I heard the following prayer today. It is as if my body is telling this to me using sensations, pains, aches, vibrations, and other symptoms. 🙂
The Prayer From My Body:
Listen to me. I am your friend.
I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken grief in your smile.
I am your high blood sugar, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust.
I am your hot flashes, your fragile low back, your agitation, and your fatigue.
You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me, coddle me, condemn me.
You usually want me to go away immediately, to disappear, to sling back into obscurity.
More times than not, I am only the most recent notes of a long symphony, the most evident branches of roots that have been challenged for seasons.
So I implore you, I am a messenger with good news, as disturbing as I can be at times.
I want to guide you back to those tender places within yourself, the places where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty.
I may ask you to alter your diet, get more sleep, exercise regularly, breathe more consciously.
I might encourage you to see a vaster reality and worry less about the day to day fluctuations of life.
I may ask you to explore the bonds and the wounds of your relationships.
I am your friend, not your enemy. I have no desire to bring pain and suffering into your life.
I am simply tugging at your sleeve, too long immune to gentle nudges.
You are a being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing.
Let me be one of the harbingers that leads you to the mysterious core of your being, where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart.
I could be living in my mind so much, kind of in virtual reality. However, my body is always in the present moment; when I tune in to it, I am allowing my natural intelligence and my innate healing abilities to emerge. It can bring me to my senses, both literally and figuratively.
My body is a reservoir of knowledge from the past. That knowledge is an aggregate of my experiences, my emotions, my habits, etc.
Notes:
I heard this prayer in the Mindfulness Daily at Work Training on the Sounds True website. I don’t know the source of this prayer.
When I read and saw the idea of tuning in to my body sensations for mindfulness, it didn’t make sense to me right away. It seemed paradoxical that I witness my body sensations to learn more about my inner realm. However, as I continued a bit, I could experience the difference. It is more experiential for me than cognitive/logical. It’s not about chasing cravings and passions of my body, it is about being mindful of my breathing, and simply observing and feeling out my body – sensations, aches, tightness, relaxation, lightness, throbbing, vibrations, etc. whatever that I might experience. (Also, cravings and passions are the construct of my mind and emotions actually, and not the body).
I have compiled more notes on my mindfulness journey in this blog post – Create a Beautiful Universe.