Once you dedicate yourself to deepening your awareness, relationships must improve, because you are sending new energy along the invisible strands that bond us all. The only caveat is that you must not make awareness a private possession, yet another reason to feel isolated. Let the other person have full advantage of your inner growth. This means that any impulse of love is for them. Any epiphany exists to be shared. As you expand, you must transform being into doing. No matter what happens on the surface, however, rest assured that everyone to whom you relate senses your energy. Bonds don’t lie. They cannot be faked. Which is all the more reason to find the true level where bonding occurs. Only there do relationships stop being work and turn effortless. Once you make a bond, there’s no reason to distrust the other person, because the two of you are one in the only way that matters, by sharing in the same wholeness. Loneliness, isolation, and the restless insecurity of the ego are exposed for what they are—by-products of disconnected souls before they find each other.
Step 6. Relate to Your Body Consciously
We have all been trained to ignore the spiritual value of our bodies. Centuries of programming have fostered the illusion that the body has no mind, certainly no soul. But as we’ve seen time and again in this book, your body has kept faith with your soul even when you haven’t. It opens itself to the flow of life. It sustains every cell through the universe’s infinite supply of energy and intelligence. Ironically, the gratitude given to God should rightfully be given to our bodies, which have sustained us more reliably than any “higher” power. Every day, your body consciously tends to you, never losing focus or attention. You can acknowledge this faithful service by consciously relating to your body in turn.
Or, to be more precise, you will be completing the circle. Awareness wants to flow freely from body to mind and back again. Too often, however, the body sends messages that the mind short-circuits. Certain messages frighten us or undermine our self-image. We don’t have time to hear the body, or we procrastinate because there are more important things to attend to. Consider the following everyday situations:
You feel a twinge of pain.
You see signs of aging.
You feel “not quite right” physically.
You notice that your energy is decreasing.
You are uncomfortable in your skin.
You don’t see a match between how your body looks and the real you inside.
There are two ways to relate to these experiences. You can detach yourself from the physical sensations and see yourself as separate from them. Or you can think of physical sensations as conscious messages from one part of yourself to another. The first reaction is the easiest and most common. There’s a sense of false security that comes from ignoring what our bodies have to say. You get to choose whether to take it seriously; you choose when and where to pay attention. But in essence you are rejecting your body. Real security comes when you relate to your body as consciously as you relate to yourself. Then pain and discomfort acquire a different meaning. They are no longer danger signals that you want to run away from. They are messages asking for a reply. (By analogy, if you’re sitting in a restaurant next to a crying baby, your instinct is to be irritated, and if the crying keeps up, you will probably ask for another table. But if it’s your own child crying, your instinct is to move toward the disturbance and try to make it better.)
Relating to your body calls for the same basic attitudes that go into any intimate relationship. Tending to them every day keeps the relationship healthy.
Trust
Consideration
Honesty
Mutual cooperation
Loving appreciation
These are all aspects of awareness. People focus too much on the physical choices that the body presents—whether to take vitamins, how many calories to ingest, how much to exercise. Without awareness these considerations tend to be fairly useless. Your body knows if you fear it; it rebels at being disciplined like a disobedient child; being ignored makes it grow dull and inert. The whole purpose of consciously relating to your body is to provide the kind of foundation that is really needed. After that, you can take any physical measures in the right spirit, and that will bring the best results.
Trust. Real trust is implicit. It doesn’t depend on shifting moods. It doesn’t need to be tested or proven. Most people only trust their bodies so far. They anticipate a time when the body will bring pain and the distress of aging. If you are on the lookout for what can go wrong physically, you are relating out of distrust, the opposite of what needs to exist. So reframe the situation. Think of the millions of processes that are being carried out perfectly in billions of cells every second. Compared to that steady, faithful, perfectly coordinated functioning, the few times that the body shows distress are minuscule. It’s far more realistic to trust your body than to distrust it. After all, you trust your mind even though it occasionally breaks out in irrational reactions and is susceptible to moods of depression and anxiety. Your body stands by you without asking for any reward, and its steadiness far exceeds the shifting winds of the mind.
Consideration. Your body doesn’t demand consideration, but it will reward you amply if you show some. It’s considerate to walk away from stressful situations. Stress puts enormous pressure on the body’s coping mechanisms, and that includes the stress of loud noise, congested work environments, excessive physical demands, and emotional upset. You may consider it recreation to run a marathon, for example, but you should consider your body’s viewpoint before demanding that it obey your desire. Another basic consideration is rest and regular daily rhythms. Instead of waiting until you are too tired to go on, provide rest several times a day to your body—all it takes is a few minutes sitting quietly with your eyes closed. A predictable daily routine for meals and exercise also shows consideration. If you are used to irregular habits, it may bore you to adopt new habits, but if you persist for only a week, you will notice a positive response from your body. It will be more relaxed and at the same time more responsive and energetic. Even the most minimal effort at exercise, such as getting up from your desk and stretching every couple of hours, injects a bit of personal attention into the body. Keep in mind that your attention is a basic nutrient that your body needs.
