Liberating Consciousness From The Body, Part I
Liberating Consciousness From The Body, Part I
How to cultivate objective sense perception by untangling subjective thoughts, feelings and instinctual behavior from reality.
This is part 1 in a 5 part series. Click here to read Part 2.
On June 27th, 2020 I was standing barefoot on a rock at the edge of a rushing river in the Weminuche Wilderness of Colorado after hiking 6 miles down a canyon and into the forest.
We had just taken a dip in the frigid glacier fed waters, so I was feeling very refreshed and alive.
Feeling a presence behind me, I turned around and locked eyes with a giant black bear that was very close and walking straight towards me. For what felt like an eternity, I couldn't turn away. Looking a wild bear in the eyes feels like meeting the gaze of god: terrifying, beautiful, pure, fierce.
A moment later I watched myself - as if from outside my body, knowing what was about to happen and utterly unable to stop it - take one step backwards, and then another, into the algae covered rocks and thigh deep water I had so carefully navigated just a few minutes prior.
As I stepped off the safety of the dry rock, my left foot slipped and slid down the slimy stones into a crevice where it lodged itself at an odd angle while the tumbling waters pushed the rest of my body into a spiraling motion in the opposite direction.
Something in my knee snapped, causing me to cry out in agony.
Carefully extracting my foot from the rocks, my lower leg felt like a dangling tree limb hanging by a thread.
I heard myself yell.
"I'm sooo stupid!"
Trotting away, the bear kept looking back at me - bent in half, floundering in the river, yelling loudly - with a face of fearful fascination, before disappearing up the canyon.
Gingerly, I put weight on my left foot in order to walk ashore and nearly collapsed under the pain.
No matter how many times I replayed the event in my mind - in which I stood my ground instead of taking those two steps backwards - I could not change this new reality.
I was seriously injured.
During the long hours spent limping out of the forest and up that canyon, and in the long days following, I grappled with some of my worst fears:
✦ helplessness
✦ dependency on others
✦ feeling trapped and unable to use my body freely
I imagined living with a dangling leg for the rest of my life.
Picturing decades of inability to do what I love - to hike and run in the mountains, to step on people and teach Kinetix - a deep ache gripped my chest. A life of pure possibility had been replaced with a dark void that I resisted with all my might.
I wasn't ready to accept any of this.
I longed to go back:
✦ to the body I still owned when I locked eyes with that bear
✦ to the difficult uphill trail run I had enjoyed just last week
✦ to the unfettered dreams and life plans of yesterday, that all required a different body than the one of today
Standing on the banks of that river, I had no idea that this injury was about to open a door to new levels of freedom that would profoundly impact (for the better) my relationship to myself, my body, my work and life itself.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor Frankl
When pain, injury or illness manifest in our bodies, most of us do not respond; we react.
Reactivity is a mechanism of the nervous system, which is the domain of the subconscious soul (psyche).
The human soul, with its rich life of feelings, dwells in the body and makes its presence known there.
The human brain, or nervous system, is designed to pay attention first to our life of feelings (sensations, emotions, impulses and instincts), and then to the meanings we make about everything we feel and perceive, in order to learn what kind of world we live in, what to be afraid of, who to love and who to avoid, what to think and believe, and how to behave.
Above all, the nervous system is designed to pay attention to feelings of fear and any specific stories we associate that fear with, in order to categorize threats and automate solutions that help us survive as long as possible.
If you are over the age of 25, then your nervous system (brain) operates largely automatically, especially to threats.
Whenever a threat is identified, the brain deploys those previously memorized thoughts, stories, beliefs, feeling states* and behaviors that helped us survive similar past threats.
*Feeling states are states of being we embody at a self identity level distinct from specific emotions. For example: confident or insecure; empowered or disempowered; trusting or doubtful, etc.
Whenever we're in a state of reactivity, we are NOT experiencing the present moment.
Unless we can accurately identify what's happening in the present moment, it's impossible to choose an appropriate response out of freedom; instead, we will be slaves to our survival biology, or the nervous system's automated thoughts, stories, beliefs, feeling states and behaviors.
The key to expanding levels of freedom, and the growth opportunity in every injury, pain and dis-ease, is to:
► pause
► get present
...and ask:
What does this moment call for?
In order to answer this question, we have to identify what is actually happening in the present moment.
Especially challenging in an experience such as the one I found myself in by that river - with a dangling leg that was getting more painful with every passing moment - presence is, nonetheless, the only path to knowing with certainty what is happening, and how to choose the appropriate response.
Luckily, we don't need to banish reactivity (or subjectivity) in order to embody presence and develop objective sense perception, or the ability to see what is true in a given moment.
It's also helpful to remember: the truth is many sided.
Subjectivity and reactivity are really good data!
In fact, without identifying our reactivity patterns, we can't heal and evolve in certain ways.
The trick, then, is to harness the power of self awareness, which we can use to observe our previously programmed (brain memorized and automated) thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
Often called "observer mode," self awareness is the first step towards any kind of freedom, which necessitates that we untangle ourselves - body from mind from soul and spirit.
Observer mode allows us to separate what is (objectively) physical during injury, pain or illness from what is (objectively) psychological (or personal); from there, we can identify what's driving these automations, and consciously choose NEW ones - out of freedom.
Unable to objectively name "what is", we will inevitably give in to the reflex of unconsciously projecting past memorized beliefs, fears, stories, meanings and feeling states onto the present moment, just like I did when I fell into that river.
This maelstrom of thoughts and feelings, left unchecked, will coalesce into a series of nearly uncontrollable behaviors that often put us on paths of great suffering.
These paths of great suffering are 1000% necessary for our soul-spiritual development.
I have walked many such paths.
And, at any moment, we can choose to step off the path of suffering, onto the path of freedom.
Standing on the banks of that river in 2020, I paused; recognized what was happening inside of me; and chose the path of freedom.
Next week, in Part II of this series on "untangling" ourselves, I'll take you with me on the long hike out of that canyon and into the days and weeks following.
Because what I learned about consciously untangling my physical body from my psyche is a true superpower that anyone can learn; it's a superpower that allowed me to walk through that experience with very little pain.
As you'll learn, my MCL - an important knee ligament - fully ruptured when my foot got caught in the rocks while my body twisted the other direction; and it's likely that a couple other tendons at the back of my knee partially tore.
The truth, however, is, that damage does not cause pain.
Pain, in its purest essence, is protection against injury; or, it is protection against worse injury, if injury itself is unavoidable (as was the case for me that day).
The suppression of pain is called trauma.
Yet, in our time in human history anyway, pain is mostly personal, highly subjective and based on the meanings we've assigned to a given experience; the pain levels we feel are rarely appropriate to the moment.
Furthermore, how long pain lasts is almost entirely a result of our nervous system programming. *Almost. More on this later in the series, which involves fascia science.
If you'd like to learn some of the neuroscience behind the highly subjective nature of pain, click here to watch neuroscientist Andrew Huberman discuss this on his podcast.
While this whole event was not something I ever would have chosen for myself, it was one that, nonetheless, would grant me new levels of body and soul freedom I couldn't have fathomed, or designed for myself, or even known how to pursue as the woman who locked eyes with that bear.
If I have learned one thing this lifetime, it is that pain is the portal we must walk through to find freedom.
Choosing to walk through this portal is an immense act of faith, requiring that we set aside all of our programmed preconceptions and step into the great unknown.
With love,
Elisha