We often think that our thoughts and feelings affect how we live and move in our bodies, but it can also be the other way around, too. How you move can affect how you feel, and how you feel can affect how you think, and how you think can affect the state you're in and the outcomes you produce. The best way to feel really, really depressed, is to look down, slump your shoulders, breathe in a shallow way, and mumble. Try this for five minutes or less, and you'll notice how awful you feel. Then notice how you find thoughts to fit into this mood.
Finally, notice how other people start to avoid you and how your creativity, intelligence, and productivity are at a near standstill. Alternatively, you can decide, right now, whatever mood you're in, to change it, to move your body in such a way that you send a signal to your brain that you are alive and well and ready to change the world. Now try this. Start breathing more deeply, straighten out your shoulders, puff out that chest, look up, smile, or preferably, grin. Walk briskly.
Speak in a louder tone. In five minutes or less, you'll wonder why you were ever in a bad mood. You see possibilities everywhere. Your ingenuity kicks into high gear.
You can be, do, and have anything. Physiology does more than affect your moods; it can affect how much vital energy, called prana, that you absorb into your body. You are literally sucking into your body positive life-force particles from the air, from the sunlight, from the food that you eat. Your nadis or subtle nerves, open up and can conduct more life force. Go for a walk on the street. See how most people are pretty down.
Look at how their shoulders fall, their walk shuffles, and their faces reflects agitation and despair. But you will see a few bright people, too. They are smiling and laughing with shoulders thrown back, and their whole body is open to life and new adventures.
Sometimes it does seem that we live entirely in our heads and that our bodies are something that we move around in. But really, you live in your whole body, and if you want to be more responsive to life, the trick is to create an expansive feeling in your body by changing your posture, your breathing, your facial expression, and your rate of movement. What you perceive to be reality is always only your own interpretation. All events are complex but we tend to shape them according to our personal story. This interpretation is not only acted out on a mental and emotional level, but also on a physiological level. Further this interpretation then shapes the experience in subtle ways until you can feel fully justified that your interpretation is the truth.
The only truth is that you are making everything up as you go along. Rather than seeking truth, which is a relative phenomena, it is far more meaningful to make a choice as to what is empowering. The most empowering thing possible for anyone of us is to be ourselves more fully, and as we permit ourselves full self-expression, whether or not this fits in with the currently prevailing cultural norms, we expand our ability to feel more alive. Your body is a powerful to interact with the world as an empowered soul. This is much more than positive thinking. It's positive living by experiencing the vitality of your body and how it affects all aspects of your life.
You are not an abstraction, but a living, moving, thinking, and feeling being. How you move your body can have a profound influence on how you live your life.
Saleem Rana would love to share his inspiring ideas His book Never Ever Give Up tells you how. It is offered at no cost as a way to help YOU succeed. The Empowered Soul
