Over the past week, a discussion on “coming from the heart” versus “coming from intuition” led me to a new direct experience about awareness and integration. Before I go any further, I need to briefly explain what I mean by coming from heart or intuition.
My friend and I attempted to clarify whether one or the other was more meaningful/important/necessary. In that discussion, it became clear we exemplified two preferences, mine being intuition while his was heart. A more concrete way of saying this is my decision-making process is via my intuition, and his is via his heart. However, as our conversation progressed we agreed that just as the lower and upper chakras of the body meet in the heart and are tempered by it so, therefore, are our physical cellular wisdom and our spiritual intuitive wisdom tempered by the heart’s wisdom. Of course, in yoga we are taught to seek such truth through its direct or felt experience in our body, mind and spirit.
Today, a very concrete illustration of this actuality emerged in my Zoom conversation with yet a different friend. We were discussing how depression has a visceral presence and, once it departs the body, a visceral absence. My friend stated the visceral absence felt like “knowing something without having to explain it with words.” To state this in a different way, the sensation of visceral absence reflects the physical body’s cellular wisdom (depression exiting the body) as well as the spiritual body’s intuitive wisdom (knowing it was depression that left the body). Furthermore, this union or integration of body and spirit was joined by the mind’s recognition that intellectualizing or defining the experience with words was unnecessary.
When body, mind and spirit are aligned and in sync, we are experiencing our potential, or as he so aptly stated, “our super powers.”
Without the body; the essence, the energy of Intelligence, the creativity — whatever you call it — cannot manifest itself.
The very manifestation requires the form, the very expression requires the form. Vimala Thakar
The following poem from my soon to be published poetry book, Unplugged, says more of the same.
Easing In
Homeless to once familiar shores,
the ancient journey to truth, beauty and goodness
moves beyond physical illusion.
Old roles relinquish when external judgments,
discovered to be untrue, slip gracefully away.
The internal staircase of awareness spirals down
into sensation, thought, emotion, and
awakens truths never before spoken.
Body, mind and breath sense the rippling, and
ease into shapeless beauty where all is good.
