Remembering you have a body: Too much living in the head
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2019-10-22

My thought for today is something that I'm really a beginner in, and it's just a brief mention of a whole world of a topic. 
And it's the idea of awareness, consciousness, the senses, and how do we organize them, how do we see them, how do we see ourselves? How do we perceive our being, our existence where we fit? And the idea is that it's so normal for us to really just by default see the centre of our universe as our heads. 
And, you know, it makes perfect sense. 
We have, you know, four out of our five senses, in terms of external perception, are in our head. 
So why wouldn't we see that as the centre? I mean, if we're looking at something, it's centred on our eyes. 
If we're hearing something, it's centred on our ears. 
And of course we have this brain in our heads where all this thinking goes on. 
And so it's completely understandable to see the head as the centre. 
And it's not entirely false, but it is incomplete. 
I have absolutely gone down the road of being in my head to an extreme degree. 
It's very helpful for escapism to sort of concoct fantasy imagination in our minds and separate from our real surroundings. 
And I've always enjoyed being highly cerebral, often to extreme degrees, almost like the alien head in a vat, just sort of a discombobulated, you know, disembodied head, just a pure brain. 
You know, there's something about that that's attractive to me, and certainly when I was younger, this kind of pure cerebralness is something that I've gone very far into. 
But I've also paid the price for that, in the neglect of my body, in the- almost like a tyranny of being overly cerebral, where our thoughts become tyrants over ourselves, trying to make the world the way that we want it, make reality the way that we imagine it, even flying in the face of what the world is actually telling us and what our bodies are telling us, living in this concocted, convoluted thought world. 
And that is the extreme of this kind of head consciousness, where we focus our consciousness in our head, in our brain, in our thoughts. 
And, you know, when somebody has no brain- you know, it's not like this is all a bad thing. 
It's not all bad. 
It's just the extreme of it, and the idea that this is the only way, that is the mistake that I have fallen into. 
And I'm recently becoming more open to alternative ways of kind centring our perception. 
I was fascinated to hear of this idea that it's possible to imagine your gut as being the centre. 
And we had that in the sense of feeling your gut. 
You get a gut feeling. 
And, you know, I imagine, you know, maybe for many people this is natural. 
And certainly the heart- we can have a sort of a heart centre, if we sort of- the feelings coming from our chest and from our heart sort of feel like the centre of our being. 
And maybe some of this is completely obvious to many listeners. 
And maybe it's just for me that my living in the head has gone this far. 
But I know I'm not the only one who has this propensity to live in the head. 
So much of our environment conditions us to that, all this kind of mentally-based labour. 
We're often removed from physical labour. 
We're living in chairs and watching screens, and that is highly, highly mental, brain, head activity. 
And we're being very highly stimulated. 
We're just- it just seems to be part of the default state of modern person is just this hyperstimulation that is filling our senses, filling our minds. 
Pictures, words, sounds. 
And it's keeping us focused in the head. 
And so much of all the movements and programs and therapies and ideas that are trying to help with the problems of this over- this living in the head, which has spawned whole worlds, whole movements, whole systems, all devoted to how do we get out of our head. 
And it seems like a big part of that is if we cut down on the stimulation, if we have this silence and this space, we can then actually have feelings from our body, and actually let this sort of internal sense speak to us. 
It's like our body, our hearts, our guts, and our bodies can be speaking to us, and they are communicating subtle senses to us all the time. 
But because we are so distracted, focused on, or entranced by these mental stimuli, all the words and sounds and pictures and everything that's coming at us, we tune out of the body. 
So this is simply the beginning of moving in this direction and it's just- it's simply noticing- I'm just noticing how big a thing this is. 
I don't actually have a solution for this. 
But for my first step, I will- well, there's the continuing search for more silence, the continuing pursuit of simplicity to leave more room for this. 
And simply the feeling of- letting myself have the feeling of just reminding myself that I have a body. 
Yeah, maybe that is just- something as simple as that can be highly powerful. 
Let's just remember, remind ourselves, hey, I have a body, and simply feel the body. 
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