Are you feeling it?
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Scenario 1: Think of a day in your life when you felt under a lot of pressure. When you were madly rushing because you just didn’t have enough time to get an important thing done. Maybe you feel like this most days?
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Scenario 2: Now think of a time when you felt a sense of slow, spacious ease. Maybe in nature and/or on holiday somewhere beautiful.
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In which scenario did you feel more connected to yourself? To others? To your sense of empathy and compassion?
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Two concepts I want to explore here, and particularly how they intersect, are the concepts of mindfulness and body wisdom.
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Mindfulness
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In the last decade particularly, much has been written about the benefits of increasing our mindfulness. One definition is “a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.”
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So among other things, mindfulness helps us to be more connected to the present – externally but also internally… ie. We’re more connected to what’s going on inside ourselves. Hold that thought…
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Body Wisdom
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An exciting discovery in neuroscience that’s become mainstream knowledge in the last few years is how we actually have multiple “brains”! Yes really. The definition of a brain is ‘a complex, adaptive, neural network’. Significant size neural networks have been found in our heart and gut.
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This means your heart and gut brains – or wisdom centres – can also perceive, assimilate and process information, remember and adapt to new circumstances and information.
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Our head brain is great at thinking, analysing and making meanings of things. Our heart supports emotional processing, connection and passion. Our gut brain can focus us on our sense of self, action and courage.
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The crux of connection
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If we’re not connected to ourselves, how are we going to utilise our heart and gut wisdom?
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If we depend on our head brain alone to make decisions, we don’t include the knowledge and perspective of what our heart wants (compassion & values) and what our intuitive gut wisdom offers us (courage and sense of self).
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The gut and heart also influence the quality of our cognitive functioning. They send important signals to our head brain and so considering them when making decisions can help us to make coherent and connected decisions.
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Furthermore, if we’re not connected to our heart wisdom, surely this makes it harder to have self love. And if we’re not loving towards ourselves, why would we be truly kind, loving and compassionate to the outside world?
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The outcome
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Think about the kind of world you want to be living in… one where people are making cold-hearted and fearful decisions? (What could possibly go wrong?)
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Or a world where compassion and courage are part of every decision we, our communities and our leaders make? I know my preference…
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A mini-meditation to try
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If you’d like to explore connecting in more deeply with your heart and gut wisdom, enjoy a mini mindfulness meditation from Melli O’Brien…
