I was pondering on this topic (Listening to your body) & have researched some articles.
Below are the ones I found. My personal comments are on *(asterisks).
http://www.selenati.com/articles_your_body.htm
Our body is in constant communication with us – we just need to pay better attention to its messages that steer us towards joy and aliveness. The non-verbal communication of our Inner Self can appear as an intuitive hunch that might urge us to take an overdue vacation or spend some time outdoors. Sometimes a dream can catch our attention leaving us wondering how it relates to our waking life. Other times the Inner Self communicates through a tension headache, chronic back pain or an upset stomach.
*Note that I did see a show on National Geographic regarding Chess Masters. The show said that the intuition is actually real. It is not intuition per se but our brains restore data from past experiences. When we react to situations intuitively it is actually based on recorded past experiences on our brain, what has worked or not worked before. This is why when we watch chess masters they are very quick on moving the pieces. They do not think on their next move. The chess pieces' positions are already stored on their brains from past games & so their brain gives them a signal what move should work for the current game being played
None of these non-verbal messages occur by chance. They are messages from our Inner Self helping us to arrive at the insight or experience that we need to regain balance and wholeness. By listening closely to these hunches, feelings, dreams, pains, and other body signals we learn to understand these messages. Valuing these messages allows us to build a loving and trusting relationship with our Inner Self.
Unfortunately we don’t know how to listen to our bodies, our hearts, or our spirits. In our western culture we have been conditioned by our parents, teachers and authority figures to deny our feelings, medicate our symptoms, and discount the importance of our dreams and intuition. Since we have been so consistently trained to look outside ourselves for logical answers from authority figures, the Inner Self is ignored. If we ignore these subtle messages we receive continually from our bodies, in the long run we may end up getting sick or developing chronic pain without a clinical explanation.
*I have one contradiction on this. Lately I have found how so much useful denying one's feelings is. For example, why cry over spilt milk? There is nothing you can do, so just don't feel those regrets & anger anymore. Personally, an attitude like that left me more alive & eliminated wasting my time on worries & useless problems. Also, doesn't it always say that a person who is healthy emotionally is someone who can control his/her feelings?
*Personally I never go to the doctor or drink medicines as long as I can still tolerate whatever I am feeling. This is because I believe that all medicines (& even vitamins) have side effects. The only time I will risk having another disease (caused from the side effect) is when my current disease is intolerable anymore. Also, I can consider going to the doctor but if he gives me another remedy that is not medicinal then I would take that, & I would only take medicines when I really need them. Of course, antibiotics need to be completely finished, else, they won't work!
*Personally as well, I trust myself more than the doctors. It is I who feels what I feel. It is I who is present at all times in whatever I do. It is I who can eventually determine what is causing my sickness.
The process of listening to our Inner Self can be simple once we know how and if we value the signals we receive. It can also be frightening at first to open up to feelings we have avoided for years, but reconnecting to our Inner Self is worth any effort. As with any meaningful relationship, it takes time and consistent effort to build the relationship with our Inner Self and to learn to trust the feedback.
Some of the things we can do to tap into the wisdom of our Inner Self:
- Create moments of quiet time either during a morning meditation, a solitary walk in nature, or just before falling asleep at night, and ask your Inner Self: “What is my body saying to me?”
- Ask your dreams at night, “What might I need to see clearly now?” or “What in my life am I not paying attention to right now?”
- Keep a dream journal and write down your dreams when you awake. Use the dream images to do some drawing or sculpting and see what emotions arise. Ask the images what messages they have for you.
- If you have chronic pain, sit quietly and relax into a meditative state and ask your Inner Self ”What might my body be saying to me through this pain?”. Focus on your breathing and listen for a word, a feeling sense, or an image to come to mind.
- At times it might also be helpful to merely focus on the pain. Rather than avoiding, resisting, or denying it, try to befriend it instead. By letting your attention rest directly on the pain in a soft, non-judgmental way, you can begin to notice its inner qualities. What sensations are there? Is it throbbing, pinching, pulling, dull aching, or burning? Often if we have the courage to get to know all aspects of our pain it diminishes its grip and decreases in intensity.
