Therefore, it no longer makes any sense at all that doctors would treat our body and mind separately. Knowing that our body is mind changes everything about our approach to wellness. It means that in order to achieve any sense of self, we’re going to need to learn about the mind-body connection. It’s all part of a bodymind approach to wellness, and we need to find the route which makes the most sense for our case.

The Body-Awareness category of The Ultimate Healing Guide contains the largest number of alternative healing modalities, and for good reason. The body is a complex system most of us take for granted, and our bodies carry the record of our complete life experience within the cells of our tissues.

Any bodywork a which helps you work towards a release of tightness and return of flexibility is a valid path towards self-awareness and ultimately self-healing. You need to work at finding which ones make sense specifically to you and ignore all the rest. But don’t be surprised if it takes years of just thinking about things differently before you’re ready to make any changes!

The sheer number of methods available to address chronic pain issues, flexibility issues, nutrition, strength, all while also including mental health as part of a holistic approach, means there are probably more than 100 things you haven’t tried yet. It means there are over 100 things you should try before resorting to emotion-numbing drugs or risky surgeries.

By taking the approach that the body is mind, with the assumption that your self-awareness reigns over both, it means we can begin to take actions which make better sense than just swallowing pills to solve all our health problems. Knowing the body is mind changes everything.

“The Body in the Mind: Almost everything the mind does depends on the body. The mind, it turns out, can’t really be separated from the body at all, because the body seems to play an integral role in almost everything the mind does. Without the body, there is apparently no functional mind.” 

John Montgomery Ph.D., Psychology Today

On September 12, 2004, the Dallas Morning News ran a story, “Medical School Breakthrough,” about a new research study that had just been completed at Southwestern University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas.

Scientists had discovered that our experiences do not just reside in our brains but are recorded at the cellular level throughout our bodies, and they believed these cellular memories were the true source of illness and disease. https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/cellular-memory-healing-clearing/

These discoveries in 2004 were just the first of many evidence-based projects which have evolved to support the increasing role of 21st-century mind-body science. They corroborated the evidence, assertions and speculations put forth by Candace Pert, PhD, in her book Molecules of Emotion as originally published in 1997, closely followed by Dr. John E. Sarno’s The Mindbody Prescription released in 1998 and which is still selling strong. These books establish the dawn of the body-is-mind concept as it took a 30-year trek to permeate pop culture understanding.

This sets the stage for the basis of the notions written about here on TheBodyIsMind.com.

We call upon the intelligence of our body as an ally in our quest for wellness:

Our Bodies Average 37 Trillion Cells.

Let’s get right down to the brass tacks of body-awareness: you’re going to need to work at it. If you’re not in the condition to fight for your body wellness, then perhaps the mind-awareness approach would be a more comfortable direction for you. Let’s not play games. If taking care of yourself is the most difficult thing you’ve ever done in your life, and you’re failing at doing so, then there are other factors blocking your survival instincts which you’ll probably need to address first. The Belief, Meaning & Purpose section of The Ultimate Healing Guide  may provide some nuggets for that.

We spend our entire life screwing ourselves up and expect to change things overnight with a drug? While the endless commercials for drugs on TV try to make us believe pills solve everything, it’s not that easy! Our consciousness PLUS the intelligence of our bodymind together are greater than the sum of the parts. Surely we’ve all heard this before. Without addressing your consciousness, pills are often useless.

When we consider all the things which can go out of whack with our bodies, we’re going to need to address nutrition, sleep, posture, balance, strength, endurance, flexibility, and range of motion. If your body is already compromised in one or more of these areas, this will have severe adverse effects upon your outlook on life as well as your energy levels and your ability to cope with stress and the unexpected.

Everything is interconnected. We need to change our thoughts, change our behaviors, and change the way we treat ourselves. Learning to live with ourselves starts with compassion. We need to learn how to forgive ourselves, and we need to rekindle meaning in our lives. If we aren’t working on these things together, then we can probably expect to keep spinning our wheels or otherwise losing the fight the way we’ve been doing.

