Life is My Teacher

     Last week, something happened to me that I had not experienced in over 10 years: I was stricken with the flu.  Over the course of this past week, my mind wandered aimlessly attempting to figure out why such a rare occurrence chose to rear its ugly head.  The more I pondered the question and focused on this illness, the worse I felt.  At some point during the second day of commiseration, the little voice inside my head told me that this would be a teachable moment in my life.  In other words, my moment of interoception had finally arrived.

     Interoception, also known as an internal sense, is something that is stimulated from within the body, such as hunger.  I found a definition on the website The Free Dictionary which best captured the essence of my moment: “sensitivity to stimuli originating inside of the body”.  During this past week, I actually felt the innate healing powers of my body through a conscious awareness of the relaxation response.  Let me show you what I mean.

     For years I have studied the effects of both the stress/relaxation responses and their connection to both acute and chronic disease, as well as recovery from the same (see previous posts titled “Stress, Our Foe” and “Relaxation: Hard to do . . . Necessary for Life”).   My recovery began on the second day of this bout when I utilized a new tool that I recently added to my holistic tool box:  the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) body scan.  A few weeks ago, I told you that I was going to begin the MBSR course as a way to increase the awareness of my life on a moment by moment basis.  As I become consciously aware of how stress affects me, the better I am able to manage it.  So how does the body scan work?

     The body scan, through a series of guided meditations, asks the practitioner (me) to experience how the body feels in the here and now of this practice.  As I lie on my back with my eyes closed, a facilitator guides me region by region starting with the left big toe.   In a systematic manner, we work our way through the lower, middle, and upper portions of the body respectively.  I am told that if the mind drifts, acknowledge the thoughts without judgment, and then bring my attention back to the area of the body with which I am currently engaged.  By the end of this 55 minute session, any aches and pains I carry seem to melt away without a care.

     The amazing part of this healing process is that the very act of attending to the here and now actually gives the mind a job to do, which is all it ever really wants from us.  Rather than living with chaotic thoughts, I was able to quiet the mind and allow the natural healing process to take its course.  After completing this scan, I could actually feel my internal energy working towards homeostasis (balance) as a result of being in a total state of relaxation. This begs the question:  What was my teachable moment?

     The important lesson learned is reflective of the healing as I experienced it.  Remember, a basic tenet of holism views each person as an individual with respect to what protocol he/she responds because there is not a one size fits all category.  It was destiny that brought me to this exact moment in time to teach me that the mind and body are interdependent, rather than independent entities.  Therefore, they do not work separately from each other as one might think.  I believe that a healthy mind can orchestrate a healthy body.  I will leave you, my readers to be the judge of this statement through further exploration into the world of MBSR or similar stress reduction programs.

 

     As a footnote, I leave you with a quote from Eric Allen:

"Everyone is my teacher.  Some I seek.  Some I subconsciously attract.  Often I learn simply by observing others.  Some may be completely unaware that I'm learning from them, yet I bow deeply in gratitude."

Life is my Teacher J

 

References

Meleo-Meyer, F. & Santorelli, S. The MBSR Online Course: An 8-Week Training in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.  Retrieved from http://www.soundstrue.com/store/the-mbsr-online-course-3226.html on 2/3/2015.

 

TheFreeDictionary.com (2015).  Interoception.  Retrieved from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/interoception on 3/1/2015.