My Heart’s Aflutter!

Its long been part of my job description as first a fitness class instructor, later as a personal trainer and now as a massage therapist to assist people in recruiting their minds to assist achieving simple things like better posture, better form during an exercise and deeper breathing, basically increasing their physical performance and function helping them to feel better, via the mind body connection. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of times I’ve heard phrases such as “I don’t believe in that stuff”, “I’m not good at that” and/or “my mind doesn’t work that way” when it comes to healing the body and rising above it all, when mainstream body mind terminology is used and accepted by the public all the time.

Phrases such as: “put your mind in the muscle” and “breathe through the pain” are commonly used in the exercise and massage industry. See, I know from experience that pain is the mind’s resistance to change. It’s the job of the subconscious brain to protect us from danger and injury. The unconscious mind doesn’t distinguish pressure from a massage stroke from pressure from a damaging force. That’s a good thing, that’s what its job is. But, I’ve been thinking a lot about the conscious resistance that people have to the idea that they can create their own physical realities in there bodies and of course there is the obvious question, why? Why do they resist capitalizing on their ability to feel and function better. But that’s not something I want to concentrate on in this piece. That’s a whole other article. What I want to concentrate on is the fact that people already believe they have a mind body connection! That’s what’s important and that’s what can be useful to people. This is evidenced in our everyday language already. We use phrases all the time which demonstrate our understanding of this connection. For example, we say we have “butterflies in our stomach” when we’re in love, “he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders” when we see someone walking down the street heavy with their life burdens. It’s naturally the way the brain works to describe physical experience in images. That’s what poetry, metaphor and visualization capitalize on. So, what I want to say to people is this, trust your very uniquely human ability to be able to recruit your unconscious using imagery and visualization to create change in your reality, your actual physical life. Ritual 1 can assist you in doing this, it just adds a pleasant therapeutic fragrance to the body mind’s own natural talent that’s already there!