Body as a teacher
So yes, we all get swept away by the tangible world around us. But we also know that there is more to life than what we see, isn’t there?
As I sit down to write or speak to people, a strange force makes the ambiguous feelings and senses coalesce and organise into sentences that you will now read. It’s part of the marvel that I’m just about to explain. As I express these ideas, I also learn. That’s because for the first time I hear these ideas shaped into something that’s organised by sense and logic. We all act as a bridge in one way or another.
Beyond what’s apparent, we can feel that everything ebbs and flows. There is another layer that we can read between the lines. The invisible patterns of energy that underlie everything around us weave into a fabric of living art, buzzing through all that we can think of. The subtle, unceasing dance of give and take, contraction and expansion, is one of the principles that organises the interconnected network of all things in this universe—a constant exchange of energies.
Everywhere around us, if only we pay attention, we can observe the dialogue—the constant chatter of all things. We can “hear” that chatter even—and perhaps especially—amidst total silence.
How do I know this? I know it mostly through my body and, specifically, my senses. Just as the body can sense the world through touch, sight, smell, and so on, it can also sense the energies that underlie the physical world.
Through my awareness, I can feel—and now I can finally describe—different sensations that, like a language, speak to me. Through my body, I can tell if I’m straining or at ease at any given moment. My senses tell me if I’m open or resisting whatever is happening. They tell me how the situation feels. If I’m tense, I can tell that there is a part of me now active that’s forcing against a thought or circumstance. I get to respond to a thought or a person in a way that feels right.
I can also “taste” the words I’m speaking or writing, even before I do so. As they begin to form in me, I can feel if it’s the right flavour or whether I have to search for a better word. Many sensitive people do this, as they weigh their words before uttering them.
In this way, I can sense my way through situations, feeling my way towards more ease and less strain. My body, like yours, is a receiver that can sense into both my own inner world and the world around me. Over time, more nuances and messages started coming through me, which I’ll explore a little later. But it’s through the senses that we communicate with energies.
My body, when I befriended her, became my teacher, and the mind—my interpreter. And with all the authorities available, this teacher has always looked out for me, concerned with my highest good.
Not all lessons have come from the delicate sensations. Because I wasn’t always paying enough attention these whispers we too subtle for my chaotic inner world that I was trying with all my might to block out from my awareness. Like I said in the previous chapter, most of my life I simply avoided large feelings and disappeared from them. They were too big and I didn’t know how to be with that so it had to take some drastic life lessons to get me to listen. The same energy that organises everything and moves in cycles, transforming all things around us, also dragged me through challenging events that shaped my mind with the forcefulness of a white river. Eventually, these painful lessons brought me to myself in leaps and bounds—much faster than one would want to.
But from what I can see now, my life has been made up of crucial ingredients baked into everything I am and know.
The last few years have been an incredibly hard school of life. Much has changed in my “observable” life—namely, relationships, moves, work life, more moves, and numerous losses. But the changes that occurred within me happened at the speed of light. My mind was repeatedly shattered by new realisations, forcing me to change the old ways of thinking and what I believed to be true. Almost everything I had learned about the world, relationships, work, and myself crumbled into smithereens.
I could feel the toll of the rapid shifts. Nothing made any sense, and pretty much every week my view of the world and myself was transforming. It’s been happening too fast and threw me off. I didn’t know the top from the bottom, swept by a whirlwind of resets.
The inner transformation blurred before my eyes, and I could hardly keep up with it, scrambling to make sense of new realisations and truths. My mind, exhausted from trying to connect any dots, grew tired, and I focused on taking notes of my observations as I went. Before I could get used to any new wave of understanding, another came to unravel things I hadn’t known, crushing the new “order.” (Largely, this is how this book was drafted.)
With time, and through some important practices I took up seriously, I began integrating the “curriculum” I was being given.
No lesson has been wasted. Everything has been used, digested, and assimilated into what was needed. It’s hard to say that “I” did it all. What feels more accurate is that something within me guided this entire process.