Focusing directly on our symptoms and pain is the opposite of how most of us respond to illness, which is to avoid it. By changing the way we view our illness or pain, we can begin to see our symptoms as a potential ally. Opening to the negative feelings and painful sensations by simply accepting what is true in the body, allows healing to occur within the Inner Self. This permission to feel whatever is present creates a sense of freedom inside, and allows us to look at feelings of justified anger or repressed shame and grief that are carried in the body from past experiences. The body remembers and the Inner Self guides us to the areas that need healing.
Learning to listen to your Inner Self and its messages is a gift not a distraction that needs to be medicated away. This relationship with your Inner Self is potentially the most loving relationship you will ever experience.
http://naturalhealthperspective.com/antiaging/listening.html
Taking the time to properly listen to your own body is one of the most important natural health self-help tools available. Yet, many of us do not take the time to listen to what our own bodies are trying to tell us. Macho people wrongly think that the objective is to inflect as much self-abuse as possible without complaining.
Highlights of Listening To Your Body:
Listening to your body is an important self-help tool that is worth developing.
Do you know what is normal for your own body?
Macho people excel at ignoring important warning signs when they continue to abuse their own bodies rather than listening when their body starts complaining.
Sudden radical changes in your body could be important enough to be worth discussing with a qualified health care professional.
When you are sick, listening to your body means finding out why you got sick.
The Natural Health Perspective is not a medical web site. It is a site on health that offers evidenced-based commonsense solutions that will improve your health, wellness, and longevity. Therefore, no attempt will be made to list specific warning signs of medical emergencies since there are scores of medical sites offering that approach.
Sure we all listen, when our bodies tell us it is time to go to the bathroom and snack when we are hungry. And, we all know when are experiencing a bad day. But, many people are ignoring important messages being sent to them by their bodies. Are you sensitive to what your body is saying, when your body starts to complain, or are you totally numb to these bodily sensations?
The basic premise of this web site is that if you provide your body with what it needs, it will naturally heal itself. Likewise, when you are doing something wrong that your body does not like; your body will complain about it. Are you listening?
"Unless you learn to notice and be bothered by the early, subtle stages of illness, you will lose your chances of managing your body through its changing cycles by simple means and will find yourself more and more dependent on outside practitioners and the costly interventions of modern hospital medicine."
-- Spontaneous Healing by Andrew Weil, MD
You should become more aware of what is normal for your own body, so that you can hear your body complaining when something goes wrong. Are you listening to your body? We all have aches and pains, but what is unusual, what is different should motivate us to find out what a strange new feeling, sensation, or whatever, might be about. Anything that you may be experiencing which feels different to you could be important enough to be worth discussing with a qualified health care provider of your choice.
You listen to your body by focusing on what you are doing, throughout the day. Many people call this being centered. The practices of meditation helps people to become more centered and live for the moment rather than always for the future.
When you come down with a headache, for example, you should be able to make a connection between your behavior and your headache. How many times have you just automatically reached for a OTC drug pain reliever when you got a headache? But, have you ever asked yourself what might have caused that headache in the first place? Have you ever observed, how often you get headaches? Could it be related to what you ate or drunk? Have you ever observed on what days of the week you usually get headaches?
In other words, healthy people are healthy rather than sick. And, when a healthy person gets sick it is because they did something wrong. So, when you get a headache something went wrong. And, it is your job to figure out what that something might have been. Correct, the problem and you should not get that type of a headache again.
There are many opportunities to increase your sensitivity to, and awareness of, the true needs of your body. These include when to be active and when to rest, when to sleep and when to get out of bed, when to work and when to relax and enjoy yourself. There is more than one way to listen to your body. Periodically, measuring your body weight, waist size, body temperature, blood pressure and pulse rate are objective ways of listening to your body. The list of opportunities for listening to your body is quite long. Listening with greater interest should be part of any program of natural healing and health.
When you have symptoms, treat them with OTC medicine if you must, but also learn to ask yourself what those symptoms might mean. Do they indicate that there is something more serious that should be investigated? In natural health this is called a constitutional imbalance, while conventional medicine refers to them as underlying disease processes which if left untreated could lead to a serious lifestyle disease. Are your symptoms telling you that you are an experiencing a medical emergency? Or, do they mean that you should simply slow down or alter your lifestyle in some way?
Learning to answer these challenging questions is a part of dealing with the problems of living a good life.
In conclusion: everybody must decide for themselves, including physicians, when something is wrong, and whether or not it is a medical emergency. The natural health way of doing this is called listening to your own body. Find out what is normal for you. And, learn to recognize when your body starts to complain.
