One of the common “complaints” that I hear about focusing on the body and the mind from the level of the nervous system is that it feels very reductive. It’s something that I had to come to grips with myself.
Comments that have come up in the past say things like, ‘We’re more than a series of chemicals reactions and our biology. We are soul and spirit”.
To which I now find myself saying:
I totally hear you. But in truth, I’m yet to find something more mystical and magical than the body. It’s incredible how when under threat, our lungs move down and wrap around our heart to protect it.
Or that when everything feels too much, that we have this ability to tune out in an effort to keep ourselves safe, our nervous system protecting us from input that feels too much or too difficult to manage.
That we have this beautiful fascial container that lets us feel into the edges of our skin and communicates to every cell, like a superhighway of sensory information.
It only takes ten minutes of learning about your body to really blow your own mind.
And then- even beyond that- how we can merge with our horses to create as a unit a power and a strength that neither of us could feel independently. What a gift.
And what’s more, the ultimate connection to the truth of who we are can never be tangibly experienced or felt if you are living from a place of survival.
I believe the “extra sensory perception” that we consider to be the reserve of those with a gift, or perhaps a phenomenon that we experience once or twice if we are lucky is actually part of our innate physiological and psychological skill. It is who we are. It is how we are.
But we can’t access that if everything about us is just trying to get through the next minute.
Understanding and learning about your nervous system is both scientific and spiritual. They don’t exist as binary. They are one and the same.
And to think anything otherwise is to blinker yourself from the other worldly and yet of this world delight that is your skin and everything that exists within it.
Onwards.
❤️ Jane
