We often speak of "spiritual bypassing," but there's SO MUCH body bypassing in this culture.
A lot of us (including myself for far too many years) walk around disconnected to the point that, for example, I often said that if you cut off my body, my head wouldn’t notice. At the time, I thought that was pretty funny.
As humans in a traumatizing culture, a large number of us have gotten far too adept at dissociating.
Feeling our feelings can feel overwhelming, but that’s because we aren’t encouraged to feel our feelings … which decreases our capacity to … feel our feelings. (Round and round we go.)
It starts when we’re little and we start hearing any number of the following…
Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.
You’re too sensitive.
You care too much about … everything.
Do not show anger.
Your excitement is … too much; bring it down a few notches.
And we’re also told a million things about our bodies:
Sit still.
Don’t climb that/hang there/walk so close to…
Be careful. (This one is telling us that we can’t trust our own judgment or our body’s ability to do hard things.)
You take up too much space
Take up more space.
You’re too fat.
You should gain weight.
And on and on…
Our culture is designed to push us and our experiences deeper and deeper into our brains, shutting off access to all the intelligence of our senses AND our instincts, our inner voices, our guts, our hearts… our inherent wisdom is blocked.
Our wisdom is blocked but so too is the mechanism by which we can calibrate all the chemicals that keeps us happy and joyful and creative, and that mechanism is moving this body.
Somehow in all of this, there is also a body-based gaslighting. We start to believe that the body isn’t even important.
We look to sitting still as spiritual practice. We look to deprivation of sensory experiences as spiritual practice. Think about fasting and celibacy, just for two examples. We see people who do those sorts of things as somehow “enlightened.” One cannot be “enlightened” when one is not engaged in their own damn humanness.
We start to think that we can just think/pray/journal/talk our way out of all of this pain or lack of fulfillment. Not that those aren’t good things in and of themselves but they do NOT replace the body based experiences we are built for.
Alas…
You ARE this body and this body's very makeup is about movement. We are built to move. The imperative to move is encoded in our structure on every level.
NOT MOVING can be a sign of depression and anxiety but it's also fertile ground for depression and anxiety to grow, and this culture grows those two things at rates we’ve never seen before.
Disclaimer: moving is different for all of us so I'll repeat this forever: AS LONG AS THERE IS BREATH, THERE IS DANCE.