spend lots of time rationalizing, analyzing, lecturing, logically concluding, or giving themselves all kinds of intellectual reasons about why they should stop doing one kind of thing and start doing another…and yet…it often does not seem to change anything at all!
We can spend our whole life being in our heads, thinking we know ourselves and others very well…going round and round in the well worn circles and thought patterns in our brain, all the while missing out on a deeper level of knowing and understanding.
This deeper level of knowing, wisdom, and understanding, seems to, for lack of a better way to describe it, arise from within our bodies.
This bodily wisdom can help us gain a greater awareness of ourselves…what it is that’s really going on inside of us…what we’re really experiencing…all of which can then lead us to actually change our lives in meaningful, profound ways.
How do we begin to cultivate the ability to tap into this bodily source of wisdom?
That’s what this post is all about.
The Body and Mental Health
This is the final post in a brief series on the relationship between the body and mental health.
The first post, which you can find here, was a guest post by the amazing therapist Michelle F. Moseley on Diet Culture, Mental Health, and the Church. In the article, Michelle touches on the effects of diet culture on physical, mental, and spiritual health, and the way the church can be conscious and aware about how to stop perpetuating diet culture.
Recognizing that historically much of Christianity, and most religions, have taken a negative stance towards the body, the second post in the series offers six ways that we can honor the body and become aware of, and value, the sacredness of the body itself. You can find it here.
This post will give an outline for how to go about growing our ability to gain wisdom from the body.
Noticing the Bodies Ability to Communicate
Maybe all of this ‘body as a source of wisdom’ stuff sounds like the kind of woowoo thing that they would dig in Asheville. Maybe you find yourself a little skeptical, or just aren’t exactly sure what I’m talking about. That totally makes sense…because what I’m talking about is a hard thing to talk about.
Try this quick experiment, and, just notice if you can detect any difference arise within you.
The first thing you’re going to do is sit somewhere comfortable, relax yourself, take a couple deep breaths. Then, close your eyes and think about a person who you love and imagine them telling you they love you. Just replay that scene over and over in your mind’s eye. Imagine that person’s face telling you they love you, and, as you’re doing that, just notice how your body feels. Set a timer and do that for a minute. A full minute is actually a long time!
Go ahead - give it a try right now.
Okay, now call to mind a scene in your life where you experienced a great deal of pain, or shame, or ridicule, or embarrassment, or rejection. If you’re comfortable, replay that scene again and again. And just like last time, just notice how your body feels. Again, set a timer for a full minute.
Okay - go for it.
Did you notice a difference?
Again, it’s hard to put words to these kinds of experiences, but for me, there’s a certain kind of openness, and relaxation that I feel throughout my body, particularly my upper back and shoulders as I think about a loved one, and a kind of physical tension that I feel when spending time replaying a painful scene.
It’s not a mental thing…hopefully we weren’t analyzing or rationalizing when we thought about those two scenes, we were just allowing ourselves to tune into what Eugene Gendlin calls a “felt sense”. Here’s what Eugene Gendlin has to say about felt sense in his book Focusing:
A felt sense is...an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time - encompasses it and communicates it all at once rather than details by detail…
A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling…it is an unfamiliar, deep-down level of awareness.
Gendlin, p. 38
Trusting the Bodies Wisdom
Once we begin to tune into this felt sense, it actually becomes an important source of wisdom for us.
It’s a source of wisdom that has always been there, and yet we often have not developed it, or have been taught to ignore it altogether when it arises.
Imagine being able to tap into and trust that felt sense we get when we meet a new potential dating partner, or business partner. Oftentimes we’re taught to rely solely on our mental/rational side, where we dissect a person by breaking them apart by each different quantifiable and namable component. A
Accessing this felt sense makes us aware of how our bodies feel about the entirety of the person at once. It’s the combination of a thousand or more different factors and more all put together to make a single bodily feeling you receive when you interact with someone. Learning to listen to and grow deeper in touch with that feeling could have major implications for your life.
For example, someone may look the right way, and say the right things, and yet, when you make space to listen to your body, your felt sense may be giving you a very different message about this person.
Or you may have the dream job you’ve always wanted. Everything is perfect on paper, yet, your felt sense is telling you that something is off. You can’t quite name it by thinking about it, but, you are able to feel in your body that something just isn’t quite right within you.
What if eventually you could put words to those bodily sensations and recognize something deep down they were trying to communicate to you? It’d be amazing right?
So how do you know how to develop that felt sense more and work with it to be a greater source of wisdom for you?
