5 Tips for Listening to Your Brilliant Body Mind

You have within you- right now and all the time- a brilliant and underused resource: your Body Mind. When you tap into this deep and powerful intelligence, doors open wide to bring you more healing, pleasure, vitality, meaning and happiness in every area of your life.

What does your brilliant Body Mind want you to know? Use these tips right now to dive in and find out!

1. Believe your body has something of value to tell you. Believing your body has something valuable to communicate is a radical and powerful first step. You, like most modern adults, probably learned as a very little child to override and ignore your body's messages. By doing this you cut yourself off from your vital life force.

Although we are taught in our culture to value Thinking Mind over Body Mind, the intelligence of your body has insights, information and delight that your thinking mind cannot begin to know.

Begin believing, or at least being interested in the possibility, that you do have a brilliant Body Mind that is just waiting for your attention.

2. Drop down from Thinking Mind into Body Mind. Thinking Mind is perfect for many things including planning, fixing, comparing, worrying, analyzing, and judging. But it cannot do everything by itself.

Wonderful as it is, Thinking Mind is only a part of your intelligence. Tune into your Body Mind and you will have a bigger, more instinctual, intuitive and visionary intelligence to partner with your Thinking Mind.

Here are some easy steps you can use anywhere, anytime, to shift from Thinking Mind to Body Mind:

- Let your Thinking Mind get soft and dreamy. Perhaps say, "Thank you so much, dear Thinking Mind, for being so smart and so helpful. Now, for a little while, you can take a break." Imagine Thinking Mind drifts on a cloud or takes a walk or a vacation in Tahiti, or goes off to solve the economic crisis.

- Soften your eyes. Thinking Mind lives close to the eyes. When it is overworked it often causes tension in your eyes. Do you ever notice that when you are trying hard to figure things out you squint and strain your eyes? This is a good sign that Thinking Mind is working too hard and needs some help from Body Mind.

- Allow your awareness to drop down into your body. Feel your focus of awareness shift down from your head and eyes into your feeling, sensing body. Every cell of your body has intelligence and every cell of your body is, in its own way, talking to you.

- Feel your breath. Where can you feel breath in your body? Notice the sensation your breath makes as it flows in you. Feel the warmth, texture, length, feel it touching the inner body as it moves through. Let it have a little more room. Ahhhhhh...

- Feel sensations all through your body. Let awareness follow the breath and notice what you feel.

- Notice when Thinking Mind comes back in and tries to take over. This is the nature of Thinking Mind, especially when it has had the burden of doing all the work for too long. Thank it for trying to help, remind it to just take a little break and again, soften your eyes, drop down inside, feel your breath and simply feel and notice.

3. Listen as you would listen to a beloved little child.

- Pick her up gently in your arms.

- Sit in a big, soft, comfy chair.

- Take your time.

- Just notice. No need to fix or change or judge or advise.

- Just give room with your big generous heart for whatever needs to be said.

- Soon, just from having had your attention, the little child will be up running and playing and happy again.

4. Listen with all your senses. Although we think of listening as something we do with our ears, listening to your inner body takes all of your senses. As you tune into your body, let all of your senses turn inward. Feel the sensations of breath and heartbeat and pleasure and pain, see the colors and inner movies, smell the memories, hear the words and sounds and taste the flow.

5. Be compassionately curious.

- Compassion creates a safe space for whatever you feel and notice.

- Curiosity keeps you interested, surprised and open to new and unexpected experiences, information, guidance and insight.

- Together compassionate curiosity creates a wonderful container for you to explore the amazing, enormous and much needed intelligence of your Body Mind.

Use these five tips and let your brilliant Body Mind show you the way to abundant health, vitality, success and happiness.