The Body’s 3 Languages: Thoughts, Feelings & Intuition
I want to start off by sharing a favorite quote of mine that really helped me shift the framework around how I view the ‘mind-body split’ people like to talk about:
“The body isn’t a thing we have, but an experience we are,”
Christine Caldwell, Bodyfulness
What comes to mind for you as you read this statement? For me, I find that it recenters me. Repurposes my existence. Helps me remember the entirety of who I am, rather than as a being living in my head all the time with a body to take care of when I occasionally remember to. It’s easy for us to forget our whole selves in favor of focusing on the things we think and the actions we take as a result of those thoughts.
Knowing that we are an experience reminds us to live fully as ourselves, sitting in a feeling of aliveness. When can you remember feeling so alive? I would hazard a guess that most times, it was when you were completely present and letting yourself feel everything as it came to you, whether you were having a deep conversation with a loved one, or on your motorcycle at top speed.
As an experience, something is ALWAYS happening, always moving. Even sitting in complete stillness, the amount of motion happening within yourself – from the beating of your heart and the expanding and contracting of your lungs, to the blood pumping through your veins and arteries – is constant. In all seriousness, the absence of moving is death (Caldwell). Because the body very much wants to stay alive, countless messages are being sent through these channels every fraction of a second from a million different points of origin to every organ, system, muscle and beyond.
In order for our conscious selves to understand these messages, they are sent in one, or sometimes more, of what I like to call our three body languages: that of fully formed, analytical thoughts; felt emotion (because matter = energy in motion = emotion); and sensed intuition. All three of these languages developed for a reason – more ways to keep us alive. To focus on one to the exclusion of others is to undermine that purpose.
A large percentage of us in Western societies – especially the US – have come to believe that we can only speak in one of these languages; often, these are thoughts “from the brain”. Because we know how to “speak” in this language, we feel that we can trust in the information these messages carry, while distrusting those that feel foreign because we believe they are not a part of us.
The truth is, we were all born able to speak fluently in all 3 of these languages; we’ve simply forgotten we can.
Just as in the spoken word, your ability to remember how to speak in these languages decreases when it is not practiced; we get “rusty”. Constantly believing that messages in only one language have value reinforces that lack of practice. Conversely, fluency returns when we immerse ourselves in the culture and environment where it lives. The trick is to first remember that you have this ability to speak and understand all 3 languages, analytical, emotion, and intuition – and then to practice truly listening for them.
What can you imagine you’d hear?
