BODY CALM INTRO | Helping Your Body To Heal
‘Go home and get some rest.’ Visit a doctor, work with a health practitioner or seek advice from a friend and one of the most common recommendations you’ll receive if feeling unwell is to give your body rest. It seems an easy enough task. Relax. Take some time off, put your feet up and chill out so your body has a better chance to heal. Despite ‘get some rest’ appearing to be a simple thing to do on the surface, most people I meet don’t know how to calm down, disengage from doing and let their body ‘be’.
This inability to stop stressing stems from a number of subtle sources that we are going to uncover and resolve with Body Calm.
One of the main causes of stress is our habit of excessive thinking. The interconnection between the mind and body is scientifically proven, and so our physical form is constantly responding to and experiencing what we are thinking about and feeling. This means if you go home to rest but take your busy mind with you, then your body won’t necessarily end up getting much respite at all. Yes, you may physically lie down in your cosy bed or on your comfortable couch, but if your mind keeps mulling things over at a million miles per hour, you will very often find that healing is hindered and your physical conditions continue.
Body Calm gives your body the rest it needs to recover.
STOP STRESSING START RESTING
Scientists and doctors agree stress is harmful to health. Stress has been found to lower the immune system, trigger inflammation and increase blood pressure. It plays a key role in cardiovascular disease and digestion disorders, speeds up the growth and spreading of certain cancers, and interferes with sleep leading to chronic fatigue and insomnia. More heart attacks happen at 9 a.m. on Monday mornings than at any other time of the week, with many experts citing the stress associated with having to face another week at work being the potential cause of the ‘Monday cardiac phenomenon’. The list of stress-related physical symptoms and conditions goes on and all point to the fundamental conclusion that getting your stress levels under control can be quite literally life-saving.
Stress, by far, is the biggest preventable cause of the majority of physical diseases and premature deaths on the planet. At the same time, meditation is known to be the most effective cure available for significantly reducing stress. Yet, despite these facts staring us in the face there are still relatively few methods of meditation used to actively support the healing of the body, with even fewer techniques having been specially designed to target the mind-based causes of stress and ill health.
With Body Calm, I want to bring meditation and healing together as the ideal marriage made for health heaven.
You don’t need a doctorate from Cambridge or Harvard to know your mind is constantly causing changes to occur within your body. Simply watch a movie that’s a bit of a tearjerker and the undeniable evidence of the mind–body connection can fast end up rolling down your face. Bear witness to injustices and you can feel your blood boil. Your stomach can churn when contemplating concerning thoughts and you can find your mouth watering at the mere thought of a food you enjoy. Yet, again, despite the proof being prolific, it is easy to neglect the mind when helping the body to heal and stay fit and healthy.
Dependency on doctors and drugs
We live in a world that relies upon doctors and drugs to try to fix the body: 70 per cent of Americans take at least one prescription drug while more than half of the population take two. In the UK, in 2014, 50 per cent of women and 43 per cent of men regularly took prescription drugs, with more than a fifth of men and nearly a quarter of women taking at least three prescribed medicines.1 The UK’s National Health Service gave out a massive 22 million prescriptions for paracetamol alone, a 13 per cent rise on 2013 and at a cost to the taxpayer of over £80 million.2 Global spend on prescription drugs is expected to reach $1.3 trillion as soon as 2018. Over one billion prescriptions were given out in England in 20143 with four billion written in the USA in 2011. Based on these figures, some alarming trends are very evident: our dependency on doctors and drugs are moving in an unprecedented upward direction.
Growing up, if ever there were any early signs of sickness, my first stop was the doctor’s surgery to pick up a prescription and be advised to go home and get some rest. I believe the consequence of this conditioning is an unhealthy dependency on doctors and a sense of powerlessness to properly heal without pharmaceuticals.
It wasn’t until I got into holistic health myself that my mind-set started to change. Especially after accidentally creating a form of therapy called Mind Detox that went on to be used globally to heal the mind-based causes of physical, emotional and life problems. Then, with the introduction of meditation into my daily routine, I began to appreciate a part of the doctor’s advice that I’d previously taken for granted – ‘go home and get some rest’. To this day it’s hard to say what has been more impactful: the pills and potions or the peace that’s come from taking time out to relax and recuperate. Perhaps both. All I know is I cannot remember the last time I turned to a pharmaceutical drug. If ever I do end up feeling under the weather, I’ve noticed it takes around the same amount of time to feel 100 per cent again, if not quicker, by simply meditating as often as possible while my body does its healing work.
Incidentally, I’m not suggesting that you toss your prescriptions in the bin and never open your medicine cabinet again. However, I am saying that until you start using meditation to reduce your stress levels and get good quality rest, it’s hard to fully grasp the big benefits that both can have on the physical functioning, recovery rates and wellness of your body.