After 15 years of study at the University of Chicago, Eugene Gendlin developed a 6 step process for how to learn to identify and work with your felt sense.
Gendlin discovered in his studies and research, that a person’s ability to access this kind of bodily wisdom was directly connected with a person’s ability to have lasting positive change in therapy.
This is a great way to start to try to learn to listen to the body:
6 Steps to Access Bodily Wisdom
Step 1: Clearing a Space
Get in a comfortable posture, take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, and just make space to begin to notice what you’re feeling in your body. Tension or tightness in your chest, back, throat, stomach, etc. Just notice. Then, ask yourself, ‘How is my life going? What is the main thing for me now?’(Gendlin, p.50). If your rational/logical mind starts thinking about the answer, just ask it kindly if it can step back, and bring your attention calmly back to the sensations in your body.
It may take several minutes, but notice what concerns seem to arise from within you. When you notice it, again, don’t try to rationalize or think about or solve or fix it, just notice it. Notice it with compassion, neutrality, and a slight sense of distance between you and the concern arising. When you notice your concern, just allow it to be, and then set it to one side in your mind, and allow the next concern to arise. After a few minutes you’ll have several concerns that have risen, placed neatly in a stack, or a row, or a column in your mind's eye.
Step 2: Felt Sense
Choose one particular concern to focus on. Again, don’t try to rationally solve it. Just spend time feeling the problem with your body. Don’t try to break it up into its parts and analyze each part, just allow yourself to feel the entirety of it, all of it at once.
Notice where in your body you are feeling this concern. Is it a certain tightness in the back of your head? A kind of pressure behind your eyes? Just notice it, and allow yourself to feel it. Spend time with it. Don’t try to rush to make sense of it all, just allow it to be, and to be felt by your body.
Step 3: Handle
As you are holding this concern and the bodily sensation of it in your awareness, make space for a word, or image, or phrase to come to the surface. Words like scary, tired, sticky, thick, etc.
Step 4: Resonating
Once a word comes to the surface, notice how that word feels in your body.
There’s a world of difference between a word that is close, and a word that is just right. If the word is close, (for example you are noticing how the word exhausted feels in your body) you’ll notice your body still feels that same felt sense. However, when the word is just right, (for example, maybe the word resigned instead of exhausted hits differently) you will feel something shift in your body. For me, it’s usually a sense of openness, or a slight release of tension in the spot where I was previously holding it.
Just knowing and becoming aware of exactly what I’m feeling with regards to a certain concern itself can be incredibly therapeutic and healing. I recently had an experience with a supervisor that I had been carrying around for weeks and I could not understand why I was holding on to it and why it was still bothering me for so long. I tried the above steps, and had several words that were close but not quite right. Eventually, the word insignificant arose inside of me. I immediately felt a shift in my body and felt a relaxing and opening. It was healing to know that what was truly happening inside of me during that interaction with my supervisor was that I felt insignificant. Suddenly the haziness of the tension I had was replaced with a word that fit just right, and, just knowing exactly what was happening inside of me greatly reduced the tension I was feeling.
Step 5: Asking
Now that you have your word, go back and feel the sensations again in your body. Use the word to ask yourself, ‘What makes the whole problem so ____’(Gedson, p. 51). Again, allow different answers to slowly arise after a few minutes at the pace they want to. If your body doesn’t shift when you get an answer, simply let that answer go, and wait for a new answer, and see how your body reacts. When you have the right answer, you will notice your body shift.
Step 6: Receiving
Receive whatever comes to you in a friendly, compassionate, curious, open, non-judgmental way. Just allow it to be. You may not have ‘solved’ the problem at this time, but, spending time in your body gaining more clarity about what is truly happening inside of you is itself a valuable endeavor. Even if you didn’t feel the body shift during the process, simply thank yourself and your body for showing up, and commit to returning again to it tomorrow. There’s a kind of mysteriousness to it all. We make the time and the space to focus inward, but the inner revelations and bodily shifts come when they will come. When the moment does come, and the wisdom from your body rises to the surface and you feel the release and opening inside of you, then you will hopefully receive a new sense of clarity about what is happening within you, and over time, what your next steps could be.
That’s it for this series on the Body and Mental Health!
Note: New content now being published at www.travisjeffords.com/blog
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About the Author
Travis Jeffords is a National Certified Counselor and Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate in North Carolina. He holds a Master of Science degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a Master of Divinity from Christian Theological Seminary. Travis writes on the intersection of faith, spirituality, the church, and mental health.