Let’s take a look at each one, the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’.
It’s obvious what the body is; it is what we are as a physical organism, we can touch it, therefore feel it, see it, etc., from the inside and the outside, so it’s factual and straight forward to know what the body is.
Now, let’s take a look at the mind. Where is it? No one can really pin it down. It doesn’t have a physical form; therefore, it is open to massive interpretation. We have to make up a definition for what the mind is. Some schools of thought I’ve heard call it the Brain, others say it’s a never-ending thought stream in the ethers that contains every thought. So maybe by asking what is thought, we possibly might get closer to what the mind really is, and what the body and mind connection is.
As a body, we function with physical movements, and we think our way through the mechanical tasks and actions needed to live our lives, via functional thoughts. Included are thoughts that come from outside us as knowledge or information passed from others to us. This can be of benefit if it helps us navigate our way through life in a practical way.
So, where I see thought interfering with the natural discovery that each one of us needs to live our lives uniquely, which happens from the inside, is when the thoughts coming from the outside overshadow, drown out and hinder the natural expression of the organism, the body that we are.
We have become so used to consuming others’ thoughts, in an imaginary structure called the mind, that we actually start to believe those thoughts are ours, and that changes what it is to be our natural self. When we are so accustomed to accepting what others think as our own, we become affected and influenced on a level at which we are not really aware that this has happened, or is happening to us. We become conditioned by the system of thoughts fed to us, voluntarily or involuntarily.
So then, getting back to the mind and body connection, the mind in my understanding is a thought process. It’s only when we look at thought, the information throughout time that has been recorded, that we think the mind is vast and all encompassing.
But where does true original thought come from?
In my exploration, through natural meditation, it comes into existence as an expression of the body. That is why this meditation is completely different to other forms of meditation. The mind and body connection is just that, intimately connected. When there is an urge, a feeling, a sensation, in the body, this happens before the thought is expressed that is the description of that feeling or sensation. It cannot happen the other way around, it’s subtle and often goes unrecognised and misunderstood.
When I’m feeling thirsty and I am conscious of this, thought has just described the original physical sensation of the body’s need for water. It’s a response of the body to itself to know it needs to drink water. It is not the thought that comes first. This is a basic example but makes it simple to see the origin of the thought process coming from the body.
The mind, the thought process, only has life through the expression of the body and that is what the mind and body connection is.