For as long as I can remember, reading any factual books or watching such content made my system resist. I could only read so much before starting to feel anxious, dizzy, or holding my breath. Deep inside, my sensitive mind-body system was already taking in too much information and data. Any more activated an internal alarm, urging me to take things slowly and avoid overload.
But prior to this self-awareness, I pushed far beyond my limits—stimulating myself more than I could, doing more than my limits, overloading myself beyond my capacity. This lack of boundaries threw me into burnouts, disease, and general chaos. Whenever I pushed too much, it quickly activated this discomfort. And as I started overdoing anything, I would get a twinge or pull urging me not to extend myself. Back then I forced myself through, using my will.
Now, I humbly listen.
(At least mostly.)
Likewise, I was also never comfortable with the “sit quietly and stop shifting around” type of learning. Although aloof for the most childhood, I was also intense, fierce, and explored life with curiosity. I loved solitude, and I liked doing things my way. In all respects, I was never a by the book person. My way meant: creating arts and tiny figurines, talking to the toys I’d made, climbing everything I could climb, reading scary fairy tales, and digging in dirt in my grandparents' garden.
For most of my school years, I dealt with all the external expectations of being a good student by simply avoiding hard things, failing classes, and skiving from school. The possibility of going into the arts to engage my whole body in the process and follow a more humanistic and free path was just the thing. Much of this tendency has to do with the fact that I take in information by experience and could never learning anything by heart. Besides, I always knew I wanted to study graphic arts. And so my art experience helped me untangle the abstractions and see what was behind all that chaos.
Like a baby learning language through immersion and osmosis, I too have accepted this side of me. I know that I learn through all integrated multi-sensory perception, taking in a variety of cues and signals, and building layer-by-layer of understanding. I believe all humans are more like that too, but the system forces them to memorise facts obediently, line by line.
Learning, being a whole-human experience, should never be locked in a stiff classroom. It should neither be a “brain” activity, but rather immersive one, if you ask me. As a result of my wild learning path, almost all that I’m sharing here comes from allowing myself to follow my nature of intuition and direct experience. A part of me regrets not having the capability to learn more from books, but another, larger part knows that I’ve been receiving just the right experiences to teach me way more than I could have through merely consuming theory. Because this limitation, and the struggles I endured in the system that demands people be a certain way, it also offered me the only path available for me to deepen: the path through subjective experience.
Always observing more and talking less, I didn’t know how to apply this receptivity outside my artistic practice. I didn’t know what I was doing, but unconsciously, I was collecting data. We take in stimuli so that we can churn something out of them. We (sensitives) process life through so many layers that others don’t.
When finally I accepted this energetic frequency of perceiving life, I’ve been able to speed up my understanding of what I was doing, and do it with more clarity and confidence.
For instance, I noticed when there was a dense stuckness in a particular stubborn situation—that felt like quicksand, required breaking the impasse with a single input. In life, as I observed it, most often required doing something “off the wall,” which inadvertently made the stickiness “unstuck,” releasing it into pieces like small seeds that could sprout into new possibilities.
Other times, when deep in stress I knew I had to stop trying to solve a problem or figure out an external pressure. Instead, I allowed myself to relax deeply into the moment of stillness, which helped soothe and release the discomfort of overthinking. Typically situations untangled themselves without my constant meddling. The same could be applied in an intense situation when being verbally attacked or accused—I noticed that easing my own energy, eased the energy of the other person, disarming their hostility. To follow the intuition, I had to challenge all my previous habits of controlling everything.
This, by the way, is not a formula for each kind of similar occasions. Rather it’s my ongoing experiment that one has to feel into. And it’s not cut and dry. It takes honing intuition and the willingness to try new things without any guarantees.
You see, the way we “taste” the words before we speak, is no different to any other considerations about any choice we make in life. Feeling into them before we proceed, helps a great deal in navigating my practical life situations. But it can also inhibit our natural expression and spontaneity.
I owe so much to my sensibility, which registers correspondences and rhythms around me. The data I had been collecting form my life put together with my sensitive nature together with my “audacity” to validate what I sensed, despite what I was told—something that until just a few years ago seemed like such a heavy burden—I could finally use it in life.
