Living Your Best Life
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
One of the reasons why sometimes people new to Tapping have trouble getting results is that they have trouble identifying their emotions and noticing what’s going on with their bodies. For numerous reasons, in many cultures, we’re taught to deny the importance of signals from our bodies just as we’re taught that emotions are mostly useless and best ignored; often we’re encouraged to place the value of intellectual learning and displays of mental ability above all else. The body may be seen as just a sensory apparatus and a vehicle for moving the brain around in space. Only athletes are generally exhorted to pay more attention to their bodies because this is necessary to gain competitive advantage. Even then, they’re often told that they should push through pain without considering any more sophisticated methods for understanding an unthinkably complex body-mind system. The upshot is that most of us have no experience with tuning in receptively to what the body might be trying to tell us, particularly when doing so means feeling discomfort. Not only are most of us profoundly uncomfortable with feeling discomfort, but we also may not even have the language to describe physical sensations, because we’ve spent a lifetime running from them. Add in the very common knee-jerk fear reaction so many of us have about what pain might MEAN to us and our lives, and we have a tangled, heavy ball of obstructive habits that can be hard to contend with. It can also prevent our learning to build bridges to understanding our bodies’ signals in ways that only we can, and then taking appropriate action.
If you want to enjoy the best possible experience of life, here are some ideas on how to unwind this unfortunate tangle and free up energy for the creation of more synergy with your body and its innate intelligence:
Consider what an incredible thing your body is, and how much it does for you every day. It allows you to perceive the vast and varied world around you with your senses; it processes all the air and fuel you feed it and turns that into energy; it allows you to think, feel, and move around at will, and it maintains a million delicately balanced processes that allow you to all of this at all times, throughout thousands of changing internal and external conditions both seen and unseen. Do you think, just maybe, it might be possible for it to communicate something of value to you here and there if you were willing to listen?
Last week we looked at a few ways to get started with meditation. One of the reasons why it can be such an advantage to learn to work constructively with your mind rather than just letting it run wild is that when your mind is not always screaming like a banshee, you have some space to notice what’s actually happening—including with your body—at any given moment. Until you can create such space, you are at the mercy of a mind that will always try to distract you from anything it’s not creating, such as the other parts of your self, as well as opportunities being offered to you by others and the world around you
Practice challenging yourself so that you can become more comfortable with remaining calm in the face of discomfort. Just to make things interesting, we live in a world that offers endless distractions from outside of us, in addition to those that our busy minds create. It’s so easy to seek comfort constantly through food, entertainment, other sensory pleasures, and busy-ness of all kinds that many of us convince ourselves that we’re keeping our discomfort at bay. Unfortunately, suppressed thoughts and emotions have a tendency to build pressure until they cause an explosion we can’t ignore. If you become used to the fact that some discomfort won’t kill you, it’s easier to make small choices every day that are better for your life in the long term. You build confidence in your ability to grow and make progress through small challenges, which then lead naturally to larger ones. If you’re afraid to feel anything unpleasant, you’ll probably always stay stuck right where you are. Conversely, a little courage put into action will multiply until you’re hard to stop
Work on handling your fearful reactions to noticing how you actually feel. Feeling, naming, and being willing to work with what’s true for you leads to awesome power, but it takes work to build these skills, and as you do so, you’ll discover a bunch of stuff that it’s not fun for you to look at. This is ok and completely normal! Trust me, everyone experiences stress and panic when faced with the idea of injury, illness, uncomfortable emotions, restrictions, and eventual death, but all of these are a normal part of the human experience, and finding peace with them is both possible and healthy. Too many of us live our lives in an almost-constant state of stress and panic about this, that, or the other thing, and this takes a major toll on our physical and mental resourcefulness, our capacity for enjoying life, and our long-term health. States of high stress can be useful when your life is at immediate risk, but if that’s not the case right now, that stress is killing you. When you have a high-stress reaction to something that is not life-threatening, in other words, an overreaction, it’s time to lovingly dial it down, and I know of no faster, easier, or simpler way to do this than through Tapping. Lots of other tools can help, like deep breathing, exercise/movement, talking or journaling, etc., but as you probably know, Tapping’s my favorite!
With practice, you become more able to patiently and receptively confront what’s going on in your internal world, identify it descriptively, and endure the initial discomfort of doing this until the Tapping begins to bring you relief. If you can’t allow yourself to notice your emotions and how they express themselves through your bodily sensations, you may not be able to get the results (the on-demand relief and clarity) you want, and that’s waiting for you once you create the space for it to emerge.