Are pain and tension linked to thinking? How? Do we experience physical pain more than mental emotional pain? Is limited body movement and limited thinking inevitable as we age? Which comes first, the body’s lack of flexibility or fixed and limited thinking? Is rigid body and thought pattern a sign of aging? How much of our physical and mental deterioration is our stuck thinking based on childhood belief and expectation? Do you ever ponder these questions?
These are the kind of questions you may not ask yourself until your body is in pain. Then the questions come unbidden. What have I done? How bad is the damage? Am I getting old? Can this be fixed? What do I do to fix it?
So, what do you need to know about your body and aches and pains to stay healthy and to repair readily when there is a mishap, overload or accident? How can you avoid a recurrence of the pain? What do you need to know?
Habits Serve and Shape Us
All of us have habits that serve us well and other habits that get us into trouble or limit our progress. These habits will shape our body, our thinking, our health, our relationships, our joys and our distresses. How can we increase the life enhancing habits and identify and reduce or eliminate the life sapping habits?
Habits Grow With Us
As we grow older our habitual thoughts and emotions make their stamp more and more visible on the shape of our muscles, our posture, walking gait and range of flexibility in movement. How does this happen?
As a baby, a toddler, a youngster we were curious, instinctively experimented, reached for anything new on our horizon, till we became familiar with what was constantly in our home world. This became our comfort zone, a place to retreat to when outer world was too difficult, too demanding, or too stressful.
In familiar territory we didn’t need to make an effort to master something new. We could switch off, relax, zone out, and do only what was comfortable. Our comfort zone is a useful place to rest and recuperate in but once recovered, got our second wind, we need to venture out again and engage in the unfamiliar, the difficult, the new, to stimulate and expand our ability and capacity. This is our life journey of self-discovery and self development. Along the way we learned to recognize stress and tension.
We Know More Than We Realize
Have you ever looked at a person and thought, “he/she is tense,” even before you spoke with the person. What made you recognize and use the work “tense?” We are often good at reading body language. It’s not an intellectual process but an immediate and instinctive assessment of a person’s current state. We know the signs even if we can’t articulate them.
Chronic anxiety for example, wreaks havoc with muscle tone, tensing muscles not for movement or work activity, but as a reflex to the anxious thoughts. We tighten muscles of the body to create a hard shield against the world, against fear of emotional pain, “holding our self together” physically, in an effort to counter or avoid the emotional “melt down” or to prevent “falling apart”.
Our Language Reveals Our Knowing
The common expressions in our language are metaphors highlighting just how familiar this experience is for many of us, either living in anxiety our self or recognizing it in others. Chronic anxiety can set our body tone and over time becomes our habit and our norm to the degree that when our muscles are not tense we “don’t feel our self”. It becomes part of our internal feedback system and self-image and we only recognize self through the anxiety produced body posture, tension, aches and pains.
Our entire history is progressively recorded in our muscles. Each stage of development of physical and mental habits is the foundation for further postural habits that reflect the impact of life events and how we coped.
As the years go by the stress patterns bow us, bind us, trap us in degenerative habits within ever narrower ranges of comfortable activity. We avoid what is not comfortable, what stretches our capacity because it’s uncomfortable. With narrower ranges of extension and flexibility we lose power and strength and become narrower in our range of thinking and effort and connection with our outer world.
Awareness Opens Solution Options
Without awareness of this process happening we make no attempt to slow, stop or reverse this linked mental and physical decline. Releasing the limited muscle range can also release the mind’s range of thought, allowing for new mental exploration, for creative invention, and shifting our view to new or different possibilities to engage in for fun or interest or other benefit.
Various styles of hands-on bodywork like massage and kinesiology address the body/mind habitual patterns, releasing stress held in the physical tissues caused by our challenges, anxieties and fears. Bodywork is not just physical, it also moves the stuck energy patterns and supports the release of body/mind tension.
Regular Body Care
A regular appointment for de-stressing the physical and mental/emotional body accumulations is anti aging and health and energy preserving. Regular muscle and energy rebalancing prevents habits becoming dis-ease. As your body loosens under the influence of caring hands so does your thinking and your interest and choice of activities that you can include in your life regularly.
Book a Touch For Health Balance with me at https://www.mykineticbalance.com. Your health and life can become better with Touch For Health Kinesiology.