Every Emotion Begins In The Body First, And Then The Mind Interprets It

I used to imagine wrongly (until a friend who's studying psychosomatic work under Peter Levine) that everything begins in the mind. But she reminded me that most emotions begin in the body and are then interpreted (wrongly sometimes) by the mind. Fascinating stuff!

Transcript

Hi everyone!

I hope that you guys are doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Boom Shaka and I welcome you to my channel.

As always,

I'm so grateful that you're listening,

Subscribing,

And commenting.

I really appreciate the support.

And in this one,

I want to kind of continue on the same vein of talking about psychosomatic work and why I think it's extremely important,

Especially in our culture right now,

As we are,

As we stand in this moment in time.

I was talking to a girlfriend of mine who was extremely into psychosomatic work.

She does a lot of work with Peter Levine and individuals like that.

And if you're interested in learning more about this,

You should go read that book by Peter Levine.

I think it's called something like Taming the Dragon or Taming the Tiger or something like that.

It's a Peter Levine.

Peter,

P-E-T-R-L-E-V-I-N-E.

Levine.

And so what she was saying and what I was kind of starting to say,

What I was talking to her about was psychosomatic work.

But what I started to say was,

You know,

I can't believe it took me this long to realize that,

You know,

I can't just be focusing on this part of my mind,

Of my brain,

Or my body to fix myself or to heal myself.

Because there is like 90 percent of my body is like,

You know,

Here,

Like it's in this zone here.

This is like maybe 10 percent of my body.

But all of my work previously had consisted or focused on on my mind.

I'd,

You know,

I would do journaling or I would do talk therapy or I would do,

I would vent or I would,

I would,

I would talk about things.

I would think about things.

I'd reflect on them.

I'd contemplate things.

But all of it was about the mind.

It was all about thinking or talking or speaking or something like that,

Right?

All about this this zone here.

And then I was like talking to her and saying,

You know,

I can't believe it took me this long to realize that I had to start doing body work.

And she said something really poignant which was what I want to share with you guys.

And she said,

Don't berate yourself for it.

This is our culture.

Our culture teaches us that we're supposed to mainly focus on our mind and on our,

On this zone here in order to do anything without ourselves.

It doesn't matter if it's healing or non-healing or if it's living our lives or talking about things or making decisions.

Like everything is based on this part of our body.

It's based on our mind.

It's based on thinking.

And so the society in general teaches us this.

Society teaches us,

Our parents teach us,

Our teachers teaches this,

Our,

You know,

Our university teaches us about critical thinking and using our brains.

Everything in our in our culture is geared towards that.

Whereas obviously psychosomatic work and a lot of native cultures,

A lot of olden cultures will always talk about using nature,

Using your body,

Using your body's intelligence,

Using your mind-body connection,

Using your gut instinct or using your gut,

The brain in your gut,

You know,

Things like that.

So always a lot of the olden culture,

The older teacher teachings and the psychosomatic work all comes back to the body.

And it's funny because she also said that this was really poignant as well.

She said something like how most of the things do not start off in the mind.

They actually start off in the body.

Like if an emotion starts off,

It doesn't start off in the mind.

You interpret it in your mind.

You think about it in your mind.

You kind of contemplate or reflect on it in your mind.

But a lot of things,

A lot of emotions,

Feelings,

Situations,

Whatever might be,

Kind of start off in the body.

You'll notice your body first and then your mind comes up,

Especially if you're really paying attention.

And so something might happen like for example if you are in a situation where you're feeling fearful and you step into a room and all of a sudden you notice that the person inside the room is prone to violence or something kind of like something happens in your brain or your body and it tells you,

Your body tells you,

Like it's fight or flight mode.

Be careful,

This person's dangerous.

And it kind of shows up in the fact that perhaps your heart will start beating really fast all of a sudden.

Or you know your gut will start grumbling and gurgling and saying okay this is fear mode.

We need to be careful.

This is a scary thing.

And so first of all your body starts reacting and then you interpret those reactions in your mind as a reaction.

You tell them,

Oh I see this is fear.

My heart is beating really fast.

It must mean I'm fearful.

This situation must be fearful.

And that's how you start interpreting the whole thing.

You start kind of like making up a story based on it.

Right?

And so this is really really important to understand for me especially as well because I didn't even actually realize this because I did not think about it this way.