Honesty. In personal relationships, it’s a strain to keep up a false front, and the same is true for relating to our body. In both cases the falseness usually comes down to self-image. You look at your body and want it to match your ego’s desire to look good in the eyes of others. People spend thousands of hours at the gym, not for the sake of the body, but to satisfy an ego-ideal of beauty, vanity, strength, and security, and to fit in with someone else’s expectations. Body image is a huge problem for many people, and classically women are the most distressed about it. You can reframe the whole problem by comparing your body to the person you love most in the world. Do you really care what that person looks like in the mirror? Do you denigrate that person for not fitting the image of a supermodel, not being at their ideal weight, not having perfect biceps or big enough breasts? Does growing older make that person less valuable in your eyes?
The reason those considerations don’t matter is that you are relating to a person, not to an object that must match an ideal image. Now think of your body as a person who is just as intimately related to you. You don’t even have to call this person “me.” By any name, your body has been relating to you as the most faithful of friends, and once you regard it that way, ego image becomes irrelevant. In short, learn to personify your body, and then you won’t be so tempted to objectify it.
Mutual cooperation. You can’t expect your body to serve you if you give it nothing to work with. The body of a middle-aged executive isn’t out to sabotage him when the man decides to shovel a foot of snow from the driveway. But if he has ignored his heart for years, there is danger in sudden hard exertion, perhaps fatal danger. The key to the body’s reliability lies in cooperation: only ask for as much as you have given. Compared wi
th other intimate relationships, your body asks for a fraction of what it is willing to give in return. This is another area where it helps to personify your body instead of objectifying it. Think of your body as a willing worker who wants only a meager salary, but who cannot survive on nothing. The salary it asks for is paid in personal attention. If you genuinely want to cooperate with your body, paying it a little attention makes proper diet, exercise, and rest easy—you will be providing those things because you want your willing worker to be happily employed.
Loving appreciation. Your body is going to serve and uphold your interests for a lifetime. It’s only fair to appreciate it for this service, and if possible to appreciate it with genuine affection. Most people are far from doing that. Instead they look on their bodies like old models of cars that will need more repairs and cause more trouble as they wear out. This causes a serious disconnect. What they want from life—a future that’s more comfortable and fulfilling—is mismatched to a body that grows more uncomfortable and disappointing. The mismatch isn’t the body’s fault, however; it’s the product of beliefs and assumptions born in the mind. We all relate to loved ones who grow older, and if we’re lucky, we relate to them better as they age. Familiarity breeds fondness in this case, and appreciation flows more naturally.
The same should hold true with your body. Being a familiar companion, you can grow fonder of it over time. The two of you settle in to a shared life, knowing things about each other that no one else can possibly know. If this sounds like a marriage, that is rightly so. The highest aim in life is the marriage of mind and soul, and since the body links the two, it deserves to be part of a more perfect union as the years unfold. This isn’t a fantasy that tries to compensate for the advance of physical aging. It’s a realistic way to approach your own awareness. If you aim to be more aware, wiser, and more fulfilled in the future, invite your body to join that future as an equal partner. When body, mind, and soul are matched, the results will be far different from when they are alienated from one another.
Step 7. Embrace Every Day as a New World
For life to turn into a great victory, you have to win many small battles along the way. These are fought on the flat landscape of everyday life. We see the same people each day, by and large, and expect the same things from them. We work according to a routine that becomes second nature. Lapses into boredom, indifference, and inertia are possible at any time. But beneath this apparent flatness, life is constantly renewing itself. Your cells are never bored, distracted, inert, or detached. They are fully engaged in being alive. There seems to be a gap, then, between mind and body. Since the mind sets the body’s agenda, if you lose the tiny battles against routine, inertia, and boredom, this gap will widen. The flood of renewal will ebb away; forward motion will gradually come to a halt. If you can close this gap, however, the opposite will happen. Every day will seem like a renewal.
There are two sides to every gap. The model for that is the synapse, the microscopic gap that separates the branchlike ends of brain cells. To have any brain activity, chemical messages must leap across the synapse. On one side is the sender, on the other the receiver. Both must be prepared to do their job impeccably. When the synapse stops working, the brain goes out of kilter, which means that you experience yourself going out of kilter. Your entire sense of self depends on what happens in the gap. Researchers have discovered, for example, that depression is linked to how much serotonin, a specific messenger molecule in the brain, is sent across the synapse and then taken up again to clear the way for the next burst. In a normal brain the right amount of serotonin crosses the gap, then just enough is reabsorbed to keep sender and receiver ready for new messages. In a depressed person’s brain, too much serotonin is reabsorbed, and with depleted supplies, there’s not enough reserve to send the next message properly. Certain receptors get clogged, and others are empty. Without the right balance, you can’t be in a steady, secure mood of contentment.
