Your body talks in many ways. It’s good to heed its needs, sensations, signs, actions, and reactions, because your body is not something apart from you. You are your body. And your body wants you to listen to it, which means that you listen to yourself.
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You are also your thinking and your emotions. Together with your body, that’s all you. It’s like a coin that consists of the heads, tails, and an edge.
You cannot think of a coin without one of its parts. It simply wouldn’t be a coin any longer. Likewise, you wouldn’t be you without either your thoughts, emotions, or your body.
Nonetheless, in our daily lives, we often pay excessive attention to our thoughts and emotions. We tend to neglect the existence of our body, taking it for granted.
We want it to be healthy and function in the way we want; we use it as a tool to an end. It’s like a rider and horse. The rider guides his horse, making it do what the rider wants.
Nonetheless, the rider also understands that his horse needs water, food, caressing, rest, exercise, and maybe medical care. While riding, he listens and pays continuous and conscious attention to the horse’s reactions: how it breathes, how it walks or gallops, how the ears and tail move, if it bucks or bolts, or rears, or if its muscles are overly tensed.
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The rider listens because he needs to understand if his horse is happy, excited, calm, aggressive, agitated, tensed, resisting, in pain, or tired. The rider heeds his horse because it’s in his utmost interest that his horse is doing fine. A rider with a crippled horse is a crippled rider, and a rider without his horse, isn’t a rider any longer.
Like a horse, your body talks not with the language of words, but through body language, sensations, signs, sounds, and behavior. By learning that language and paying continuous attention to what your body says, you can learn what it needs, when to provide it, and how, and keep it in better health.
It means that you as a physical, emotional, and mental unity will also be in better health — making you a more balanced person, a rider and horse that ride longer, smoother, and healthier along the roads of life.