And really the truth of it is that everything does start in your body and everything ends in your body as well.

Like we might interpret things and we might start making up stories about it.

But everything will start and end in your body.

So your body will let you know when the fear reaction stops.

Like if you walk out of the situation or you walk away from that person who makes you fearful,

As soon as you do that your body will tell you.

Your heart will stop beating so fast and it'll calm down.

And your gut will also calm down and you won't feel like you know you need to go to the washroom anymore.

Your gut won't gurgle or grumble anymore.

And so eventually like as if it's your body's telling you like that your body's intelligence is telling you,

All right cool everything's fine now.

We have escaped from that scary situation.

So we can calm down now.

And so the body calms down and then in relation to that,

In interpretation to that,

The mind realizes that it can calm down as well.

And so the mind calms down.

Right?

And so I really wanted to do this video because I really wanted us to understand,

Me especially,

But also you guys obviously,

To understand that it's not a random thing that I love psychosomatic work so much.

It's not just randomly I've decided,

Oh yeah no I don't want to do that work anymore.

I want to do this work.

It's because the reality is that our society in general tells us that all of the work that we need to do has to happen here.

And I'm not saying that we need to completely negate that work.

Of course that's necessary as well.

But you first need to realize that a lot of the stuff that you're doing,

A lot of the healing that you need to do,

Has to first happen in the body.

And if you don't do that,

If you're just doing talk therapy and you're not doing anything related to the body,

If you're not doing any kind of movement of therapy or yoga or tai chi or qigong or EFT or T.

I.

Whatever it might be,

If you're just doing talk therapy,

If you're just doing mind work and you're not doing any kind of body work,

Any kind of psychosomatic work,

Then there's no point really.

Because then there's all this stuff that's stored in your body that you're not releasing.

You might be releasing a few things in your mind but because a lot of the stuff,

I would say 90% of it is stored in your body,

If you're not going to release that then it's basically like you're just not doing anything at all.

And so I think that's the reason why a lot of individuals now use a lot of therapists actually.

Not only do they recommend CBT or talk therapy or things like that but they're also kind of recommending other therapies as well.

Not just medications of course but actual physical work.

They tell you to go dance if you like to dance or go for a walk in nature or do some yoga because that's obviously a brilliant way of releasing trauma.

Doing some T.

I.

E or EFT or I mean there's so many different kinds of work.

Feldenkrais is becoming very common as well.

And there's so many interesting kinds of therapies that are coming up because of this new and renewed vigor with psychosomatic work.

Particularly somatic work which is related to your body.

And so I'm really grateful that I'm actually living in this time or I'm alive in this moment in time because I really get to take advantage of all of these amazing psychosomatic modalities.

Things that I would never have even considered in the past are not coming up and becoming more and more popular.

And this gives me the initiative or the impetus to kind of try all all these different things out and see what works for me and see which ones I really love.

And so as I said for me my primary ways of kind of doing psychosomatic work is yoga obviously the asanas the poses and EFT.

I really love EFT and I also really really like T.

R.

E.

I've been doing T.

R.

E.

For almost a year and a half now and I really really love it.

And so I've done videos on T.

R.

E.

And yoga obviously.

I haven't done one on EFT maybe I'll do one soon.

But I really love these modalities and I really do recommend that you guys go out and kind of google it or find a practitioner who teaches this stuff or just go on YouTube.

I'm sure there's loads of information on there.

Because it really is the key to healing I really believe is that yes focus on the mind of course do work on the mind but also do not forget a lot of stuff happens in the body and sticks to the body and stays in the body and is held by the body and it needs to be released as well if you really want to do any kind of healing work on yourself.

All right I hope this makes sense I hope I was able to explain myself to you it's such an exciting topic for me I really love this so much.

It's so much fun to talk about so much fun to practice.

And so if you guys have any questions please do comment below and I shall do a follow-up video of course on it.

And if you do already practice some kind of psychosomatic work I'd love to hear from you guys as well you know I love hearing from other people who are kind of practicing this stuff.

How is it working for you?

What do you use?

What kind of modality are you focused on?

Etc etc.

Again thank you so much for listening for your support and for being on my channel and I shall see you guys the next time around.

Bye for now!

Reviews

This made a lot of sense 🙏💕