"We begin to understand that distress itself is an expression of the "wisdom of the body." It is the body's way of letting us know there is work that needs to be done and life that needs to be lived-- and our discomfort shows us the way in. Discomfort, then, is always a message-- that we are holding on too tightly to our sense of self-- and an invitation for us to relax, open, and surrender to the fire of larger experience."
-- Touching Enlightenment, Reginald Ray, p. 83
Our bodies experience everything that happens to us and around us, whereas our minds are constantly filtering things. Experiences that our minds don't allow get stored as "unlived life" and will eventually show themselves as pain, tension, numbness, etc.
"We freeze so that we won't have to feel the intensity of what is occurring." p. 80
"Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides." -- Malraux
"As with our traumas, so with virtually every moment of our lives-- the full range of our experience is not admitted, but is pushed back, jammed down, and walled off, where is abides in the body as conscious or unconscious tension." p.114
"Rather than try to actively "figure out" what happened and how it fits into our idea of "self", we simply abide within the body, in the sting and the pain, and perhaps the humiliation and confusion of what occurred. Abiding in that way, we let all of it work on us, in the shadows and in the darkness." p.114
In our culture we prize the thinking mind and hold sensations, dreams, images, emotions, intuition to be secondary. But our mind is constantly filtering and judging based on an idea of "self". Our body is open and porous, connected to everything. Our bodies contain wisdom and information to guide us.
"When we let go of what we think, we meet in our body a being or a kind of being that is informative, self-affirming, and satisfying." -- p. 154
