Body awareness and being you
You might be here because you want to feel joy in moving in your body --and in being yourself. One way to recognize joy as such is through cultivating your body awareness. So what is body awareness?
Defining body awareness
There’s the body and then there’s the awareness.
Body
Body can be “a body,” a specimen of the human body. The kind of body we study through many lenses (science, medicine, sociology, history, art, and more). Collectively, humanity knows a good deal about this body!
Body can also be your body. Unique, experiencing, being. Individually, you can know a good deal about this body, too.
Awareness
Awareness can come through your knowledge of something. Like what we collectively know about our bodies (and any one of us can then look up or study). Your knowledge affects your awareness, which is why I’m including it as a kind of body awareness. Body knowledge is part of how you can be aware of your own body.
Awareness is also your sense of, or consciousness of something. Awareness is what you can tune into and feel or notice or hold in your mind's attention, either while it's happening or after it’s happened. You don’t need to be able to label or define or understand an experience to be conscious or aware of it.
Some sensations guide our basic survival behaviors (hunger, shelter, sleep, community). If we feel them, we usually understand them instinctively. Without anything else to get in the way, if you feel tired, you will rest, if you feel hungry, you will seek out food. Of course, there is plenty that gets in the way, including our own history of experiences and our meaning making.
Because we are all meaning making creatures. When we become aware of sensations we don't understand instinctively, or can’t explain through all we’ve learned, we tend to seek meaning. Sometimes it’s an urgent quest, sometimes we come to that exploration gradually.
Making meaning is not body awareness. It comes after. It's the stories we use to make sense of what comes into our awareness. It's the individual contribution or connection to the collective. It's the knowledge building that we do. Of course, once the knowledge is learned, then it can become part of our capacity for feeling, for being aware through our own senses.
For most of us, body awareness is a blend or blurring of felt sense and learned knowledge of our body. Where that blurring can happen I’d like to unpack further in a future post and for now simply share some examples of what might be just one type of awareness or the other.
Felt sense
- Sensations coming from within
- Hunger
- Thirst
- Fullness
- Emptiness
- Sex drive
- Pleasure
- Pain
- Being warm
- Being cold
- Being hot
- Feeling stiff
- Feeling sore
- Feeling numb
- Wholeness
- Separateness
- Belonging
- Being
- Being you
- Stillness
- Movement
Learned knowledge
- What part of me are bones
- What part of me are muscles
- And all my parts in anatomical terms
- Strength
- Weakness
- Shape
- Size
- How I fit in
- How I stand out
- What I look like
- Belonging
What can you do with body awareness?
Does all that we’re aware of need to have meaning? Do we need to explain all that we can sense in our bodies? Of course not.
Being aware of being, of sensing without explaining --or being aware with curiosity and patience-- can be a gift.
When I’m meditating, my sense of my body, how my body feels, is unique to meditating. As a novice, I sought labels and explanations for the feeling, but that search yielded more mysticism dressed up as science than solid information, so I let it go. I try to just enjoy the experience, understanding it in myself -- even if I can’t explain it to anyone else.
On the other hand, pain in my body, in my muscles, bones, and organs, tends to drive me to seek meaning, and persist in the search. That’s why I study anatomy, teach yoga, and love helping others move out of pain and into healing. When I’m hurting, I want an explanation or cause, so I can either understand and accept or accept and heal.
I’ve learned over the years strategies for cultivating awareness --and being ok with whatever it can teach me. Movement and meditation practices have been key in my own education, which I love to share here, and of course there are also many, many other ways to go about it. I encourage you to explore what works for you, and let awareness of your body, of yourself, be part of being you.
Be moving, be true, be you,
photo credit lisa yount, found on unsplash
Do you feel more "grounded" in one area of your body than another? This is something that I started thinking about when my dance colleague in grad school mentioned that she was sensitive to / always coming back to her neck as an area of interest. Honestly, I don't remember if those were the words she used, but it made me think of what area of my body I was drawn to explore -- or avoid. In dance and life, this could be any area or the whole body, and if you're curious about what this even means for you, I encourage you to try an episode of Moved to Heal, my new podcast of trauma-informed practices (for anyone!).
I'm also inviting you to explore the idea in a slightly more limited way in your meditation practices this month.
What’s in this episode?
The chakra system helps to draw attention to segments of the trunk in a similar way that movement practice can help draw attention to any and all parts of you. And this month, I'm teaching meditation practices that use the 7 segments from the chakra system without ascribing meaning to those segments (as the chakra system does).
We're starting this week with the 7 Centers meditation -- which is the practice of bringing your awareness to the deep centers of these 7 segments in sequence.
How can you use this practice?
One thing I love about the chakra practices (and the less mystical versions I'm offering 🙂 is how they can help you to develop internal awareness of your physical self (at least of your torso) and of any reactions or emotions that go with that.
I know that might sound scary. And you can ignore you ever read it, if you want! You can go into this practice without agenda or looking for something; either way, I hope you'll find a little bit of awareness with it someday.
Give it a try when you're ready
Listen to "Ep 490 - Feeling Grounded + 7 Centers Meditation" on Spreaker.
Listen to "Ep 489 - How to Practice 7 Centers Meditation" on Spreaker.
Be moving, be true,
photo credit brazil topno, found on unsplash