I’m on to something and it is making me feel curious.

Over the years, when I have suffered with feelings of anxiety and emotional stress, I have felt it in my mind – a dizzy array of uncontrollable thoughts, hopes, fears, indecisiveness, wayward thoughts and at such a pitch of intensity that I have felt unstable.

My coach, whom I have visited for three years now, has asked me to feel these emotions in my body.

She asked me to do this some time ago, and although at the time I thought that I understood what she meant, I think with hindsight that I did not.

As my journey deepens and I move through Integral Coaching from being a helpless participant in the world around me, to being a man living in conversations, stories and narratives, in the present moment, her words spoken to me again recently, have found a source within me, of fresh impetus and understanding.

I have been very anxious in recent weeks. On the surface it is managed and at home where I used to let it all fly, it has been managed there too, so where can I be  – where can I go to with these difficult aspects of self?

The answer it seems is in my body.

The mind and the body are one inseparable element of my being. I am a mind of intelligence and free thinking and skewed thinking at times, and I am a beautiful physical flesh and blood human being – as are all mankind!

When I am stressed, I try to find the place in my body where I can feel the pain (not physical pain – but a tension).

More often than not I feel it in my gullet  -in the trachea behind the sternum – or to put it simply in my chest, and it affects my breathing.

Or I feel it in the cavity over my heart and this is painful – it hurts physically and I soothe myself with additional stories that I might have a heart attack and die, and other such nonsense designed by my critic to keep me in a state of fear.

Or I feel it in my back  – real low and far away from the mind.

Or I feel it on my skin causing me to scratch relentlessly on my scrotum or abdomen or at the extremities of my hands and feet until I could be sick with the enormity of the agitated state that I have worked myself into.

Last week for the first time I noticed the pain in my ears – real deep as if my brain had some how swollen and was putting pressure on my cochleas.

Now that I am noticing the mind’s effect on my body, I able to shift the focus from mind to body, so that I can calm my breathing to assist the intensity in my chest and heart.

I can rest my body to ease my back and wash my body and caress it with antibiotic cream to heal my sores.

In shifting the focus from mind to body, as guided to do so, by the living angel who is my coach, I am given something tangible to establish a new balance between my mind and body so that together I can find and feel a place of calm.

My next post will be : Being Polite

William Defoe