Tuning into the Wisdom of your Body

by Natalie Geld

Did you know the disconnect we have with our bodies inhibits spiritual development? Perhaps you ‘get’ the idea of self-love intellectually, but don’t ‘feel’ love. Ironically, we crave intimacy and fully armor against it.

Our body absorbs experience like a sponge. Even our lungs look and feel like plump, supple sponges. I know this because I spend hundreds of hours reverently exploring human anatomy. I marvel while breathing my own air into soft pink lungs of a human cadaver in the anatomy lab. When filled with air they appear to fly, like ‘wings’ of a great gentle Manta Ray gliding through the sea.

Look at your skin.

Notice its scars and wound etchings on your hands, your forearms, knuckles, and your thumb. If you peel off your clothes right now, how many healing marks could you count? Each one is a work of art, your cells reinvesting themselves to protect you. Each mark looks and feels different for the effort, different for the pull of skin over joints. Different for how it was cared for, or neglected. Imagine peeling away your artful skin, the largest organ through which we breathe. How many wound etchings can you imagine live inside? Each layer is intimately connected with the others.

If we could peel our skin, we would be surprised to reveal how profoundly interwoven we are — every layer’s interdependence stunningly clear. Intimacy begins with our sensual intelligence. Awareness and engagement, rather than fixation and attachment to our body, is power, deeply felt.

I’ve been wrestling with the disparity of communication in our medical and mental health fields my entire life. I’ve been honored to present my perspective, and interview some of our most lucid minds at the Science & Nonduality and Towards a Science of Consciousness conferences. I wanted to know why we feel so stressed and disconnected, even when practicing mindfulness. I wanted to explore why our sensual intelligence, our body, and our sexuality, is still left out of most conversations for raising consciousness and improving our experience of living. I wanted to know how we could evolve. What was missing? And you know they were glad I asked.

I interviewed Dr. Cassandra Vieten – a licensed clinical psychologist, President and CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and author of Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year, coauthor with Marilyn Schlitz of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life, an avid soccer player, and a mom. Say that three times fast.

Genuine and direct, her energy and big blue eyes are quietly electric. Cassi blew into my interview room to discuss the truth about consciousness practices and our human experience. She embodied her work by being absolutely present, captivated me with her candor and said,

Natalie, what you are talking about is such a fresh topic, it’s still so taboo. But for a few of the traditions of Tantra, there has been this idea that we have adopted now in the West that it’s about catapulting ourselves out of mundane reality. It fits right into our whole Protestant, and Catholic, and patriarchal world-view that there is sin, our body and sexuality are dirty and mundane. There is just as much of that in Eastern philosophies. They don’t frame it the same way, but say it’s a lesser world, and I really don’t think it is.

I think that in this lifetime, in this incarnation that we are all sharing together, there is this unbelievable meeting of consciousness and matter. There is a meeting of energy and form, of immaterial and material, of subjective and objective. It’s right at that meeting place where the action is. To fall too far on the material side is imbalanced. You are missing the joy, the richness, the beauty, the wonder, and curiosity of life. That’s what life is all about. If you fall way over to the completely transcendent end of things (which I think is tempting because we have been so hyper-focused on the material that all of us in the consciousness world want to pull it all the way over there), the problem there is you forget about blood, and guts, and juice, and bodies, and sweat, and sex, and nursing. That’s a mistake. We are not here to transcend this – it is how we are living right now. It’s consciousness through form and form through consciousness. That doesn’t mean that the way that I love my child, or the way I am attached to people I adore in this life, or the beauty that’s created in a piece of art is any less than transcendent consciousness.

Mindfulness in motherhood for me was transformative; not only mindfulness transforming my motherhood, but motherhood transforming my mindfulness practice. There is wisdom in learning to be calm and neutral, to observe your experience in equanimity. But what I learned in the pregnancy process, the birthing process, the nursing process, and now even in the parenting process, it’s about embodiment! It is all right here — there is milk and there is blood and there are tears and there is vomit — this is not excluded. In fact, this is what the journey of mindfulness is all about.

Mindfulness is about learning to approach all of your experiences, as much as possible with openness, curiosity, and compassion. Learning to ride the waves rather than resisting them and getting battered about in the process.”

To sum it up, I like the way Cassi says, “Consciousness practices offer richness, juiciness, depth, meaning, purpose, pain, awe, wonder, joy — all of it. The whole enchilada.”

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