Let’s talk about the first part of this five part system. These are the main things that I’ve seen over and over again in healing that come up with blocks in the way that things work.
The first is the question, What is the body?
Because when we understand the different parts of the body, we can understand life and healing and how the mind body connection works. Otherwise we’re sort of at the whim of our emotions or our experiences, which are true and important for us, but can fall short of helping us to actually figure out what’s going on. And then we can get stuck over here, which is a little bit too dogmatic of not really relating to our experience.
So when people get stuck over here, this is like where the new age sort of thinking falls short, “It’s all good, I feel it, so it’s true!”, which can really not serve us in some ways. And if you’re getting stuck over here, and this is my particular shadow side that I’ve worked through in life: “It says it’s like this. This is how it is,” the sort of spiritual bypass type of aside. We really wanna balance those two.
So when we think about “What is the body?”, one of the frameworks that I like to use is the traditional vedics, understanding of the body coming from India. This is a good broad answer to “What is the body?”
I didn’t make this up! The layers of the human being are called the koshas or the sheaths. I think it’s very helpful to really give you a framework, an ancient understanding of who and what you are.
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Physical Body
The first layer, the first circle is the physical body. These all have Sanskrit names, I’m gonna explain them in the more easy to learn terms. So the first, the outermost circle, is the one that you see the most, the physical body or the physical layer. Literally in Sanskrit, it’s kind of like the food body, the part of your anatomy and existence that is fed by the physical world. It’s what you see. But you’ll notice that there’s actually a whole lot more in each of those definitions.
Prana
The second one is the prana layer. Prana is the term from Indian spiritual science and health for chi or your vital essence. So this is where we start to get more into the places where acupuncture kind of connects. And I would say that the fasha sort of bridges these two. The layers of the body are all interconnected, so you can’t really separate them out, but we do talk about them differently.
Mind
The third one is the mind layer. And just like the Eskimos had a lot of words for snow, Sanskrit has a lot of words for different parts of the mind. So if you really wanna understand how the mind works physically, these traditions give us a lot. The mind in this aspect is the thinking mind, but it’s also our reactionary tendencies. The thinking mind is our habits, our sort of base level gut reaction and I think it should be this way a little more and those that some traditions call kind of like ‘the ego type of thinking’. Your eye sense kind of lives in here. This is important because we’re going to differentiate that with the next layer.
Intellect
The fourth layer is intellect, or sort of like the discrimination layer. It’s hard– ancient terms have a lot of different ones and it’s hard to find the one that’s exact, but it’s like higher thinking. Intellect discrimination, what is true with a capital T versus what is subjective.
You’ll notice that at the center is really whatever we call the mystery of life/love with the capital L! God, the universe consciousness itself is at the center in this worldview of your existence. Some people talk about the soul that’s kind of in that aspect. You’ll notice that as we get closer inward to that, we’re getting closer to that source. So that’s why we go from mind to intellect.
Spiritual Body
And the last one, I would call it the spiritual body. Sometimes it’s called the bliss body. The Anandamaya layer and Ananda usually get translated as bliss. My spiritual teacher, who is, was an 80 year old Indian swee. He’s like, “Bad translation. I don’t like bliss.” Technically, Ananda is like without the absence of the mind, the absence of that thinking mind. However we term it, I like to say the spiritual body, I think kind of makes sense.
You’ll notice that at the center is really whatever we call the mystery of life/love with the capital L! God, the universe consciousness itself is at the center in this worldview of your existence. Some people talk about the soul that’s kind of in that aspect. You’ll notice that as we get closer inward to that, we’re getting closer to that source. So that’s why we go from mind to intellect.
Subtle Body
The term that I’ll use a lot, which I want to define for you, is the subtle body. The subtle body is not a well determined definition, but it means it touches in a little bit to the physical body. It’s really kind of a combination of your chi, your prana layer, your mind, and a little bit of the deeper mind. So it doesn’t quite touch on the deeper, deeper stuff. But it’s also not wholly the physical body.
So often I’ll talk about the subtle body just to mean the whole of the energetic process. And this is important because a lot of places where I see people get stuck is that when something happens to us, maybe it’s something someone said or something as a child, or it could be a full on trauma or just a little kink of something that you had a reaction to. It’s like the subtle body gets a little kink in it. It leaves a memory or a mark that can get stuck there. And when things are out of whack in the subtle body part of our being, this is where we get stuck. We get unconscious tendencies, we get reactions. Sometimes we get physical pain.
And the problem is that if it’s stuck in this subtle body layer and we only approach it from the thinking mind with traditional therapy –now a lot of somatic therapy really includes more of the body, which is more helpful– but it is a bit of a truism with healing that whatever layer it’s in, is the layer that needs to be activated to get it out. Acupuncture is helpful here. I use a lot of tapping or EFT or different aspects where you’re tapping on acupuncture points, engaging the mind.
When you engage these layers all at the same time in certain ways, it can really reset the system and let things get out that have been stuck for a very long time, often people’s whole lives.
So this is why I want you to understand the layers of the human being. And this is why we start here in the body wisdom method, cuz we have to have an idea of how these things are working together.
You are a soul with a body, you deserve great things!
Disclaimer: This program is not intended to be a substitute for professional mental health or counseling services. No practitioner-patient relationship is established and the training content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA and nothing here is intended to diagnose, cure or treat any disorders.