If we really desire change in our lives, it’s going to require doing something drastically different than what we’ve been doing. You’re going to need to change what kinds of information you expose yourself to on a regular basis as much as it’s going to require permanent sacrifices by giving up some of the things you love the most. Don’t expect to continue leaning on all your bad habits as crutches if you’re planning on making progress towards feeling better about yourself and feeling better in general.

Once we get it into our heads that it’s no longer even a theory but scientific fact that our body stores memories as part of our mind, it’s going to make better sense why we need to really find something that ties this all together for us in a way which we can believe in. You’re going to need to cross the gap between your current understanding of self, and the modern evidence-based perspective of the nature of our self+bodymind.

Body awareness means you’re going to need to learn how to examine how you feel; to discover or renew a relationship with your body as an ally in your fight for wellness. Therefore, you cannot expect to make much progress in strengthening this relationship if you continue to abuse yourself with toxins, non-food fuels, and a lack of oxygen from holding your breath all the time. Give yourself some room for self-compassion.

Even when you’re feeling your worst, that’s when your body most desires for you to move it around, get active, start breathing more deeply, and get some motion into your life so you feel more alive! Every story we’ve ever read and every movie we’ve ever seen where people overcome adversity are all based on real-life possibility. It’s this potential to overcome all odds and find redemption or find peace which lives within each one of us.

Despite the worst suffering you’ve experienced, you can still learn to improve your outlook, have patience and understanding for yourself, and find love for your life and the world you live in. Without such an outlook, the world looks very bleak and dark indeed. Who wants to remain living in a soup of relentless misery without end?

In every one of those cases where people overcome depression and failure to find a renewed lease on life with a motivational passion and mission in life, they first had to come to terms with the pain they were suffering. We need to stop running away and turn to face our pain. There’s really no other way out.

Fortunately, there are many on-ramps to wellness with a body-awareness approach. Almost every single modality which will benefit your condition in this category involves all aspects of bodymind health. In other words, when you’re working on your body-awareness, your self-awareness and mind-awareness are elevated as well. It’s a system whereby any improvement made on one corner of the triad raises the level of the other corners, always in relation to self-body-mind.

Once you gain positive traction, you’ll never look back. Experiencing even a little bit of improvement over your previous condition is always encouraging and must be something you expect to happen before it will. If you manage to take two steps forward for every step back, on average, you’ll eventually reach new levels of wellness inconceivable before you started. It may take years of practice to reach new levels of balance and stability, but you’re never going to get there if you don’t find a way to crack the shell and get started.

These are truths you’ll never hear from your doctor; they don’t have the luxury to develop any kind of intimate relationship with you beyond diagnosis and prescription. When we learn to be honest with ourselves is when we can face reality and bear the truth of our existence. Suffering is a fact of life. We can succumb to it or relentlessly push it back.

It’s like there’s a black hole trying to suck us in, slowly towards the darkness and despair where we lose all control over everything in our lives. We fear losing control of our minds, losing control of our bodies, and losing ourselves within the dark morass of suffering. We’ll do everything we can to avoid thinking about it, distracting ourselves with drugs, booze, cigarettes, porn, over-indulgence, and debauchery. God forbid we lift a finger to take control of our lives by applying direct effort.

To reconnect with your body and eliminate the feelings of disconnection from self and the dispassion for your life, find your self-healing path through the myriad options of body-awareness. Below, you’ll find a list of 27 things you can look into right now to find something that will help break the shell of your chronic pain, anxiety, PTSD, or stress-related illness and reconnect with the intelligence of your body.

First, find your position on the Self Healing Path, then find something in the modalities list above on this page which interests you and learn more about it. If you think there’s something missing from the list, please let us know. Be sure to check out the advanced modalities available within the Self+BodyMind Relationship category, as well as the Mind-Awareness section for the majority of available preventative self-care and wellness options.

If you can’t seem to get started, check out Belief, Meaning & Purpose as well as Freedom of Choice here on TheBodyIsMind.com.