Body Calm aims to ‘help’ the body to heal. I am not saying you should never call on doctors or drugs ever again and ONLY use Body Calm but rather, if you need to heal or want to stay healthy, then it is wise to adopt an integrative strategy that includes modern medicine, alternative methods and meditation.
The insights and exercises shared in Body Calm have come about during the past decade through thousands of hours of personal meditation and the experience gained from working
with thousands of individuals from around the world at my clinics, academy courses and residential retreats. My clinical practice has given me the opportunity to meet and treat people presenting almost every physical condition you can name, from acne to arthritis and headaches to hyperhidrosis. I’ve worked with a multitude of people on a wide range of conditions to discover and resolve the potential mind-based causes. When undergoing my meditation teacher training, I went away to meditate day and night for many months, sometimes up to 18 hours per day, and have gone on to attend month-long meditation retreats since, to further deepen my personal practice. On top of that, I’ve run health and meditation retreats at some of the world’s best resorts in UK, Turkey and Thailand and trained coaches in my methods from more than 15 countries. Overall, I believe it is the unique combination of my extensive therapeutic work, academy training courses and the many months I’ve dedicated solely to meditation that have allowed me to create Body Calm and write about how to help the body heal and stay healthy.
Using the techniques I’m going to share, you will learn how to stop stressing and be calm. You will heal the common causes of stress-induced ‘dis-ease’ and return to a more restful state that is highly conducive for self-healing and optimum health. Sound good? Well, the benefits of Body Calm extend way beyond the return to rest – and begin with a rather curious question.
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A BODY?
Inquire as to how you know you have a body and you will probably conclude that you know because you can see and feel it. In other words, you are aware of having one. This rather obvious recognition means that within you now exists something that is aware of your physical body. With Body Calm you are encouraged to become interested in, and attentive to, the conscious awareness that is aware of your body – as you engage in any self-healing activities to fix, change or improve your health. In doing so, Body Calm can give you a new relationship with your physical form. By getting to know your real Self, beyond your body, you will make the inner shift required to stop being in a battle with your body, and to instead enjoy the kind of calm coexistence that allows health and peek physical functioning to flourish.
Vast quantities of vital healing energy are wasted when you fight against your physical form.
When you are in harmony with your body, you ramp up your energy reserves and dramatically increase your inborn self- healing capabilities. Having a healthy relationship with your body requires you to know and experience that, although you have a body, you are not your body (I will explain this more in Chapter 11). It also requires you to change your relationship with your mind and body by being more consciously aware.
A meditation technique for ‘peace with body’
Most of the suffering that happens when a person is ill originates in the mind. Yes, conditions can be physically uncomfortable. But they become mentally stressful and cause emotional anguish when we start thinking about them. As a result, being at peace with the body begins by getting a peaceful mind. By reducing the time spent thinking, you rest in to the aspect of your Self that is aware of the mind and body. Naturally, as you engage less in negative thinking about your particular condition, you learn to peacefully live with your body.
In my experience and observations, by far the best way to befriend your body is to rediscover your real Self. When I refer to your ‘real Self’ I’m talking about the permanent and unchanging part of you that has been present since before the day your body was born; the conscious awareness that is not only aware of your body, but also your thoughts, emotions and everything else that happens during your daily life, too. Being consciously aware, you discover that you benefit from effortlessly experiencing the peaceful presence of your being.
Remarkably, you can come to notice that your awareness never gets sick, doesn’t malfunction, go faulty and is free from pain or any difficulty happening within the body. To your relief and delight, you can reconnect with an on-going inner state of restful calm that is perfect, whole, and completely untouched and unconcerned by any temporary physical problem. With this all- important shift in perspective, you benefit from what I call ‘peace with body’, whereby you remain calm even if your body happens to be going through a tough time. ‘Peace with body’ means you don’t need to suffer if you have a physical problem. You also no longer need to postpone feeling better until your body gets better because being aware of your real Self feels great.
GO HOME AND REST IN YOUR REAL SELF
Central to Body Calm is the invitation to rest in your conscious awareness. As you progress through the book and play with the teachings and techniques shared, I invite you to notice when you are experiencing a sense of inner stillness or silence. When you do, you can be confident in these moments that you are being your real Self. I like to refer to this conscious awareness as the ‘Infinite and Eternal I’ (or ‘infinite and eternal eye’, if it makes more sense to you). Consciousness has no outer edges, is always present and beyond the physical body. It is a serene and secure state of being to return to, where all is wonderfully well and calm is continuous. It is my hope that by being your real Self, the phrase ‘go home and get some rest’ takes on an entirely new meaning for you and that once you return, you stay for good.
Go home to the heart of your real Self and rest in the haven of calm that is your consciousness.