Relax, Mind! Your Body’s Taking Care of Business
Not to worry. It’s got you covered.
Irecently participated in a week-long silent mindfulness meditation retreat in which we sat still all day watching our thoughts, feelings and sensations as they arose and disappeared. In a small group meeting where speaking was permitted, I described to the teacher a deep dive meditation technique I had discovered and developed over the past few years. I told him that after counting my breath for half a century to keep my mind from endless wandering, I had finally stopped and was now “just sitting,” unburdened by an overlay of first grade numerical drill. He smiled and nodded.
“Good!” he told me. “Now do that for the first five or ten minutes of your sitting — and then do nothing. Don’t do anything at all. Just sit there. I realize that just trying to do nothing is already doing something. It’s a paradox — to do something and at the same time not intentionally do anything. But try it anyway. Don’t direct your breathing. The body knows how to breathe all by itself. Just watch your body breathe and see what happens.”
I did as I was told that very afternoon and something did indeed happen. I let go of directing my breath and simply let it find its own rhythm, like water finding its own level. Since I had already been practicing deep dive meditation for more than a year it naturally fell into that pattern, rising and falling from the base of my being, in the lower abdomen. But without direction from my conscious mind it smoothed out in ways I’d never experienced when deliberately directing it. It became effortless and serene, pausing when it “chose” and resuming again when it felt like it. “It”? Who was “it” that was making all these decisions for me? And who was “I” watching “it” take over from me and my “central intelligence agency”? What’s the relationship between “it” and “I”?
Trusting Your Body to Know What to Do
The body’s ability to take care of itself without my conscious intervention struck me as akin to my experience kayaking in San Francisco Bay. There, where I paddle several times a week, I’ve come to realize that if I relax and let my body adjust to the constantly shifting balance of the kayak in the bay’s perpetual churn, my hips instinctively adjust without any intervention by my conscious mind. In fact, I do best when my wakeful mind simply lets go and feels itself into the kayak as a seamless extension of my hips and buttocks. Only when I try to intervene and override my body’s intuitive adjustments does the whole relationship suddenly become a herky-jerky, off-balance affair.
In meditation as in kayaking, my body appears to demonstrate an advanced intelligence of its own that my conscious mind couldn’t possibly keep up with. Had I tried to think through every random motion of the kayak or the subtle variations of the breath, my conscious mind would have hopelessly bungled the task. In the end it seems to come down to a matter of trust. Realizing this deep truth, can I finally trust my body to know what to do in critical situations and let go of a chronic concern and anxiety that without my conscious intervention it somehow won’t “take care of business”?
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I decided to try a further experiment: after several periods of meditation where my conscious mind watched as some sub- or unconscious part of my brain directed the breath with exquisite precision to achieve a harmonious rhythm, I arose from my seat and began watching as my body navigated its way through more complex tasks — walking from one place to another, eating dinner, taking a shower, even scratching an itch. To my surprise I noticed that while I made conscious decisions to eat dinner or take a shower, my conscious mind had no apparent role in the myriad body movements required to accomplish any of these tasks.
You could dismiss this as my body running on auto-pilot, but while I’d eaten dinner and taken showers innumerable times before, the particular motions required to accomplish these tasks are always a little different. They require a high degree of bodily intelligence and complex coordination and the actions can’t be directed solely by habit. I began to wonder whether human intelligence is located not solely in the skull but in critical locations throughout the body — a kind of distributed or decentralized intelligence taking care of business at the location closest to the part of the body engaged in addressing those particular needs. It seems that “headquarters” (pun intended) in the conscious mind is only called upon to intervene if and after receiving signals from other parts of the body that a change of plans is urgently required.
What’s happening here and who’s directing it? The answers, insofar as there are any, may be found in sources as disparate as neuroscience and mysticism. Or there may simply be no answers. In the months since I first experienced this whole-body intelligence, I’ve trained myself to watch it in actions in a wide range of circumstances and have come to appreciate how trustworthy it is. I’ve even come to realize that when I’m considering whether or not to do something, if I carefully watch what my body is doing it tells me what I need to do by showing me what I’m already doing. Realizing how much my body intelligence is already doing for me without any need for my direction, my conscious mind is finally freed of needless anxiety or self-consciousness and thus able to relax into a more spacious state of being.
Released from the unnecessary burden of trying to manage from headquarters what is already being handled quite well by other regions of the nervous system not accessible to the conscious mind, the neocortex can stop over-thinking and focus instead on higher brain functions that are usually out of reach to those overwhelmed by life’s more mundane tasks. With a more spacious conscious mind we experience vastly greater flexibility and wider awareness, enabling us to exercise unexplored capabilities — greater capacities for creativity, insight, reflection and contemplation, as well as higher states of consciousness and emotion — serenity, joy, laughter and playfulness, compassion and empathy, a sense of meaning and belonging.
