Do you ever feel confused by the mind/body paradigm? It’s like it seems obvious to people sharing about it, but when try to put it into practice it never seems to deliver the promises of all these beautiful people.
Well, it didn’t for me either, until I saw the simplicity of it all.
When I first began working as a physical therapist, I thought everything you felt in the body was a consequence of our physiological systems. So, if your back hurts, I would be able to explain it based on any collection of these impairments: core weakness, joint stiffness, glute incompetence, or something of similar causes.
As a physical therapist, I could help most people by treating these physical problems. However, I couldn’t help EVERYONE. There were always people whose symptoms wouldn’t resolve when I treated the physical impairments we found.
Meanwhile, I personally struggled with pain in my hip. I injured it while running a marathon, with another 8 miles still remaining in the race. I never gave up. I walked plenty, but I never walked off the course. I’m not saying this with pride, by the way, it was more innocent grit from a young woman who thought she had something to prove.
I didn’t know it at the time, and I wouldn’t learn it for many years later, but I had torn my hip labrum that day.
I consistently struggled to run since that marathon. My hip or my back would hurt too much. I eventually stopped running and picked up yoga and rock climbing to fill the gap of activity in my life.
One evening after work, I walked into the climbing gym. Even though I was staring at the bouldering area, I was day dreaming about running. Within moments, my hip started to ache.
I snapped back to me in the climbing gym and thought, WTF?!
I had no pain or even an awareness of my hip, until I started thinking about running. Thus my complicated journey of understanding the mind/body connection began.
For years since then, through all the extra certifications and education, I was always caught wondering is it the mind or is it the body? Which path do I take to treat myself and treat my patients?
I got quite a bit worse as a provider for those years. I got lost in my head and was always overthinking my own experience and how to help my patients and clients. I found myself running around in circles treating the mind when I should have treated the body and treating the body when I should have been exploring the mind.
I could never seem to tell, is it mind or is it body?
I found myself consistently caught in these crossroads. As if I had to choose one. As if you work on the mind then the body is irrelevant (and vice versa).
One recent morning, wisdom stepped in to simplify things and I finally understood a favorite quote of mine:
“You can’t separate the body and the mind. We are a unified organism.”
– Lorimer Moseley.
That morning my hip was aching and the pain was running down the back of my leg. I have been so heavy on the mind side of things, that my habitual instinct was to search there for an answer. Yet this morning that strategy felt as irrelevant as taking a fishing pole to the pool. Instead, I grabbed my foam roller and spent a few minutes rolling out my hip, hamstring, quad and calves on my right leg.
The pain quietly moved on.
I’ve always thought the mind and body were connected, like the body influences the mind, and the mind directs the body. But today I saw how it’s us who have created the separation of these two things and there is actually something deeper underneath them both that guides each.
You can call it life, wisdom, but I’ve come to call it heart.
It’s the heart that is at the center of your intuition and it guides your lungs to breathe, your physiological heart to beat, and your body to move.
Understanding the heart is as simple as knowing your favorite color. As long as you’ve stopped paying attention to all the thinking that tells you you’ve chosen the wrong one.
Mind and body are but two sides of the same coin and the heart is that which bonds them together.
It turns out to be less about deciding whether to work on the mind or the body, but instead to reconnect to your heart.
It gets a lot simpler from here.