Imagine for a moment, what life might be like if we had to consciously control our basic biological functions. If the length and depth of each breath had to be consciously regulated based on an internal sensation of the need for oxygen. If we had to think about changing the speed of our heart rate to adjust to changing needs for oxygenated blood in the muscles and the brain. If all the secretions of the digestive tract had to be turned on and off manually. What if we had to individually direct each of the millions of muscle movements required to pick up a forkful of food, put it in the mouth, chew it up and swallow.
I don't know about you, but I'm mighty thankful that of the vast amount of activity which goes on in my body, I will never have any sense of conscious volitional awareness. We are the fortunate occupants of a biological system of tremendous complexity. The more one knows about how one's body works, the more amazing it becomes that it works as well as it does. Whether you believe we are made in God's image or God in our image, this human form is a masterpiece worthy of unending awe and appreciation.
Yet how many of us view this bag of skin with awe and appreciation on a daily basis? I suspect that many of these marvels of engineering brilliance escape our notice. What we do pay attention to is the ways it doesn't meet our expectations. The darn thing is forever complaining about aches and pains. Joints become stiff and disks worn. It doesn't digest the foods we like to eat. It overreacts to innocuous pollen in the air or the bite of an insect. It under-reacts to viruses so we get sick. Bones that should be solid break. Flesh that used to be firm sags. And the darn thing stores an unnecessary amount of fat which clogs up the inner plumbing.
Even if all the physical components are functioning, the mental subsystem rarely functions as we wish it might. It craves things that it shouldn't have, creating an endless stream of demands. It conjures up irrational fears and paralyzes us with panic in response to high places, small places, public speaking, harmless spiders and rodents. Sometimes unwise words slip out of the mouth uninspected, causing harm. And worst of all, we can lose control of it when it flies into a fit of rage.
Clearly wisdom and ignorance struggle with each other to control our actions. Often enough, even knowing the right thing to do we choose the wrong and suffer later for our indiscretion. Wisdom grows in the manure of our misery. We are an unfinished masterpiece.
Recognizing the limitations of our biological system, today I wish to encourage you to explore the latent intelligence that we largely ignore. A tremendous amount of this biological system does seem to run automatically. I don't have to control my heart rate, blood pressure, the mix of hormones in my blood, or the tonic contraction of each muscle. Our choice often then is to ignore it until it breaks down.
One has the option, though, of paying attention to the subtle, automatic processes in the body. Attention to the mundane aspects of one's body processes can improve its healthy function and inspire a deeper understanding of life.
As I have done a little dabbling in anatomy and physiology, I have become impressed by the way intelligence is distributed throughout our bodies. The simplistic view that our brain sends down commands which are then carried out by the obedient cells that receive the message is far from the reality.
My first adventures into body awareness came with digestive problems. I have a chronic condition which causes me episodes of a great deal of intestinal pain. During my teenage years, I had resigned myself to the unpredictability of these episodes. Some days I felt good and other days I didn't. I attributed the irregularity of the problem to stress, weather, biorhythms, just about everything but what I was putting in my mouth. For some foolish reason, I had defined myself as someone with a "cast iron" stomach. I did have a sense that I might have a problem with milk, but that was it.
What opened up my thinking about listening to the intelligence in my body was a woman I dated while finishing my engineering degree in Berkeley. She followed a very restricted diet, not eating any wheat or an assortment of other foods. She badgered me about my bad eating habits and encouraged me to consider that I might be having trouble with more foods than milk. She recommended I simplify my diet until I had no pain from the foods I was eating. Then add foods back gradually using my intestinal pain as a test of acceptability.
She was asking me to change from controlling my consumption of food from an external criteria (everybody eats pizza so I can too) to a internal criteria (when I eat pizza, I get sick). Simple and obvious as this sounds, how many of us do listen to our internal criteria? It is an act of will that takes a great deal of courage. For example, how many of us listen to the signal coming from our stomach that we are full and stop eating before our plate is clean?
It took me about six months of hemming and hawing before I decided to take her suggestion. It took a few bouts of agonizing intestinal pain after eating the wrong things to convince me to start to control what I put in my mouth. I simplified my diet and began to discover that I felt a lot better. Soon I discovered that foods I ate on a regular basis did indeed cause me problems. My body revealed to me that it couldn't tolerate chili peppers, corn meal, eggplant, cranberry juice, and bamboo shoots. Things I was sure it wouldn't tolerate, like cayanne pepper and hot mustard caused no problems. To sort out what worked and what didn't, I needed to pay careful attention to everything I ate and how I felt later.
Since beginning this process about 14 years ago, my digestive health has steadily improved till I very rarely have problems with my intestines any more. I've even lost some of my sensitivity to a few foods if taken occasionally.
