10.25.2024

The Mind – Body Continuum

I wake up from a dream, feeling lazy and wondering where I had been that felt so real, and now in bed, soft, warm and back in the physical body again, kind of relieved and confused. I’m still aware of the emotions from the night and new feelings and thoughts flood me as I rise this body out of bed ready to live another day! It’s amazing to be human, and it’s complicated with all the different parts of me to understand. In knowing I can navigate and connect these parts, I feel open to whatever life offers me. The knowledge from yoga and how it correlates with my learning from Nonviolent Communication (NVC) about the Mind-Body continuum, basically about who and what we are, empowers me every day.

I like the idea of a continuum because, an uninterrupted spectrum of being that is grounded in the body at one end and goes to the subtle, non-physical parts at the other without any breaks in between. Most models of looking at the continuum of the human being agree that the body anchors one end, grounding us in the physical world and holding us down on the planet since it is the only part of us affected by gravity! At the other end, where things get more subtle and difficult to define we don’t find the same uniformity. I like to start with the spectrum from the point of view of the mind since I am writing this now from my mind, and presumably you are reading it with your mind. This means the spectrum in order from conceptual to non-conceptual.

The Mind

I am aware that there are myriad psychological, philosophical and spiritual perspectives about what is the mind. My purpose here is not to enter this fray, although I may be doing so nonetheless. I will write from my own experience of mind, body and soul processing in lots of different meditations, mindfulness and therapeutic experiences involving myself and others. I define the mind as the space of perception, thoughts, concepts, language, images, imagination and fantasy, memory, judgement and discernment. I don’t include emotions and consciousness because I can continue to be aware and feel when my thinking stops, so I find this distinction helpful especially when we approach emotional healing and spiritual growth.

The Feelings

The first distinct level we all experience “between” the body and mind is the feelings/emotions level. We often distinguish between positive and negative feelings, happy, peaceful and joyful ones and sad, angry or fearful ones. I prefer to put it in terms of the ones that indicate we enjoy something and the ones that show us we are not enjoying ourselves because the term negative implies bad in some way while all feelings are valid and have important information for us.

The experience of feelings can be a powerful, even overwhelming one. Feelings are the main driving energy behind our motivations, they fuel the intensity and persistence of our thoughts, and they are the first bridge from the sublte levels with our physical bodies. Feelings almost always relate to some sensations in the body, and this is an important Mind-Body. It is often very difficult to experience our feelings directly without the story in our mind that goes along with them. There are several therapeutic processes that use the somatic (body) experience of the emotions to support having an emotional experience distinct from the mental one. Especially when feelings become too intense for the mind to hold them, trusting the body to hold them through the sensations can bring a presence to the experience that the mind cannot. The body sensations also help us stay with a feeling long enough and in the present moment to be able to decipher its deeper origins instead of going to avoidance mechanisms that are often built into the mind. Beyond the healing aspects of feeling feelings directly or with the body, the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, an ancient yoga treatise, describes a technique for enlightenment through the direct non-conceptual experience of intense feelings (Sutra .

they very often feed or are fed by thoughts in the mind, and they always come from a value or a “need” as we often say in NVC. To be able to move through the emotions and effectively process the energy they are holding, we need to be able to connect them to the underlying values that cause them. This connection does not need to happen in the mind, although sometimes that also really helps. It can also happen more directly through the “felt sense” experience.

Most mental and emotional experiences correspond to Beta and Alpha brainwave activity and are connected with the ordinary waking state.

The felt sense is a term coined by Eugene Gendlin in the 1960’s after studying what leads to progress and a shift during therapy. He found that people in talk therapy who would pause between sentences or even in the middle of there sentences in moments of reflection that would last several seconds at a time would tend to have more movement in their emotional processes. He wondered what happens in that time and discovered that people can have a direct contact with their values that doesn’t involve the mind or emotions. The felt sense is the pre-verbal, non-conceptual feeling/sensation of meaning. Emotions only arise when triggered by something we consider important in some way, and the felt sense is the space in which we hold the present moment experience of what is important to us before the mind has labeled it with language and before the emotions have translated it into feelings.

Contact with the felt sense may be completely unconscious because it occurs in a way most people are not used to paying attention to, and, by definition, it is very difficult to describe felt sense experiences in words. This contact is still very important to any kind of emotional healing and it is also related to the source of inspiration and intuition which are other forms of non-conceptual experiences of meaning that then gets translated by the mind into thought and language. Some descriptions of the brain in Theta waves correspond to the felt sense experience as being intuitive and holding our “stuff” or “troubled history,” experiences of being touched in some way that haven’t been processed.

Being able to consciously navigate across the Mind-Body continuum is extremely helpful to be able to integrate the parts of yourself longing to come home. This integrative movement is what I call living into wholeness. This quality of consciousness also allows you to be responsive to what is truly going on within you. This means being able to make choices from the truth of your being. These choices will be aligned with what you really value, what nourishes you and is authentic for you in the given moment. This is a quality of freedom that only comes from this level of attunement to the Mind-Body continuum.