Taking in subtle information from all around me and translating these perceptions into more obvious and coherent truths was something I had to learn to validate and refine by myself. The more I felt into things, observing my sensory reactions to life, the more I could see various patterns in my days. And it helped me, make choices that nourished me more and strained less.
Don’t get me wrong, I would still slip into the old dramas, but with practice, it became less frequent and easier to come back to myself.
Even though anxious feelings and large emotions continued, I learned not to be intimidated by all the movements of energy that I sensed and grew a capacity for holding the tension of their stirrings while remaining present. As I said, this didn’t happen overnight, but it was how I found a grounded sense of calm and command within.
Through these impressions, I slowly remembered the truth so easily forgotten in our modern days: we are a part of nature. But somehow, we haven’t been acting our part so successfully for quite some time.
As I “listened” I had to recognise that something was doing the talking.
Regardless if I was listening or not the talking is happening for those who pay attention. And so the natural conclusion was that there is something far larger than me, the immediate environment, or the people around me. It was a strange organising power that mysteriously aligned the events, relationships, challenges, and choices in my life in a way that brought me home—a destination I had sought for decades.
Tuning in the subtle energies behind everything that was happening I become better at recognising their language. My previous need to control life and know what was going to happen faded because I was tapped in a more immediate way of “knowing”. I stopped having such a need to be prepared for everything and could release anxiety. Further down the line, I even I stopped needing to tune in because I felt safe not having to track everything or maintain the illusion of control. And I became more spontaneous, more free to express myself in the moment, knowing that any feedback coming my way—I would be able to deal with. Imagine the liberation and trust to simply be how you are, and not having to calculate everything in mind.
This, combined with my realisation how something bigger holds everything together, allowed me relax more and enjoy the pleasure of simply being and responding to life moment by moment—most of the time, at least. It’s still a relatively new stage for me, and I know that life has more to teach me.
I know this may all sound a bit mysterious or abstract at this point. But I believe that what I write will stir something in you too, helping you remember this language as well.
I know this may all sound a bit peculiar or abstract at this point. But I believe that what I write will stir something in you too, helping you remember this language as well.
What I’m about to share in this book, you’ll soon realise, has little to do with existing research or established discoveries in the field of sensitivity. This might not satisfy everyone, especially sceptics. However, much of what I’m sharing has its basis in concepts that exist in nature and have ruled way before humans existed and before any science developed.
I’m willing to be wrong or accused of heresy for the sake of exploring ideas that could push the envelope of current understanding, even through mere discussion. To do this, I have to start by exploring the energetic forces which we’re all part of and include within ourselves.
It is inevitable to continue any further talk unless I address what I observed in my life as being the main reason sensitive folks have such a hard time living in this world—the natural ability they have to access different layers and realms of information that less sensitive folks don’t.
And so, we must dive into the main framework for understanding the energies I’m talking about. Although I don’t tend to cite scientific studies, all these ideas both reach far back into thousands of years of ancient studies and now have a solid reference offered by modern science. What I’m about to share fits neatly into something that now seems obvious and conveniently uses existing frameworks of polarity and scientific distinctions.
The majority of this entire part of the book will talk about energies, the very same ones that allowed me to write about them. But long before I could distil and write it all down, these energies constellated as a jumble of abstract correlations and graphical patterns scribbled in my mind’s eye. I could feel and almost touch them as true. I observed them as floating connections in my personal life and in life itself. These existed and matured in me long before the idea for a book even came to exist. Boiling down and translating the floating chaos into a form that makes sense was not an easy task. But many synchronicities that I might mention at times helped me along the way.
Now, before we dive into the important sections, a question for you: Have you heard the saying that people are spiritual beings having a physical experience? It’s something that many folks in the New Age repeat. Although I’ve never really heard any clear explanation of what the heck they mean (and god knows I must have missed many memos), I will take it upon myself to offer what I discovered that involves our dual nature.
I will dive into sharing the symbolism and energies that make up this duality. Drawing this framework of two energetic realms will create our background of understanding for the rest of the book. And who knows—maybe for the rest of your life.
If you’re finding it interesting, I would love it if you could share my book with a friend or two.
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