Over-thinking and Overriding the Body’s Innate Intelligence
Not only is the thinking mind seldom necessary to accomplish routine tasks, but over-thinking and over-managing such tasks encumbers the ability of our more local intelligences to perform the functions they are best designed to execute. Crucially, the stress generated by our conscious mind’s chronic anxiety disables its ability to think clearly and make wise choices when the higher functions of the neocortex — functions like analysis, perspective, balance, and wisdom — are most essential. The pandemic of “overwhelm” that has engulfed the minds of so many of us living in frenetic modern societies is the result of many factors, not least of all a nonstop deluge of addictive social media and advertising. It has critically damaged our personal and collective abilities to make wise decisions about matters that determine not only our own futures but the fate of the entire planet. Learning to let go of over-managing those functions that our bodies handle quite well on their own, thank you, opens up the space for us to think more clearly, act more wisely, and enjoy life in ways that till now we’ve never given ourselves the chance to experience.
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A few caveats: I’ve been meditating for fifty years and for all the distracted hours and days I’ve spent on the cushion I must have learned something along the way. If you have no prior experience meditating it may be awhile before you can reach the dual states of awareness I’m describing. When I recently realized I had reached my half-century anniversary, I congratulated myself for sticking it out all this time. I realized with great appreciation the subtle yet profound contribution this practice has made in helping me reach a measure of equanimity and contentment I had never imagined possible when I was a young, restless soul. It’s not that I never feel stress. Try me when I can’t get a response on the phone while trying to reach customer service! Or when I unwisely tune into the news and hear of yet another act of human folly or iniquity.
I’m also retired and able to devote myself for the first time to pursuits other than those required to make ends meet. There’s a heretofore unimaginable spaciousness that can blossom in this freedom in which one has the time to experiment with deeper states of awareness. But just as I began meditating by carving out a few minutes a day for “sitting” as a nearly penniless pilgrim in my wandering youth, you too can find — or more realistically, make — space to explore your inner dimensions of being no matter what else you’re doing with your perpetually busy life. Taking a load off your mind by letting your body direct your more routine acts and saving your conscious brain power for more complex and satisfying tasks can be a wonderful beginning to a less stressful, more satisfying life.
When I say that your body takes care of business while your mind is pursuing higher states of being I don’t mean that your conscious mind is largely unemployed. In my observation there is an exquisite, quicksilver interplay between somatic intelligences in the body and mental, emotional and spiritual intelligences in the more advanced regions of the brain. As I watch this dance I “hear” my conscious mind making comments about the information it’s receiving from the body, but it does so without necessarily directing the actions. Except in especially high-impact decisions it acts more like an adviser and commentator than a director. When kayaking, my hips respond instantly and appropriately to the shape-shifting swells without needing to consult with the conscious mind. But when a sudden rogue wave appears and rips into view, an alarm in my conscious mind is triggered by my eyes to go on high alert. “Pay attention, Mark!” I often command myself, barking aloud in an authoritative voice of God. “Don’t fall asleep!” My conscious mind instantaneously issues an all-points alert to the body and the two work in tandem to deal with the danger. My conscious mind is capable of anticipating both peril and opportunity in ways that I doubt that my somatic intelligences on their own can muster. It’s the efficient, elegant coordination between the two that is the miracle of a well-functioning mind and body.
An Evolutionary Design Flaw?
Since becoming aware of the subtle subconscious interaction between these multiple intelligences operating and interacting with one another in the conscious and subconscious mind, I’ve become vastly more appreciative of what our body’s senses and responses do to ease our existence. I’ve long wondered whether our overactive neocortex is an evolutionary design flaw, making us too clever for our own good and, when underemployed, inventing ingenious forms of malice and cruelty aforethought. Why were we humans given more intelligence than we need to function in this world? The brains of most animals are more right-sized for the tasks they must perform to survive. But it seems that in the case of humans, the creator went overboard, endowing us with capabilities that often work at cross-purposes and, when not given productive tasks to do, generate both destructive and self-destructive behavior (think trolls!) On the other hand, this hyper-intelligence, when directed by the conscious mind towards its highest and most generous capabilities, also produces works of extraordinary artistic genius and feats of startling scientific discovery, as well as capacities for compassion, empathy, insight and foresight that no other creature can equal. Insofar as we can sense and appreciate the wisdom of somatic, embodied intelligence, we free our conscious minds from needless anxieties and self-judgments and open to ourselves and one another with more spacious awareness and generous hearts.
It’s odd that it’s taken more than seventy years for me to notice and appreciate what my body does for me in directing so much activity without even asking me for help. Even when it’s taken to the outer extremity of its strength and endurance it waits till the emergency is over to present the bill. Neuroscience and physiology have extensively mapped the precise workings of the relationship between the body and one’s conscious mind, how the autonomous nervous system monitors and regulates our internal organs, from the rhythm of our breathing to our sexual arousal, altogether at a subconscious level of awareness. The science is mostly there and more is being discovered all the time with the powerful tools now at hand to track the unfathomably complex interactions between neurons, synapses, organs and the like. My observations here are not based on science but on direct experience, how I perceive the interactions between the conscious and unconscious functions of mind and body. Since an early age I decided, in the naive manner of a child with an irrepressible curiosity, to make myself into a one-person field laboratory and experiment station, observing and documenting to the best of my ability how it feels to live in this body on this plane of existence. Somehow, life has waited till now, as it approaches its final phase, to deliver the results of these experiments. My response, I find, is not to feel I’ve reached some kind of final answers but to marvel at the myriad mysteries I will never fully comprehend but that I boundlessly appreciate. Surely this is one of the gifts of a mind becoming ever less fettered to the compulsion to “get it right” and thus freer to simply embrace the mystery.
