If Your Relationship to Your Body Was an Internal Family System

Where are you in relation to your body right now?

Most people live out of alignment with their body.

Disembodied - like a floating awareness trying to operate a physical form.

A body whose inherent intuitive intelligence and sensitivity have been exchanged for learned conditioning and expert advice.

This constellation is always individual.

Picture this one I see often:

You are standing across the room from your body.

Your body is slumped in the corner: exhausted, overstimulated, not heard.

You are over there a couple of steps in front, pushing forward with personal ambitions, deadlines, goals to attain.

The distance between you two reveals the source of much of your 'symptoms'.

What's Your Current Constellation?

I see this pattern constantly:

The manager whose body keeps "getting sick" at times inconvenient for his planning.

The entrepreneur force-dragging his body through 12-hour work days carrying the weight of 150 employees on his shoulders, wondering why his traps feel like overcooked entrecôtes.

The athlete pushing her body to the limit, overtraining themselves in a bore/burn/cook-out, hormonal imbalance and constant inflammation.

Your body isn't sabotaging you and getting in your way.

It's communicating. It wants to collab.

The symptoms - headaches, tight shoulders, mysterious chronic injuries - are signals from a relationship gone out of alignment.

You as the dictator delivering a monologue, your body the reluctant servant.

You two are not living "in axis."

Visualizing the Relationship

One way I support clients in harmonizing their relationship with the body, is eliciting the you-body constellation.

Seeing this often reveals what is going on behind the façade.

Close your eyes or keep them open (visualising can be done with eyes open, you're doing it all the time…).

Ask yourself: what's your relationship with your body like?

Where are you in relation to your body? Above it, looking down? Beside it, dragging it forward? In it? Above it? Completely separate or touching somewhere?

If any, what's the distance between you and your body?

Intuitively observe the current constellation, don't try to make it better or more beautiful - just see it as it is.

Moving in the Constellation

Now start with the constellation that you have seen.

Observe the whole landscape. See where you are oriented in space. See where your body is. Look forward, look behind. You can turn to it, turn your back to it, and walk around it. Change levels, going lower to the ground. Taking a step closer towards where your body is. Perhaps looking it into the eye. Look into your body.

Get some kind of insight or information from getting closer to your body.

Explore as if physically moving within that simulation constellation.

Extract details, contemplate what they point to.

Your Ideal Embodied Constellation

For the intellectuals finding all this woo-woo... ask yourself how much your intellectualising has helped you solve your problems?

No problem, received that program too. Enter scientific proof for 'pataphysics or visual solutions for real-life obstacles.

Lawrence Barsalou's research on embodied cognition and the simulation theory shows that

"simulated affect and bodily responses in the imagined situation may further contribute to the feeling that it is actually happening... All of these factors may make simulations seem sufficiently real that they influence affect and behavior."

Now, back to practice, imagine YOUR ideal embodied relationship.

What would that constellation look like? How would you and your body be positioned towards, around, within,… each other? What's the quality of connection like? Through which details do you notice this quality is there?

Allow an image to arise spontaneously.

In this visualization, again move. Turn. Step back, closer. Step back.

Explore the space as well as interconnection between you and your body as if you're walking through a 3D landscape.

What changes when you move closer? Observe changes in what you see, sense and feel in your physical body. How does the dynamic shift when you step inside the same space?

Seeing this, YOUR, dynamic can serve as a reminding telos or north star.

When you notice you're out of axis and dropping into the old patterned constellation - down-regulating your body's signals, treating body like a machine, a car - you can internally return to this image.

Move in.

Attune the constellation, like any relationship, until harmonious collaboration feels possible again.

What would start to change if "body and you" remembered you're allies?

IN SEARCH OF...

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger: "Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence."

The hero Harry Haller's laughing realization upon leaving the Magic Theatre (in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf): "This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. … It would be quite useless to go through it as you are. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality … means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality."

From an interaction between Milton Erickson and his student Sidney Rose: "'What you don't realize, Sid, is that most of your life is unconsciously determined.' I felt he meant my life was predetermined. However I realised later that the unconscious is not necessarily unchangeable."

From the Gospel of Thomas: "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; then you will enter ... "