Below are the ones I found. My personal comments are on *(asterisks).
http://www.selenati.com/articles_your_body.htm
Our body is in constant communication with us – we just need to pay better attention to its messages that steer us towards joy and aliveness. The non-verbal communication of our Inner Self can appear as an intuitive hunch that might urge us to take an overdue vacation or spend some time outdoors. Sometimes a dream can catch our attention leaving us wondering how it relates to our waking life. Other times the Inner Self communicates through a tension headache, chronic back pain or an upset stomach.
*Note that I did see a show on National Geographic regarding Chess Masters. The show said that the intuition is actually real. It is not intuition per se but our brains restore data from past experiences. When we react to situations intuitively it is actually based on recorded past experiences on our brain, what has worked or not worked before. This is why when we watch chess masters they are very quick on moving the pieces. They do not think on their next move. The chess pieces' positions are already stored on their brains from past games & so their brain gives them a signal what move should work for the current game being played
None of these non-verbal messages occur by chance. They are messages from our Inner Self helping us to arrive at the insight or experience that we need to regain balance and wholeness. By listening closely to these hunches, feelings, dreams, pains, and other body signals we learn to understand these messages. Valuing these messages allows us to build a loving and trusting relationship with our Inner Self.
Unfortunately we don’t know how to listen to our bodies, our hearts, or our spirits. In our western culture we have been conditioned by our parents, teachers and authority figures to deny our feelings, medicate our symptoms, and discount the importance of our dreams and intuition. Since we have been so consistently trained to look outside ourselves for logical answers from authority figures, the Inner Self is ignored. If we ignore these subtle messages we receive continually from our bodies, in the long run we may end up getting sick or developing chronic pain without a clinical explanation.
*I have one contradiction on this. Lately I have found how so much useful denying one's feelings is. For example, why cry over spilt milk? There is nothing you can do, so just don't feel those regrets & anger anymore. Personally, an attitude like that left me more alive & eliminated wasting my time on worries & useless problems. Also, doesn't it always say that a person who is healthy emotionally is someone who can control his/her feelings?
*Personally I never go to the doctor or drink medicines as long as I can still tolerate whatever I am feeling. This is because I believe that all medicines (& even vitamins) have side effects. The only time I will risk having another disease (caused from the side effect) is when my current disease is intolerable anymore. Also, I can consider going to the doctor but if he gives me another remedy that is not medicinal then I would take that, & I would only take medicines when I really need them. Of course, antibiotics need to be completely finished, else, they won't work!
*Personally as well, I trust myself more than the doctors. It is I who feels what I feel. It is I who is present at all times in whatever I do. It is I who can eventually determine what is causing my sickness.
The process of listening to our Inner Self can be simple once we know how and if we value the signals we receive. It can also be frightening at first to open up to feelings we have avoided for years, but reconnecting to our Inner Self is worth any effort. As with any meaningful relationship, it takes time and consistent effort to build the relationship with our Inner Self and to learn to trust the feedback.
Some of the things we can do to tap into the wisdom of our Inner Self:
- Create moments of quiet time either during a morning meditation, a solitary walk in nature, or just before falling asleep at night, and ask your Inner Self: “What is my body saying to me?”
- Ask your dreams at night, “What might I need to see clearly now?” or “What in my life am I not paying attention to right now?”
- Keep a dream journal and write down your dreams when you awake. Use the dream images to do some drawing or sculpting and see what emotions arise. Ask the images what messages they have for you.
- If you have chronic pain, sit quietly and relax into a meditative state and ask your Inner Self ”What might my body be saying to me through this pain?”. Focus on your breathing and listen for a word, a feeling sense, or an image to come to mind.
- At times it might also be helpful to merely focus on the pain. Rather than avoiding, resisting, or denying it, try to befriend it instead. By letting your attention rest directly on the pain in a soft, non-judgmental way, you can begin to notice its inner qualities. What sensations are there? Is it throbbing, pinching, pulling, dull aching, or burning? Often if we have the courage to get to know all aspects of our pain it diminishes its grip and decreases in intensity.
Focusing directly on our symptoms and pain is the opposite of how most of us respond to illness, which is to avoid it. By changing the way we view our illness or pain, we can begin to see our symptoms as a potential ally. Opening to the negative feelings and painful sensations by simply accepting what is true in the body, allows healing to occur within the Inner Self. This permission to feel whatever is present creates a sense of freedom inside, and allows us to look at feelings of justified anger or repressed shame and grief that are carried in the body from past experiences. The body remembers and the Inner Self guides us to the areas that need healing.
