How thoughts shape our body and life
It’s a common thing for us to experience emotions directly through the body, for e.g when we go out to meet someone whom we love a lot, we walk lightly with our hearts pounding with excitement, whereas anxiety might tighten our muscles and make our hands sweat and tremble before an important job interview, right? Numerous studies carried out over the last decade or so have established that emotion systems prepare us to meet challenges encountered in the environment by adjusting the activation of the cardiovascular, skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, and autonomic nervous system. This link between emotions and bodily states is also reflected in the way we speak or behave, for e.g: a young girl who is about to get married in a week’s time may suddenly have cold feet and experience nervousness. Similarly, those lovers who have had a bad breakup and are heartbroken, may experience a shiver down their spine on hearing their favourite song being played somewhere. To put it in simple words, all the above examples mean that our thoughts and feelings can affect our body directly and they can very well have an effect on what we think, what we feel and what we do.
Shakespeare had rightly said “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” The fact is that even though we are not faced with sabre-toothed tigers every day, life presents us with lots of situations which can be perceived as threatening that naturally triggers stress response from within us. For e.g. if you climb staircase instead of taking a lift to your 4th floor apartment and immediately after entering home, you experience uncomfortable symptoms like a pounding heart and excessive sweating, you might instantly get this thought that, “Gosh, I’m not as fit as I used to be, maybe I need to see my doctor and get a thorough checkup”. Now suppose instead of having a negative thought on entering home, if you just sit down calmly and do a simple deep breathing exercise, you may feel completely fine in a few minutes and you would continue with your day as usual without any great change in how you feel. This example clearly shows that the same experience, if interpreted differently, can result in very different feelings and emotions. We must thus understand the fact that our mind has tremendous power over our body and it directs everything in our body. According to medical experts, 70% of our diseases can be changed by changing the mind, because they originate from there.
Today most of us are living in body consciousness – resulting from the false identification of self with body. When a soul identifies with the characteristics of the body, we limit ourselves as being a male or female, young or old, ugly or pretty, black or white and so on. Such limited identities then influence our thoughts and actions. We act and relate with other humans in a very limited way and such a limited consciousness gives rise to emotions like - insecurity, fear, selfishness and hatred. Thus, those who are ignorant of the soul are severely bound by their body and they think, act and live their whole life in a narrow-limited way that makes everything in their lives limited. Hence, in order to live a liberated life, we need to realise the truth that we all are spiritual beings in a human body and birth after birth we continue to play different roles. Thus, by being souI conscious, we can transcend our fears, attachments and vices and we can also conquer the fear of death and any kind of physical loss, thereby experiencing our original qualities such as peace, joy and love in an unlimited way.
(The writer is a spiritual educator and popular columnist for publications across India, Nepal & UK. Till Date 9000+ Published Columns have been written by Him.)
