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One of the primary ways that we maintain the status quo of what is not working in our society, organizations, families, and lives is by disconnecting from the intuitive nature of our body.
We forget to feel.
Maybe we learned early on that feeling got us in trouble—I mean who has time for feelings anyway, right! They certainly are inconvenient for parents that are needing and wanting to raise compliant children. And for most parents they haven’t had any real modeling on how to be in a consistent and regulated relationship with feelings so they compartmentalize, suppress or repress, and then often explode, withdraw, or numb out.
Most businesses have relied on their workforce disconnecting from the body and few organizations have been designed to allow for any kind of room for feeling. Feelings are definitely not convenient for managers of teams who need to produce ambitious results. Leaders haven’t been trained how to support their team members in listening to their body and feeling their feelings.
The assumption is that feelings get in the way of real results and the needs that are right before us.
For some of us, our body is not a safe place because it was violated or we weren’t ever taught how to honor it. Many of us have become so unacquainted with our body we can’t locate sensations or feelings in our body until we have such chronic pain that we are brought to our knees and then usually prescribed something to anesthetize the feeling.
We don’t know how to feel.
We live in a culture that has placed an extraordinary emphasis on our logical or thinking mind. We reward analytics. We orient around “hard data.” We value reason. We are heavily driven by image and very invested in looking good.
We have strong biases around appropriate behavior and what feelings are welcome and what feelings are not welcome. For many of us, we have had dramatic relationships with anger or sadness and thus have limited access to them. We frequently have a strong preference for more palatable feelings like joy or appreciation. Positivity bias is a real thing and a considerable blind spot.
Consider that you are hard wired to experience a range of feelings and that they have all kinds of associated sensations in your body. Our biases and our fear of the power of our feelings has had us limit even the feelings we have a preference for.
Our unwillingness to feel our feelings fully and acquaint ourselves with the sensations in our body has us severely diminishing our capacity. Your body is coursing with energy and when it is overly managed or suppressed it comes out sideways.
The strategies that we use to manage our feelings keep us trapped. The emphasis on reason, analysis, and logic is diminishing the climate we are living and working in.
As more and more people are waking up to the necessary relationship with the body and their feelings it can seem as though the pendulum is swinging. Human beings have been so disconnected from their feelings and have so few reference points for a mature and integrated relationship with feelings that when you first start, it feels really messy.
Be patient with yourself. If you’re practicing increased awareness with your team, family, or partner, be patient. You’re trying something new.
Integrating the relationship between our head and our body is a game changing practice that infuses aliveness, purpose, passion, and freedom in ways that life becomes unrecognizable from what you previously knew.
Cultivating teams that are aligned and fully integrated creates a culture and drives results that are inspiring, magnetic, and transformative. Organizations that value the whole human experience retain the right team members and begin collaborating in ways that shift everything.
I have worked with thousands of people in one-on-one coaching, small and large groups, couples, and families to develop increased awareness and access to feeling. Learning how to feel, learning how to express and communicate feelings, and reconnecting with our body is a process, it’s a practice.
I have worked with people to eradicate chronic health conditions, produce results in departments and divisions that have been stuck for years, create new found romance and intimacy in relationships that were being written off, and take on adventure and challenge in ways that are life giving.
When you get out of your head and into your body you will experience an unparalleled access to energy. The drag of fatigue, anxiety, depression, neurotic habits, or chronic pain begins to fall away.
You are not a robot. You are not a machine. You are a dynamic person that has unlimited access to the power you most desire. Once you realize that and then start investing in relationships that are aligned around an integrated approach to life, you won’t go back. You will realize the potency of shifting from head to body.
If you’d like to learn more about how to create real and sustainable results that aren’t at the expense of your aliveness and develop integrated practices for shifting from your head to your body, reach out to us—we’d love to support you and your team in creating a new way of leading.
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