Learn to Love Your Body: Three Homes for Emotion Regulation

If you're only catching, say, that emotion of sadness when it gets to the chest, when it's a seven out of ten, you've missed the first one through six stages of it or levels of it. And then it has such a power and it seems so new that it's very difficult to regulate that emotion. Learn to love your body. It will save your life.

Find a home within your body. It will guide you to your own freedom, liberation, and joy. For the first 18 years of my life, I was at war with my body. I treated it poorly.

I exercised all the time. I pushed myself past my own limits all the time. I was a big effort guy. I felt like I could out-effort anyone on the soccer field or the ultimate frisbee field or, you know, surfing, any of those places.

And I did that by and large by having a wall up between my head and my torso and abdomen. And so when I began to stop running away from God and start running towards God, I had to do a pretty big shift in how I related to my body, my physical body, specifically my chest and abdomen area. And so for the first three to six months of running towards God, I did a lot of body scans and a lot of paired muscle relaxation. That's from mindfulness-based stress reduction, John Kabat-Zinn's work.

And I, piece by piece, took apart the wall of tension and repression and pain and contractions in my neck and shoulders that was blocking my awareness of my body. And then once I had removed the wall, I then began to explore and connect with the different parts of my body and begin to hold them in curiosity and spaciousness and begin to relate to them and then eventually begin to bring a certain amount of unconditional love to the different parts of my body. Eventually, what occurred is I created a vibrant inner world, and that was very helpful for me in my process of spiritual evolution because it allowed me to more fully find myself, ground myself in the body, and then have some sort of choice in power to choose what and who and how I related to different aspects of my body, and then to titrate the intensity of emotions or the intensity of body sensations because I had developed a robust and vivid inner world with specific places in my body that I would go to and meditate on and in, and then eventually look at the world from.

And so, those safe places in my body helped to create a groundedness and a sense of home in the body. And then I could relate from the sense of home or groundedness to new or scary or uncomfortable body sensations. And so, my meditation, the three homes, and in the Liquid Armature where I have the three crystals, those are the three spots in the body that I recommend people make little homes of in their body. So, they have three places, they have three places in the body that they feel at home, and each one is on each level of the body.

So, there's a spot where your neck meets the back of your head, and that's one place I recommend you meditate on, and in and from, and begin to look from, so that you can develop a safe place to be when you're in on the level of mind. And then, the other spot is behind the heart, two inches below, behind the heart, in front of the spine. Another good spot, and then meditate in that spot, on that spot, and from that spot, and begin to view the heart region and area from that spot. And then, going further down into the lower abdomen where the lower dantian is, so where the belly button is, do one to two inches below the belly button and all the way to the back in front of the spine.

So, behind the lower dantian. And so, I strongly recommend that when you meditate and you begin to do practices such as loving-kindness practice or wide-open practice, you are always grounding yourself in that spot, one of those spots first. And then you're always, if you get lost or confused or distracted, go back to the spot, ground yourself, stabilize your awareness, and then begin to relate to whatever was difficult to relate to. There's many reasons why making friends with and making your body, learning to love your body, and making a home and rebuilding trust with your body is so important for many different reasons.

One reason is it is the key to having healthy emotion regulation, which is a big kind of buzz topic in social media these days. How can I be emotionally regulated, or how can I regulate my nervous system? And so, if you can learn to rest your awareness and view the world from the spot in your lower abdomen, so in front of the spine, below the belly button, then as emotions arise, they arise out of the lower abdomen and up into the chest and into the head. As they arise, they'll arise right in front of you, in the lower abdomen, and then past you, and then up into the chest and into the head.

So, what will happen is you will be aware of and catch the development and building of emotions early on in their life cycle. And so, when you are able to see the development of anger or sadness as it is being born, as it is being created and then building, it is much easier to regulate that emotion because you're tracking the life and the intensity of that emotion through its stages of development and then it regulates on its own. If you're only catching say that emotion of sadness when it gets to the chest when it's a seven out of ten you've missed the first one through six stages of it or levels of it and then it has such a power and it seems so new that it's very difficult to regulate that emotion.

One of the other reasons why it's so important to develop a loving healthy relationship with your body is so that you can connect with your own personal transmission, live from it, and then express from it and express applied true love by living your calling. And that happens when you are your personal transmission and you are relating to the world or others from your most authentic part of your own being and self.