Make Your Body Smile
How do you relate to your body?
In yoga we employ both a top down and bottom up approach to well-being. Bottom up means we stretch and move and breathe and feel and that impacts the way we think and behave. Top down is where we use the mind to relate to the body – this can be, for example, anxious thoughts causing butterflies in the stomach, to love causing the heart to swell.
As a yoga teacher, I am mostly focused on bottom up – I get you to stretch in various ways, to raise the arms and breathe fast and so on and this impacts how you feel and how you think, and hopefully restores balance to every part of you.
But top down matters too. How do you relate to your body? Is it a hindrance or an annoyance? Are you proud of it, or do you hide it? Is it balanced and healthy, or so riddled with scars and trauma you try to forget you have it?
Consider someone with IBS whose entire life revolves around managing their diet to prevent discomfort and bloating. How would they relate to their digestive system? What sorts of words would come up when they think about it? Redesigning the narrative around troublesome parts of our body can be a powerful way to heal.
One of the keys to unlocking health and happiness is elevated emotions like joy, love and compassion. This is why practices like gratitude meditations are so impactful on health where we list all the things we feel grateful for. They change the frequency of organs like the heart which then sends messages to the brain which in turn changes our autonomic nervous system to social coherence and we start to feel balance.
Next time you practice yoga or meditate think about how you relate to the different parts of your body and the words you associate with them and then see if you can change the story. If you hate your dodgy knee for slowing you down, try forgiveness and sending healing and acceptance. Learn to embrace your scars. Learn to love your organs.
In the film Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, played by Julia Roberts, is told by her teacher to meditate on making every organ, tissue and cell in her body smile. That way, he says, you will become beautiful. I would encourage the same. The next time you practice yoga or meditation, make your liver smile, make your frozen shoulder beam with health, let your cells radiate golden light and energy. Change the story of your body and talk to it differently, and it might start to relate differently to you.
