Body language

Body language

February 2014

By Deepti Gujar

Illness and discomfort within the body is often the symptom of an emotional or mental issue. Instead of popping a pill, introspect on the messages your body gives you, says Deepti Gujar

Recently, I did a past-life regression session for a client who experienced a wound or a block at the back of her throat. Her reason for going into a regression was to find clarity about her career. She was wondering if she should pursue being a doctor. She also had a great love for singing, and had studied it off and on but never really pursued it full-time. During the regression as she explored this stuck sensation at the back of her throat, she went into a lifetime where she was a musician. During the integration of how that related to this life, she became aware of the belief that she needed to suffer, to delay her happiness, in order to deserve it. This led to her ignoring the pursuit of music which was her heart’s calling. In the process of regression, her body did not allow that to remain hidden anymore. In my experience, such unconscious wounds manifest into disease or illness.

For over a year my intuition kept saying that I was ready to do healing and music full time. I ignored it for financial reasons. I kept getting sicker and sicker for a year, and remained undiagnosed. Until a check showed that my vitamin levels were super low. At one level, I attributed it to my diet of being a vegetarian. At a deeper level, I asked myself what vitamins really meant. Vitality came the answer. Was I feeling alive? The answer was no. I was sapping my own vitality by not doing things that made me feel alive on an everyday basis. It has been a year since I quit my job to pursue activities like writing, singing, travelling, and anything else that fills me with joy. Yet today the stress of having a negligible bank balance is nothing compared to the stress of feeling dead and numbed by my mundane IT job.

The call of the inner voice

For healers, their clients are more often than not mirrors of something that is healing within them. Like this client above, I tend to delay singing, which has been my passion since childhood. One day I was feeling unusually restless. My mind was super active, and I had started getting frequent headaches. Meditation did not help. My bowel movements were upset too, which my ayurvedic doctor said was due to too much mental activity. I sat down and asked my body, “What is it that you want?” much like a frustrated mother. I felt a lump in my throat and the diaphragm vibrated as if I was singing. I got my tanpura out, and started tuning my voice. In the next two hours the restlessness ceased, the mind quietened. For a few days I started practising regularly. My digestion got better. I felt energised, rather than exhausted after each practice session. Today, even as I write this, it is again a reminder for me to restart my regular practice, for just last night, I had a vivid dream of singing full-throated, operatically. The subconscious finds ways to communicate to our conscious self. And I choose to listen rather than ignore this second sign (the first sign being the client).

Dr.Newton Kondaveti, my past-life regression teacher, has written a book called Consciousness Heals which talks about how the body is a hologram of your subconscious mind. He lovingly quotes to us often, “the body never lies.” The signs of discomfort that our body shows are messages. Even though some of us know this, and have practised listening to the body and seeing the success behind it in the past, we get lazy, or fall back into the old groove of things, and start ignoring our body language. It is so easy to go to a doctor, get a prescription, buy a few drugs, and go back to the same way of living. But what if we stopped for a moment and looked deeper? My earliest belief about my body was that it is just there. I almost treated it like a machine. I popped pills like Crocin without a second thought. Until I read Deepak Chopra’s book, Quantum Healing, when I was about 17 years old. I was stunned by the outlook of how the mind is an energetic entity present in every cell of the body. Hence, effectively our body is like an intelligent, ever-alert organism that is listening to our thoughts 24/7. It not only listens to those thoughts, but organically feels those thoughts, and shapes itself accordingly.

Listen to your body

In another spontaneous healing, some months ago I was sitting in one of my mentor’s Sunday sessions and felt like crying. I was tired of being sick owing to one year of regular fevers and indigestion. I was on a heavy ayurveda course, but I felt like I was hanging by a thread. I was afraid to die. That Sunday I was also very tense and scared. Through the session, something he said triggered me, and I started crying copiously. The thoughts that went on in my mind were, “Why do I have to have this body?! I hate this body! I just want to die and get it over with!” I had spontaneously processed a past-life conditioning that the body is a burden to the soul. Hence, I was dreading paying attention to it. After that catharsis and looking at the root thought i.e.  the body is a burden, I felt much lighter than I had in over a year. I stopped taking the weakness so seriously. I was calmer while paying attention to the body. At the same time, my mentor’s advaitic reminder that “you are not the body, you are not the mind”, finally started to open up a greater awareness. This same thought was being used earlier to escape the body, rather than treat the body as an instrument of the Divine, a mistake a lot of advaita followers do.

There are so many other ways in which the body needs to be addressed instead of just through diets, and exercise. Leonard Orr, pioneer of Rebirthing-Breathwork and Immortality in his book, The Owner’s Manual, writes about how the element of Earth relates to our body. In that he mentions that not only is regular fasting a powerful way of earth purification that heals the body, but also your career. There is a wonderful affirmation he gives:

I daily make valuable contributions to the aliveness of myself, others and of humanity.

I am tempted to think that our favourite singers, filmmakers and artistes who make us come alive are the biggest healers on this planet right now. I love watching an American television series called, So you think you can dance and I am deeply moved by the sheer quality of heart and soul they put into dancing. In some sequences it feels like they are moving the whole world through their body. It transcends competition. It almost always makes me get up and sing with more passion, or do yoga with more zest.

I have found other ways to relate to the body. These include:

• Blessing the water that I drink or have a bath with, inspired by Japanese scientist Massaru Emoto’s Water Experiment.
• Chanting the mantra “Om Namah Shivay” before I start cooking, inspired by my grandmother who cooked the most delicious food ever.
• Blessing the food on my plate with the mantra “Krishnarpan” – dedicating the food to Lord Krishna, and invoking his presence who transformed the poison in the 14th century saint, Mirabai’s body (since we are exposed to so many chemicals in the food we are served regularly), asking him to transform it into Light.
• Silently sending gratitude and abundance to all who conspired to bring it to my plate.
• Sleeping a good 10 to 12 hours a day that makes me feel refreshed and happy.
• I also verify some of my decisions by passing that thought through my body and checking how the decision feels in my body. Usually, intuitions, knowingness arrive at a bodily level too.

I came across another interesting case through a friend of mine who is a tarot card reader. As she looked up the cards for a health issue a client was going through, the cards said that this lady had suppressed her romantic feelings in a past relationship which led to an upset in her body. Somewhere she had begun to get a message that her romantic nature was not okay with this past lover, which caused her to suppress her childlike enthusiasm. She went on to make a list of her romantic desires, and soon her own comfort with herself increased. This subsequently alleviated her symptoms.

The best prescription for your health is written by you alone. And slowly I guess many of us are questioning how another person based on certain, however elaborate studies, can be the authority for what you need to do to set it right, when it was never a standard machine in the first place ?