Your Body Does not Lie

Your Body Does not Lie

This phrase has been bandied around a lot in recent years. What does it mean, exactly? There are so many layers of “truth”. Here’s how I think about it.

“Your Body Does not Lie” refers to a certain strata of experience. I believe that at the deepest level of Truth we are shining Light, free of ill-will. But covering this shimmering core is a layer of the muck laid down by decades of beliefs we have developed. Beliefs such as: “I am not good enough.”, or “The world is a scary place, not safe.” become like concrete over time.

Because our sense of self clamors to insist we are good enough, and we long to feel secure, there is often a superimposed layer on top of this murky place. The image we try to convey – and try even harder to believe in – is one that portrays us as “good”, “secure”, “with-it”, and maybe even “cool”.

This is akin to cosmetic surgery, covering only the surface, but it suffices for much of our lives to seduce ourselves and others into a complacency born of not “rocking the boat”. So long as enough people agree with the image, we can glide along as if it were true. Invariably, though, something happens to strip away our self-image. Loss of a job, a relationship, aging, disease. And we scramble to patch things up – at least for a while.

Then the inevitable happens. That underlying murk starts to rumble, and rather like a bad case of indigestion insists itself into our awareness. Mid-life is fraught with all sorts of self-doubt never visited on those of youthful all-knowing minds. For the first time we start to question the mask. The mask has often grown saggy for one thing. Our scramble slows to a shuffle until we, if we are lucky, stop full halt to stare right at the mess. What do we believe about ourselves in that subterranean territory?

It is here, at this level – the subterranean belief system – that our “body does not lie”. Once we awaken to the messages given to us by our ongoing bodily responses to life’s situations, we can start to question the underlying beliefs with greater clarity.

If we feel tension – there is a reason. There is always a reason. The body does not tense in preparation for something unless it thinks that something is going to happen! So, if there is no freight train (metaphorically speaking) in sight, yet the body is poised to leap out of harm’s way, we need to poke around inside of our thinking to discover what we think is surely going to happen. It is here we begin to strike the rich minefield of all the inner characterizations (of ourselves, others and the world in general) that set us up for these warrior or victim or whatever stances.

“The Body Doesn’t Lie” – is about this amazing body being the most perfect barometer available to find, unearth and debunk the myths that drive us.

Or drive us crazy – as the case may be.

Good Enough

I don’t know anybody who is free of the feeling that they are never quite enough — and it’s such a source of suffering. I don’t think anything can be more painful than living every day with the scorching thoughts of: “I’m somehow not OK. There is something wrong with me. I can’t quite figure it out, but I’m sure I need to fix something about me to make me OK.” That’s torture.

This topic has loomed especially large in my mind recently because my mother died last month. Most of us don’t feel perfectly mothered. But a very interesting thing happened when my mother died. She had increasingly lived her life as the martyr that the faith in her religion encouraged her to be. It became quite gruesome, and she died the way she had lived —suffering horribly.

Throughout my last two months with her, I focused on trying to release the chains of the patriarchal religion which had so convinced her of her unworthiness. I wanted her to taste what it was like to be mothered in a loving way as she became more and more dependent. At the very end — in the last two days — I held her and rocked her, as her breath became more labored and she could no longer resist. I reminded her: “Right here, God loves you. The Angels are holding you. You did nothing wrong. You are innocent.” She finally began to lighten in the last hour, tears streaming down her face (and mine).

Two nights after that, I bolted straight up in bed. I was feeling the most intense loving, divine Presence. It was my mother! I felt then, and it has been absolutely there ever since, “This is what it is like without all the --.” -- garbage of condemnation. “This is what it’s like to just feel loved!”

What so many of us are dealing with, I’m convinced, is all that garbage wrapped like barnacles around the skin of the feminine. I believe this is true for both men and women. By female energy I mean the soft, receptive, gentle quality of nurturance. I see this deprivation as the real starvation behind so many addictions and pains.

Often, our entrance into the awareness of this Divine Space comes unbidden. It is always there – always available, when we stop agitating against it, believing we have to “do something” to earn it, to deserve it, to find it.

Being loved has as its only prerequisite that we exist.

This is an excerpt from a longer article, found at: http://www.maryanniyer.com/articlehome.html