Learning to Love your Body
On Personal Transformation and Embodied Intuition.

June 10th 2017 - The excerpts below reflect vital aspects of both my deeply personal beliefs, and also my training as a psychotherapist.

From a Blog by "Ravenessences" in which one wise woman (Andrea Mathieson) quotes another (Jungian psychotherapist and author Paula Reeves):

"Most of us yearn for an in-depth intimate relationship. Deep within each of us there is an undeniable longing to love and be loved. Scientists tell us this longing is inscribed in our DNA. We are, they say, social beings destined to seek community and relationship.

Then why is it that all too often we turn a deaf ear and an indifferent heart towards a love relationship that is as close as breath and equally as life sustaining?

Daily each and every one of us is being courted by a profoundly wise and protective lover. That lover is your body.

Now on the cusp of a new millennium, filled with the anticipation of change and promise, we speak of soul, seek to be more soulful, retreat in order to awaken soul, while forgetting that our body is soul’s finest emissary, capable of speaking more eloquently and honestly of soul’s presence than any poet, teacher or scientist dare.

To be consciously embodied begins with learning to love the state you are in, to love your body as deeply and respectfully as you wish to be loved, and to listen intuitively to each lesson this relationship offers.

Every cell in your body responds energetically to your relationship to your soul. If you wish to summon this precious ally, take a moment and reflect upon your body’s version of soul talk, your embodied intuition. These are the wise and bone honest on-going communiques you receive constantly from your viscera, your spontaneous movements, your inexplicable yet instinctual urges, and your symptoms.

Body intuition is always metaphoric but never obscure. Embodied intuition gives us a clear assessment of the true state of our being.

For example, take a moment and turn your attention toward the part of your body you most dislike. It may be a minor flaw or it may be a central feature. Now listen to what your body has to teach you about your relationship to yourself… Allow yourself to feel the indifference or intensity of feeling you have for this rejected part of your body. Intensify the feeling and then pretend you are nothing but this part of yourself. Become your heavy thighs or your aging chin or your sagging stomach. Feel the quality of this energy, the way your posture changes, your attitude toward yourself and even life shifts. This is a gateway to knowing your true nature more intimately than you have ever dared.

All that we yearn to be or suspect we are capable of gets hidden away, disguised by the limitations and self-criticisms we imagine this terrible flaw represents. Unconsciously we ask the rejected part of our body to carry the illusion that we are less than we are truly capable of being.

If you will ask yourself how your life might change if you love this part of your body instead, if you listen to what it can teach you, your life will change. All the energy invested in this charade will be freed for you to use in behalf of self-love and self-confidence.

Every time you find yourself thinking the old thoughts, assuming the old attitudes about your flaw, accept this as an invitation to embodied love – a signal from your essential self that you are using this diversion to avoid your destiny. Respect the reminder to love yourself and step into life, not away from it.

Discovering that what you thought was a weakness is really an unexplored spiritual strength, is profoundly freeing. There is an intuitive wisdom expressed by our body that is by its very existence healing because it turns us toward our truth. Listening to the rejected part of your body can be baffling at first. The insights and messages you receive come unbidden and often defy logical explanation. Yet you will feel the truth of each insight in your bones…

What would it mean to you to believe, really believe, that your body expresses the wisdom hidden in your dreams, harbors your deepest desires and holds sacred your most profound yearnings always?...


Contact Member:
URSULA CARSEN, REGISTERED PSYCHOTHERAPIST

Toronto, Ontario M6C 3L2
Canada
Credits:
Andrea Mathieson, Paula Reeves PhD, Photo by Ursula Carsen