You Have the Wrong Operating Manual for Your Body

Letting Sensation Lead | Creative Expansion Challenge Day 3

Most of us received operating manuals for our bodies rife with erroneous information based on the assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain, however; there is no evidence to suggest this is true. And in fact, within the vagal pathway of the nervous system, 80% of information travels from body to brain, while 20% travels from brain to body. It’s going in both directions, AND the majority comes from body/sensational information first. But mostly, as a society, we operate as though our brains know everything there is to know.

Let’s change our operating instructions so we can begin to access the wisdom in every single cell of our bodies, and beyond. 

To do that, we’ll come back to the lens of polarity and operate on the axiom that our whole being is brimming with consciousness and its contents, yin and yang — we are the container and the eros buzzing through it —  the masculine and the feminine — that which is never changing and that which is always changing.

Eros is the movement consciousness is aware of.

We are both movement and awareness of movement, and it is all a manifestation of spirit.

Practically, what that means is that everything is composed of consciousness… and I do mean everything, but for this practice we’ll focus on our thoughts and ideas in the mental realm, just the same as our emotions and sensations (remember, body, mind, and spirit are all the same thing). The only reason we tend to value thoughts and logic over feelings and consider them as superior is because as a culture, the logical, the proven, the “sure thing,” the path without mystery has become the norm.

But you know that’s just fear speaking.

When we bring erotic awareness (aka sensational awareness) to our experience of this play of the polarities that compose us, we give ourselves access to information hidden within the unseen universes of our bodies. We give ourselves access to the wisdom of the whole nervous system. Which is wise far beyond what our brains can conceive or put into words.

Now, if there’s so much wisdom to be revealed  in simply feeling, why do we avoid it, apart from the aforementioned cultural programming? Because sensationally, our nervous systems can’t handle it. 

The crazy thing is, sensation is actually neutral; that is, we can choose to perceive something as pleasure or as pain, as in the way some people derive great pleasure from being spanked and whipped and tied up. 

So the idea that something is “too painful” to feel can start dissolving the moment we decide to open to sensation itself and let go of the judgement. As you’ll learn, it’s the judgement that causes the tension. It’s the fear of suffering that causes us to suffer. It’s the resistance to what is that makes the experience of deep presence more and more and more overwhelming.

We can flip this, and it’s simple. We can make the experience of deep sensational presence more and more and more inviting (which leads to pleasure) by focusing on sensation alone, versus our judgements about sensation (i.e. I shouldn’t be feeling this, it’s wrong to feel this, I look weird, etc) 

Through this willingness to feel, we inform our nervous systems that it is safe to feel, and from here, we can begin to loosen the tension we often unconsciously hold against our experience and the way energy naturally wants to move through us. 

Yawning the Body Open

To tap into this magical world of sensation, we’re going to experiment with one of my all time favorite practices. I call it simply Yawning the Body Open, and it’s composed of three pieces: breath, sound, and movement.