That’s a simplified picture, but it says a great deal about how you meet a new day. Your soul sends energy and awareness, which you are set to receive. If your brain is occupied with too many old, outworn experiences, you can only receive a fraction of the new energy and awareness that is being sent. We all know exactly how this feels. Coming out of a failed relationship, for example, you cannot think about a new relationship. You aren’t receptive on any level, beginning with the receptors in your brain cells, but extending to your sense of self, what you expect from love, how you view other people, how you cope with disappointment, and so on. It’s too crude to think in terms only of molecules crossing a gap. Your whole self comes and goes across the gap, and the receptors that your life depends on are receivers of experience across the whole range of mind and body.
When you woke up this morning, the day could have been entirely fresh. Every day is a new world. Your brain is constructed to receive billions of bits of new data. Nothing compels it to hold on to old experiences that clog up the receiving mechanism. The reason today doesn’t feel completely new is that a new self is required. To the extent that you want to bridge yesterday and today with the same old self, renewal is blocked, just as surely as if you tried to fill a brain receptor when it was already full. Under a microscope a cell biologist can see the clogged receptors, and on an MRI a neurologist can point to areas of the brain that aren’t as active as they should be. But we must not fall into the trap of thinking that matter controls the self. Your brain won’t fill any receptors that you want to keep open. If you reinvent yourself every day, you will experience a new world with every sunrise.
Saying such a thing sends up red flags in a materialistic society. Are we saying that depressed patients caused their serotonin imbalance? Did they fail to receive the joy and fulfillment that their souls wanted to give them? The best answer to that is ambiguous, unfortunately. The brain is on dual control. It runs itself automatically, which means that chemical imbalances can build up on their own, and distorted patterns of brain activity tend to have their own momentum. Once set in place, they recur without outside intervention. So it would be unfair and medically false to claim that a depressed patient caused his condition. On the other hand, people do contribute to their depression. To a huge degree, brain activity is voluntary. If you drink too much, engage in toxic relationships, or lack coping skills in times of stress, the result will be depressed brain function. The shadow zone between the voluntary and the involuntary is very hard to define. In the end, each of us lives in both areas and must navigate them as best we can.
Fortunately, the vast majority of control lies with you personally. You can say “I want to be new today,” and 90 percent of the work is done. The trick is to say “I want to be new today” so clearly and with such commitment that the message is received with no mistakes or confusion. Two brain cells facing each other across a synapse may act like separate entities, but in reality they are part of the whole brain. And the brain is part of a larger wholeness—you. It makes all the difference that you are both sender and receiver of every message. Most people don’t realize this critical fact; they have constructed a world of “me” and “not me.” As soon as they do that, all kinds of messages bombard them from the outside, since “not me” includes other people, the world at large, and Nature itself.
But if everything is “me,” then all messages are from one aspect of the self to another. The new day that you awoke to this morning is you in disguise. Its fresh opportunities come from a level of the self that is invisible and immaterial; therefore, wearing the disguise of the external world proves very effective. When you hear the phone ring and pick it up, you hear a voice that is “not me.” What could be more convincing? But don’t be convinced so easily. Every experience this day brought was subjective; it was received, processed, judged, and absorbed by your awareness. Therefore, this day occurred in awareness, nowhere else, and you are awareness.
No two people can experience today in the same way. Even one minute cannot be experienced the same
way. Because you are experiencing a unique world, it’s up to you how any given moment is received, processed, judged, and absorbed. The self performs these tasks, and the quality of the self determines what you get out of life from moment to moment. At a superficial level there is another person talking to you on the phone—a “not me”—but at the soul level one aspect of awareness is sending a message to another aspect.
The present moment is the only place where renewal is possible, since we receive all messages now. Yet there is no special magic in the now. If a great chef puts an enticing meal in front of you, the experience of eating it doesn’t depend on being present in the now. All that matters is the quality of the self as it receives the experience. A distracted person will barely taste the meal, a depressed person will find the food unsavory, but someone in love will think the same food is divine. So the now is like an open brain receptor waiting for the give-and-take of the next message.
If you are completely open, your awareness alert and expanded, your mind free of old conditioning, then the now will appear to be magical. In reality, you supply the magic. Once you realize the central role you play, it comes naturally to embrace every day as a new world. All the things that make it seem like the same old world reside in you, and by focusing on your personal evolution you can get rid of them, The fog that conceals the new world will keep lifting, until the time comes when renewal is effortless and spontaneous. That’s the very moment when sender and receiver meet in an unbroken embrace.
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul: How to Create a New You Page 27