Following on from the article last week about the discovery of the unconscious mind, how it works and what it is, this week I will be speaking to the unconscious mind and the body.

Through my own internal journey, something I feel that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung did not understand, or had not yet come to see clearly is the direct relationship between the unconscious mind and the felt sense of the body. Even the term ‘relationship’ is itself misleading as they are not two separate things, they are essentially one.

In my own exploration and experience I have concluded that the felt sense of the body is the unconscious mind, and the unconscious mind is what creates the felt sense of our body. 

Anything that is unconscious within us can be made conscious through directly feeling the body. The presence of contractions, densities, pains, pleasures and different subtleties in energy are in fact the very imprints that make up the unconscious mind.

This may seem foreign to some but if one looks into some of the more ancient traditions and practices shows that the understanding that the body and the unconscious are one happening is not a new idea, it is actually a very ancient understanding. 

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Take Taoism, where they use Acupuncture and Tai Chi to clear blockages in the meridian systems which in turn lead to resolving psychological issues, as well as systems such as Yoga which work directly with the felt sense and energy centres in order to bring the body back to a homeostasis, which leads to more expansive states of consciousness. 

In western psychology we seem to have severed the link between the mind and the body and focus solely on the cognitive aspect of our experience, missing the fact that mind and body are intrinsically linked.

In fact they are one happening, much like how a wave and the ocean are not two separate objects being governed by different energies.

The wave and the ocean are essentially one thing, if we truly look where does the wave end and the ocean begin?

When we bring the ancient understanding of the East and unite it with our modern day understanding of psychology in the West, we have a much deeper and far more effective map to traverse our human experience, and in turn begin to unwind the energies and structures that keep us in bondage.

Through devoted practice we can learn to skilfully bring attention deeply into the body, here we can learn to see the core structures that make up our identity made up of somatic densities and associations of words and images, when we go deeper than that we can begin to experience the collective structures of humanity, and at the very core of the felt sense we feel substratum of who we are and of our very existence, the emptiness of reality.

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Working directly with the felt sense begins a process that transforms us from the ground up, our whole being goes through a process of transformation and the purpose of this process is the purging and reorganisation of the nervous system, so a new energy that is not based on past imprints can begin to step in and orient us.

This is the definition of an embodied approach to therapy and spirituality.

It is actually through our own practice and from our own experience that it becomes obvious to us that the body and the unconscious are one thing, this is what I would call experiential understanding, a direct insight and experience rather than just simply intellectual knowledge.

I encourage us all to continue our devotion to our practice, to have the insights ourselves rather than only accumulating knowledge externally. Knowledge is useful, but it is through our own practice that we truly transform.

Peace & Blessing,
Matt Kay (Co-Creator of Embodied Processing)

See Part 1

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