You are a complex behavioral ensemble of the interaction between your body, thoughts, and emotions. Changes in each of these aspects of your being influence the other ones.
This interaction takes place because of the interconnection between body, thoughts, and emotions. In everyday language, it’s known as the body-mind connection, where mind is considered a collection of capacities such as awareness, consciousness, thought, perception, memory, emotion, and will.
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For instance, when your body is in pain, it typically makes you feel sad and fearful, and thoughts will arise of how to make that pain and hence that sadness and fear go away. As you can see in this example, your body, emotions, and thinking go hand in hand.
Or, when you have negative thoughts about a past event, it can make you feel depressed or anxious, which in turn can cause physical, so-called psychosomatic reactions, such as digestive disorders like indigestion, stomach cramps, nausea, gastritis, diarrhea, and constipation. In addition, these physical problems can again worsen your mood.
Strong emotions can also emerge without the interference of thoughts. For instance, the sudden encounter with a lion or bear can instantly give rise to fear and distress, typically accompanied with intense bodily reactions that lead to either fight, flight, or freeze response. Nevertheless, after such an event it’s common that the thinking process comes into play to rationalize and digest what happened.
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Examples of the connection and interaction between your body, thinking, and emotions are endless. However, you are frequently not fully aware of how those affect each other, and you’re more often than not unaware of the role your body plays in shaping your thoughts and emotions, and how those, in turn, influence your body.
In fact, in a world that overemphasizes thought and emotions, and actions related to those, many people have gradually lost an intimate contact with their body, which means that they’ve lost contact with part of who they are and how they function.
To restore the balance, that is, to reestablish a close body-mind connection, we need to relearn listening to our body. It means that we’ll need a time of training, focus, and exercise, until effortless conscious body listening becomes naturally part of our being again.
