When we emphasize head over body we drive ourselves (and our children) away from the awareness of our needs to stay healthy, we trust statistics and experts instead of our feelings. In an evolutionary perspective this change in our societies is believed to have evolved when settling down in civilizations. New laws and religions were needed. We adapted to religions that separated the earthly needs (body) and the spiritual values (mind), the Religions of the Books, i.e. the major monotheistic religions of today. The mind became the tool to get closer to God, having a belief that the bodily needs were something that was not important, and should be overseen, forgotten and dominated.
There were probably good sociological explanations and reasons for it. But not very healthy in the long run. We use our minds to reason, think, try harder, put layers and layers of our Ego over our inner us, shown as basic needs. These layers can be like prison bars. To be healthy we have to dissolve this heritage of conventions, and find our way back to ourselves. This work in accepting ourselves is not always to push our conventions and cultures but can be seen as accepting them too. In any case, if you want to let go of unhealthy “rules” you don’t need to be part of the culture you live in. To connect with yourself you need silence. On a cellular level. We teach you some of these proven and detoxing mindful silence techniques.
The sexual desire or even the feeling of love, is a good example on how it has been controlled and oppressed to the point of being ridiculous. Most societies still judge who and how we should love. Fundamental desires connected to survival can’t be stopped, just oppressed. In this way it is like medicine treating a symptom, covering up and not understanding the cause, with an obvious suffering and secondary effect popping up sooner or later. Desires and needs are as fundamental as life itself. To try to cut them out is like cutting of an arm. Over a couple of thousand years we’ve lost a lot of our natural evaluation of the signals that our bodies give us that was a natural survival instinct before civilizations were formed. I sometimes wonder how it would have turned out for us if we would have stayed with the Nature Religions existing before our modern religions. Would we have treated cattle as we do? Would we be on the verge of ecological disaster?
We worsen the problem when we adopt the standard practice of valuing one hemisphere of the brain over the other, normally the left side corresponding to the logic, structure, statistics, and rational thinking (see blog from April 28th). The risk we take is to make the left side of the brain dominant, causing us to oppress our intuitive mind. Our society is clearly a left brain society and we have to know this to let our intuition be heard. When we reach the point of suffering from this dominance by becoming someone we are not, we could get stiffness, pain and illness, in the corresponding left side of the body or vice versa. We seldom get ill or pain because of an accident. Most often it is because of that boss at work we have been complaining about for the last 10 years, or because we were deceived 25 years ago and we still beat the drama about it every day.
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