Wisdom of the Body
While there are absolutely objective truths, there are others I believe are more subjective and vary greatly among individuals and cultures.
We all have this idea of what truth means to us. We have truths that resonate, others that don’t. We trust experts to tell us the truth or we dig and dig until we find the answers we seek.
The reality is that you can find evidence to support any truth. I’m not sure I believe in THE truth in many cases as much as I believe one’s own truth. Your truth may not be my truth. I think to some degree, many “truths” are subjective. For example, is it true the sky is blue? What if someone is colorblind? Maybe they see the sky in shades of gray. Does that make it any less blue to those of us that see blue? Do we see different shades of blue?
The way we view the world is greatly influenced by the paradigm in which we see the world. It’s also influenced by the cultures and traditions we were raised in, as well as, our genetics.
I read a book as part of my yoga teacher training called, “How Yoga Works.” It’s not the anatomy book I was expecting, but rather a fun tale about how to see beyond the limitations of the mind and to question our own perceptions about the world. For example, in one part of the book, a girl is asked by her teacher if a pen is a pen. She replies with, “Yes, it’s a pen!” The teacher says, “are you sure?” She says, “Yes! It’s a pen!” He proceeds to put the pen in front of a cow that chomps down on it and then says, does the cow see it as a pen? The answer is quite obvious since the cow tried to eat it. To us, it’s a pen, but to a cow, who has no concept of what a pen is, it’s something else entirely. The idea is to question our own perceptions and assumptions and to break our minds open wide enough to see that there are many ways to see and experience the world around us. We have over eight billion souls living in over eight billion different “realities.”
What if some, if not most, of the assumptions we’ve been living by are false or even just outdated? What if, with just a small expansion in our understanding, we start to see the world through new eyes and a different paradigm? What if a truth we’ve lived by no longer serves us and no longer resonates as truth? Something could have been the truth once and now, it’s a just an idea we’ve outgrown.
One thing I have found fascinating over the past few years is this idea of who’s telling the truth and who’s not. We all have people we trust enough to listen to their messages. Something about them and/or their message resonates with us on a deeper level. Some are simply based on whether or not you’re on team red or team blue (or neither). For others, like myself, it’s based on listening to various experts and seeing where the threads cross and allowing myself to feel how my body responds to the various messages. Our intuition is far more powerful than we’ve been led to believe and there is no one who knows your body better than you.
Believe statistics? Believe data? Believe governments? Believe “experts?” Personally, I take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t trust people making millions (or billions) of dollars off my ignorance and “trust.” What I do trust are my intuition and my instincts. I trust how I feel about people, places, and situations. I follow that internal guidance system and often, in spite of data that might be trying to tell me otherwise because while data can absolutely be presented in a way that’s full of lies and deceit, my body doesn’t lie.
One of the most important things you can begin to grasp when trying to understand the world we live in is that statistics and data can be skewed and misrepresented, studies can be bought and unfortunately, so can people. People we trust, betray us. Our own minds can betray us. Our bodies, however, when we truly learn to listen, do not.
Maybe it’s time we re-learn to trust ourselves and stop outsourcing our well-being to people and institutions who stand to make incredible amounts of money based on our lack of well-being by telling us, “they know better.”
Be your own expert. Be your own healer. Sit quietly and listen. Your body is speaking to you.
The doctor of the future will be oneself. ~ Albert Schweitzer
Namaste.