Tracking the Language of the Body
By Irma Nippert
The body speaks through sensations. Sensations are not just background noise, but meaningful signals. But, you might ask, why pay attention to these sensations? After all, in most meditation practices, we’re taught to ignore the sensations of the body and environment—the itchy nose, the buzzing fly, and so on. This is because meditation is a practice intended to bring you into balance. It’s about controlling the irritating buzz of the body. The body speaks because it wants to show you where you are out of balance. It wants to show you where it hurts. When you follow its signals, sometimes very obvious, sometimes very subtle, it will take you on the path of transformation.
The consciousness of the body is real and wise and true. You can trust it to take you where you need to go. Once you have allowed yourself to turn your gaze inward, you will begin to notice the signals. As you track the signals, allowing yourself to feel into each sensation, they will take you to the next level of the emotions. A little pain in the left eye, a line of tension in the groin, then your attention is attracted to the heart, where you notice a heaviness and a feeling of sadness emerging. You begin to cry, you don’t know why. The emotion may take you to movement, another part of the language of the body. You notice your feet moving around and around, rubbing the surface beneath you. You may ask the feet, Are you going somewhere? From the subtle sensation of movement, you may understand that the message they are giving you is: I don’t want to be here. With the words, the partitions that separate past, present, and future time in our ordinary reality begin to dissolve. The partitions that separate inner and outer reality, natural and divine worlds, also begin to shimmer. Again, you might ask the feet, Where are you (in time and place)? A sob, and then a vision unfolds, and you have opened to the mental level of consciousness.
Sensation, emotion, and mind form the tripartite expression of our individual consciousness. When they merge, we enter into a holographic experience of reality in which transformation can take place. This is true whether you move into a heavenly experience of divine mysteries, or an old memory of a terrible time in your life that still haunts you.
Another person can tell you what they believe about your experience, transposing from their own internal framework, but it is only useful as it provides guidance to point you toward your own knowing. The beauty of somatic work, with or without point-holding, is the space that is held for you to resource yourself. All facilitation has the singular purpose of nudging you to pay attention to sensation, to ask questions, to listen, to make the links between sensation, emotion, and mind, and to move more fully into that holographic space of deep consciousness and experience. Ultimately, it is your own inner being showing you the truth of your existence in a way that is absolutely and perfectly unique to you. No one else, not even the greatest psychic or therapist, can show you the truth, or what needs to be shifted or done, in a way that you can so intuitively grasp. Your own consciousness will provide the exact vision, the exact words, and elicit the exact insight from the heart of the universe that is needed for transformation.