When you think of your health and well-being, you may generally think in terms of your diet or exercise, at least I did for around 40 years! I now realize that it was only around a quarter of my health and well-being!
Ancient cultures found out long ago, through their wisdom and knowledge, that these four bodies make up the whole, and when you nurture and attend to each aspect, you can live a more balanced and harmonious life.
The human is made up of four aspects:
The Physical
The Mental.
The Spiritual.
The Emotional
When you understand each of the four bodies, and how they can link to each other, you can live a healthier life, both in mind and body. You can begin to clear blockages you didn’t know you had, heal, and bring yourself to a place where you feel whole and full of vitality for your life. You can live with more understanding for yourself and others, more clarity, happiness, resilience, and, more importantly, more love for yourself and others.
The Mental Body
The Mental Aspect of self is the view of yourself that you most think of as “Me”; it is the thoughts, memories, attitudes, judgments, prejudices, beliefs, and values that all sit in your subconscious mind. You have to make a conscious effort to explore these thoughts and be mindful of what serves you and take particular note to what does not.
Unfortunately, in today’s modern world, you may have forgotten how to live anywhere else but in your mind. You can get caught up with the chatter of the egoic mind, which always wants to be right, along with the monkey mind, which is a term used by the Buddhists for the unsettled restless mind. This is made up of stories from your past and present, and the believes and values which were hard-wired into you by the time you were just seven years old, and mainly influenced by your parents, friends, media, teachers, and elders around that time.
Using Meditation/Mindfulness brings you into the present moment so you can witness and dissociate from the egoic chattering monkey mind and realize you are not your thoughts and stories. This understanding makes you aware that the more you feed your monkey mind, the more it wants; the less you feed your monkey mind, the less it wants your attention.
The Physical Body
The Physical Aspect of self is the only tangible aspect of yourself. It represents the physical experiences in your lifetime.
It is always present, and it cannot be any other way; this is why it is essential to notice the breath at times throughout the day to bring you into the present and ground yourself, bringing you back into the physical body.
In modern-day society, people primarily separate themselves from the physical body. Not noticing the breath or witnessing sensations or discomforts, and if there are feelings of tiredness or weaknesses, they may tend to ignore and push on regardless of how they are feeling.
Your body is affected in either a positive or negative way, not just by diet and exercise but equally by unreleased and unhealed traumas and emotions.
Meditation can help witness and alleviate the body wherein there may be emotional tension and discomfort.
The Emotional Body
Your emotional body is the bridge between the mental and the physical, the mental aspect of you creates the thought that forms the emotion that then creates the feeling in the physical. From the moment you were born you were primed to express yourself with emotions, have you ever noticed how a baby cries one minute but then laughs the next, they tend not to hold on to emotions the way you do, they let them come and go the same as animals.
A study by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Brain Scientist, discovered that when a person reacts to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is the persons conditioning and response to emotions that keeps them in the loop.
Professional help should be sought to enable you to deal with emotions from more deep-seated traumas.
Using meditation and being mindful of your emotions is a tool you can use to face the emotion, and you can embrace and feel it in the present, rather than suppressing it.
The Spiritual Body
Our Spiritual Aspect lies in all of us; it is the master key that unlocks us all and makes everyone and everything connected. Some call it your higher self, god, the universe, the divine it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s the knowing it exists that counts. It’s not a religion or a cult; it is a vital piece of you, and for some, it goes unnoticed throughout a lifetime.
It connects you to something far more significant than you are individual, you are supercharged when combined with all that is. You can climb mountains, manifesting-dreams, and hopes, and desires, helping to create your full potential in this lifetime.
When you find the quiet and stillness of yourselves, you realize all happiness, love, joy, and peace starts within and that guidance is always there for you and the highest good of all.
I genuinely believe that if you bring your awareness to your four bodies, you will have a more loving, joyous, peaceful, healthy, and purposeful life journey.
Love and light
Lissa xx
Lissa Pickles 