Breaking Free: Overcoming Societal Conditioning to Trust Your Body

I watched a video some time ago. It was educational for me. The video was of parents 'teaching' their baby to swim. Essentially, they just toss the baby in the water and the baby will naturally, after recognizing its own life could be in danger, allow its survival mechanisms to kick in and their body instantly and automatically allows the adjustments necessary to quickly enable the new context (that of being surrounded by liquid again) to update its system now with what it needs, in a nutshell, for the body not to die. It's safe to say once this lesson is really grokked in the body of the baby, it can't be unlearned … if that human ever comes across something of a similar situation, the instincts will trigger getting it to safety. But I digress. Regardless of how it 'lands' in the water, it will adjust itself and float to the surface, the proverbial cat always being able to land on its feet.

Now, a question comes to mind for me ... why aren't adults capable of this if they didn't learn it that early on? Why is it that if an adult that does not know how to swim is thrown into a pool, will not be able to float to the surface of their own accord and bodily know how? They'll drown. In short, the difference, I think, is everything that society, school, church, and so on, have all imprinted into the mind of that individual that tie up the instinctual part of that individual's psyche that essentially say, "don't listen to your body." What do I mean by that? If you think about it, how many times do they tell you in school to sit still, keep your hands to yourself, color within the lines no matter how much you want to do differently, and on and on and on. And how many times do you hear in church that the flesh is evil, and you can't trust it because it’s what separates us from The Big G. They're basically saying ignore your body.

You see, the baby has none of that thinking in the way of what the body needs to do to keep itself alive and can effortlessly listen to what it needs and how it may or may not need to adjust ... without thinking. But the adult, essentially has a mind of learned ways for how NOT to hear their own body. For how not to listen to the wisdom of the body. With that in mind, it brings to the surface for me this idea of needing, being okay with, and understanding the acceptance for essentially what comes next ... you've got to unlearn the things that keep you from being able to listen to the wisdom of your body. This wisdom that society and church and school and so on say doesn't really exist. That say the only real wisdom comes from the mind and thinking and calculations and planning and so on.

Now, to unlearn all of the things that get in the way of your instinctual energies, it's time to rewind the clock. Rewind it all the way back to a time when you really could hear yourself, and in that space, you begin to look for, what is, a new trajectory forward while logically and intuitively allowing yourself to try and purposefully emerge with whatever new information that wasn't previously available to you before now showing up in all the ways that it does now because the tracks you were on could only give you access to information that was inherent in the patterns of thought present to you at the time without the needed updates I'm speaking to.

All in all, it's simple really. The object is to give yourself access to better information sooner ... faster than thought you could say because it exists in the body as impulses before thought, nudges as it were, that reveal to you the path forward by virtue of your ability to really hear on the inside in some ways if not all ways completely separate from but nonetheless in connection with that which is out there in manifest reality. Now, I'm not saying don't listen to what's out there. I'm saying listen to your body first on the inside at least as much if not more than what you hear out there, first and foremost giving yourself priority in making a choice that includes the new choices previously unavailable to you because you couldn't, let's say, hear yourself think, as it were, which means you now get to show up with new information given to you from the very oldest parts of you that you just couldn't hear before. Give it a try.