Mind Your Body

Your true nature, too, is playful. Summertime is the best time to restore the balance between head and heart, between analytical and intuitive, between familiar and mysterious, between sophisticated and wild…

In our daily lives outside vacation time, so much of the days go by focused on completely unimportant things, way too many of them in our head.

Excess sitting and thinking often leads us to be disconnected from our bodies. The balance is gone. The head rules while the body becomes stagnant and numb.

But physical beings as we still are, we crave sensations, and when we do not feel them fully and deeply with our physical apparatus, our minds easily begin creating drama on their own.

During the summer months, I was amused to notice, how easy it is to shake off annoying thoughts and negative speculations crawling in my mind simply by taking a moment to myself to walk in the garden, lie on the grass, or go swimming. And it was the best summer ever!

Returning to the city, I am trying my best to retain this mind-body connection but I notice it takes a little practice.

When I get overwhelmed or annoyed, I find myself instinctively becoming less present in my body, and the temptation to have yet another cup of coffee, yet another piece of chocolate, or buy something, increases.

There is so much noise around you and online that when you get too much of it, you just want numb yourself – that is, unless you understand it is your mind that got carried away that is causing the problem.

I used to dislike the body-scanning exercises at yoga class, you know the ones where you lie on your back and focus on feeling your toes and then ankles and legs and so on, while breathing deeply. I did not see the point.

But I have come to believe that the harder it is for you to be fully present in your body, the more it would benefit your wellbeing to do it.

So much more headspace, when you make it your business to find physical pleasure every day: leave work early to go swimming, shake your hips to a good song, book yourself a spa treatment after a rough week, enjoy that ripe strawberry, that bath, that kiss.