‘Your mind is not just your brain. Your mind is both your whole body and your relational world.' Dan Siegel
Even conservative estimates of the number of thoughts we humans have put the statistic at 2,000 an hour. It may be as many as 3,300 an hour. Wow. And yet, we persist with the notion that we can simply think our way out of uncomfortable and painful symptoms and experiences. If that were possible, I suspect you would have done it quite some time ago.
Your mind is not your brain. You are not your thinking. You are a relational network of trillions of cells that inter-connect and from which consciousness arises. You as a relational field then exist in a network of relationships with everything around you, including other people. Each influences the other.
Albert Einstein remarked that a problem can not be solved with the same mindset that created them. To move beyond our current challenges, we need to bring new and different insight and experience into our relational fields, and therefore to experience things differently. Healing is a bodily experience, for as Babette Rothschild says, ‘the body remembers.’
Next time you find yourself thinking around and around a problem, pause, and instead drop your awareness down into your body. Allow yourself to notice your felt experience of it. Get curious about sensations, any motion the body wants to make, and the feelings that are arising. And then, go with that. Wherever it takes you.
