182. BODY, MIND, AND …

This post and the next will be an exploration, which began with a thought about wisdom. What does it take to be wise? To pursue that question would involve reviewing tons of books, lectures, and online searches. Therefore, I narrowed my attention to what many have said about the body, mind, and spirit connection.

Huffington Post blogger, Rea Nolan Martin, offers help on how to feed the body, mind, and spirit. She suggests that we think of the body as hardware and the mind and spirit as software. To feed the body involves some detoxing, diet upgrading, and movement. To feed the mind involves focusing on breathing, being mindful, and ditching the comfort zone. To feed the spirit includes praying, meditating, and compassionate participation.

Holistic wellness coach, Val Silver, reminds us that connecting the body, mind, and spirit has deep history. She shares her thinking and that of others about how these connections manifest themselves. In addition, she lists the means of accessing the wisdom of the mind, body, spirit connection as being: visualization, hypnosis, emotional release techniques, and meditation.

There are a variety of views about the differences between the brain and the mind, as well as the spirit and the heart or the soul. An article from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation on mind, body, and heart included the following notes:

“Cynthia Bourgeault calls the heart ‘an organ for the perception of divine purpose and beauty.’ Tilden Edwards, founder of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, describes the spiritual faculty of heart as ‘a quality of intuitive awareness . . . a sense of inclusive, compassionate, undefended, direct in-touch-ness with what is really there.’ This ‘undefended knowing’ allows us to drop beneath the thinking mind, to touch upon real experience, unhindered by the ego’s sense of self, without fear or agenda.”

“For a holistic and mature faith, we need both head and heart grounded in our physical and sensory body.”

Richard Rohr’s “The Wisdom of Contemplation” gives us the conclusion for this post:

“Whenever heart, mind, and body are all present and accounted for at the same time, when they are all ‘online’ in the language of Wisdom, we can experience pure presence, a moment of deep inner connection with the pure, gratuitous Being of anything and everything. It may be experienced as a quiet leap of joy in the heart, absolute clarity in the mind, or a deep centeredness in the body.”

“The supreme work of spirituality, which makes presence possible, is keeping the heart space open (the result of conscious love), keeping a ‘right mind’ (the work of contemplation or meditation), and keeping the body alive with contentment or, as Cynthia would say, sensation, without attachment to its past woundings (often the work of healing). In that state, we are neither resisting nor clinging, and we can experience something genuinely new.”

“Those who can keep all three spaces open at the same time will know The Presence that connects everything to everything. … This way of knowing has little to do with belonging to any particular denomination or religion; it is found at the headwaters of all the world’s major religions. Each has its own piece of Wisdom, its own techniques and teachings that urge us to bring our whole selves to the job of growing up and ‘wising’ up.”

Stay tuned.

Q: How would you describe the connections between your body, mind, and heart/spirit?

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