Learning to listen to your Inner Self and its messages is a gift not a distraction that needs to be medicated away. This relationship with your Inner Self is potentially the most loving relationship you will ever experience.
http://naturalhealthperspective.com/antiaging/listening.html
Taking the time to properly listen to your own body is one of the most important natural health self-help tools available. Yet, many of us do not take the time to listen to what our own bodies are trying to tell us. Macho people wrongly think that the objective is to inflect as much self-abuse as possible without complaining.
Highlights of Listening To Your Body:
Listening to your body is an important self-help tool that is worth developing.
Do you know what is normal for your own body?
Macho people excel at ignoring important warning signs when they continue to abuse their own bodies rather than listening when their body starts complaining.
Sudden radical changes in your body could be important enough to be worth discussing with a qualified health care professional.
When you are sick, listening to your body means finding out why you got sick.
The Natural Health Perspective is not a medical web site. It is a site on health that offers evidenced-based commonsense solutions that will improve your health, wellness, and longevity. Therefore, no attempt will be made to list specific warning signs of medical emergencies since there are scores of medical sites offering that approach.
Sure we all listen, when our bodies tell us it is time to go to the bathroom and snack when we are hungry. And, we all know when are experiencing a bad day. But, many people are ignoring important messages being sent to them by their bodies. Are you sensitive to what your body is saying, when your body starts to complain, or are you totally numb to these bodily sensations?
The basic premise of this web site is that if you provide your body with what it needs, it will naturally heal itself. Likewise, when you are doing something wrong that your body does not like; your body will complain about it. Are you listening?
"Unless you learn to notice and be bothered by the early, subtle stages of illness, you will lose your chances of managing your body through its changing cycles by simple means and will find yourself more and more dependent on outside practitioners and the costly interventions of modern hospital medicine."
-- Spontaneous Healing by Andrew Weil, MD
You should become more aware of what is normal for your own body, so that you can hear your body complaining when something goes wrong. Are you listening to your body? We all have aches and pains, but what is unusual, what is different should motivate us to find out what a strange new feeling, sensation, or whatever, might be about. Anything that you may be experiencing which feels different to you could be important enough to be worth discussing with a qualified health care provider of your choice.
You listen to your body by focusing on what you are doing, throughout the day. Many people call this being centered. The practices of meditation helps people to become more centered and live for the moment rather than always for the future.
When you come down with a headache, for example, you should be able to make a connection between your behavior and your headache. How many times have you just automatically reached for a OTC drug pain reliever when you got a headache? But, have you ever asked yourself what might have caused that headache in the first place? Have you ever observed, how often you get headaches? Could it be related to what you ate or drunk? Have you ever observed on what days of the week you usually get headaches?
In other words, healthy people are healthy rather than sick. And, when a healthy person gets sick it is because they did something wrong. So, when you get a headache something went wrong. And, it is your job to figure out what that something might have been. Correct, the problem and you should not get that type of a headache again.
There are many opportunities to increase your sensitivity to, and awareness of, the true needs of your body. These include when to be active and when to rest, when to sleep and when to get out of bed, when to work and when to relax and enjoy yourself. There is more than one way to listen to your body. Periodically, measuring your body weight, waist size, body temperature, blood pressure and pulse rate are objective ways of listening to your body. The list of opportunities for listening to your body is quite long. Listening with greater interest should be part of any program of natural healing and health.
When you have symptoms, treat them with OTC medicine if you must, but also learn to ask yourself what those symptoms might mean. Do they indicate that there is something more serious that should be investigated? In natural health this is called a constitutional imbalance, while conventional medicine refers to them as underlying disease processes which if left untreated could lead to a serious lifestyle disease. Are your symptoms telling you that you are an experiencing a medical emergency? Or, do they mean that you should simply slow down or alter your lifestyle in some way?
Learning to answer these challenging questions is a part of dealing with the problems of living a good life.
In conclusion: everybody must decide for themselves, including physicians, when something is wrong, and whether or not it is a medical emergency. The natural health way of doing this is called listening to your own body. Find out what is normal for you. And, learn to recognize when your body starts to complain.
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