Another area of awareness training that I have derived health benefit from is observing my tension and posture while working at a computer keyboard. Some of you may have noticed how much attention I have paid to getting a good table and chair for my computer here. This is because working with a computer for long periods of time can be quite stressful on the body.
When I first worked in the computer field, I would often spend long hours sitting in front a computer screen plugging away at my programs I was writing. I would go home at the end of the day usually in the evening with very tight and painful shoulders. I would become so absorbed in my programming that I would completely lose track of time and my posture as I slumped over my keyboard scrunching up my shoulders when I became frustrated. I took a lot of asprin for headaches. I figured this was just the price I would have to pay for doing this kind of work.
It wasn't until I started meditating that I became fully aware of just how much tension collected in my shoulders. I couldn't sit still for more than 20 minutes without a great deal of pain in my neck. This was initially quite frustrating, because these muscles felt as if they were made of rock and wouldn't soften.
Most of us, I suspect, think of the tonic or normal tension in our muscles as something that is fixed by our muscular structure. Take the case of a 70-year- old man whose neck and shoulders are so stiff that he can not turn his head without turning his entire body. If the man is given anaethesia, his whole body becomes loose and his head can be easily turned. His body will become so flexible, in fact that care must be taken to prevent damage to it. His shoulder could be easily pulled right out of the socket. When he wakes up again, all the previous stiffness returns.
It is the intelligence distributed throughout our entire body, much of it in our spine, that sets the level of contraction in each muscle. Muscles are not on and off switches. They are contracted from 0 to 100% with resting contraction of 10, 20, 30 or more percent. The more resting contraction, the tighter we are. This is all learned and adjusted as we live our daily lives. But once set, they do not have to remain that way forever. Simple stretching exercises can expand our range of motion and change the resting contraction percentage. These setpoints can be modified by the brain overriding the automatic settings by bringing them into our field of awareness. The way one brings these muscles into our field of awareness is by paying very close investigative attention to them.
When one is meditating, the temptation when one feels a pain in the shoulder is to try to fix it somehow and make it go away. After all, it's disturbing one's concentration and the meditation would be better if the pain would go away.
Another approach to resisting the pain is to explore and open to it. Rather that push the pain away, allow the pain to be the focus of the meditation, exploring the sensations. Its similar to the popular ideas dealing with chronic headaches which try to label the color, texture, consistency, and feeling of the headache. This is done, not with the goal of making it go away but rather the goal of investigating what is actually happening.
As I was willing to accept my neck pain as part of my current reality and to explore exactly which muscles were involved with finer and finer detail, the pain would initially get more stronger, then would come a throbbing sensation, then the muscle would release. A gentle accepting but vigilant awareness brought relaxation.
The last practice of listening to my body I'd like to mention this morning has to do with emotions. The first woman I seriously dated was always criticizing me for not being in touch with my feelings. Like my father, I was a very rational person who operated from logic, not feeling - or so I claimed. She felt I did operate quite a lot from my emotions but didn't know it because I didn't know I was experiencing them. Have any other men here heard such criticism?
Being young and impressionable, I decided to seek out my feelings and get to know them. I would analyze my actions for traces of emotion driving them. The whole experience was quite frustrating because what other people would tell me I was feeling didn't always match with my impression, causing a lot of confusion.
The way I finally got a handle on the situation was realizing that my emotions began with a change in my hormonal system. If anger arose, my heart would start beating faster. If desire arose, I would feel my body tilting forward. If hurt or sadness arose, the muscles in my face tightened. The most immediate way for me, in any moment, to determine my emotional state was to pay attention to how my body was feeling at that moment, which may seem to have no connection to the contents of my mind.
Paying attention to the information we are constantly receiving from our bodies instead of trying to ignore it or change it to suit our likes and dislikes is a way to literally expand our consciousness. The attention to my physical state has been of great help to me in improving my health and well- being. A tremendous amount of intelligence exists at the lowest level of our biological essence - down to the cellular level and beyond. The biologically based sensation of this moment can often be closer to what is real than the memories of previously experienced moments. Yet the messages of our nerves will be meaningless without a higher form of intelligence. It is our cortex that does the job of "making sense" of it all. Yet if the cortex isn't in tune with the current reality the body is experiencing, it will not successfully guide the system into the next moment. Present-moment awareness is a vital source of information that supports the well being of the total organism.
I encourage you to seek the truths hidden in the everyday bodily experiences. Only by staying in touch with the moment-to-moment realities of our physical being, can we hope to optimize the functioning of our whole body. The reservoir of wisdom within the boundaries of your skin far exceeds all the insight gleaned from a thousand books. A profound understanding of the nature of existence can be discovered in something as familiar and elementary as the next breath.
Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A Trumbore, All rights reserved.