Body awareness: exercises and tips to improve it

we live in a palace, but much of our time we only occupy a room. the body palace It provides us with health, the most precious assetbecause without it there are no signs of life or communication.

Knowing and caring for the body requires providing caredelve into it, if possible, right now.

For this we have a basic tool: our mind and its capabilities –will, intelligence, memory and visualization capacity. Applying the mind to the body to empower the human being is called body awareness.

body awareness teaches to discover the body, dialogue with itunderstand its rhythm, open the senses, guess its secrets and messages, its intelligence and memory.

It provides poise, relaxation, toning and improves daily life physically, mentally and spiritually. Unite the mind and the bodyoriginating a more complete, dynamic and happy human being.

Attitude and attention: bases of body awareness

Although the mind is a traveler, volatile and dispersed, we are lucky that the body, solid and concrete, lives in the present.

whatHow to prepare the mind so that it attends to the body and initiates us into body consciousness? The starting point is the attitude.

One has to adopt care and thoroughness of the explorer when he discovers a new territory. AND add curiosity and excitement of the child who stumbles upon a box of buttons and, upon opening it, finds all the colors and multiple possibilities for play.

Next, it become aware of attentionthe exploration lantern, which will illuminate the paths, byways, stops, sensations and emotions linked to the body.

On one side, the more attention is used, the better it will work. On the other hand, we can direct it to what we wantIn this case, the body.

Although attention is often elusiveyou can always say goodbye to the wrong direction you have taken with the exhalation and redirect it back towards the organism and the movement.

From there we will open ourselves to wonders that the body provides us, trying not to judge or impose. just perceiving and feeling the pleasure of its progress when we accompany it with the mind.

Techniques to discover the body

then consciously returns to relations with two elements that surround us from the moment we are born and without which we would not live: the earth and the air. We will thus be aware of the weight and breathing.

Abandoning ourselves unconditionally to the earth we will feel the weight. We lie on the floor face up and perceive the contact surfaces with the earth as if we had painted the front part of the body with paint and left footprints on the ground.

The first thing that will surprise us are the small differences between right and left. One will be heavier or perhaps longer. In addition, we will realize that neither the arms nor the legs touch the ground in the same way. That the hip, the shoulder blades or the head tilt more to the right or to the left, and that each of these parts can do so to a different side.

When we accept what is consciously perceivedwithout judging it, the nervous system transmits it to the brain and this reorganizes the information facilitating the relationship with the environment.

in the same position we will pay attention to the breath. Listening to its rhythm and quality. Feeling the path that goes from the nose to the lungs, passing through the trachea. We will observe if when inspiring these they expand in all directions or if there are parts in which breathing is not distinguished, such as in the first dorsals or under the armpits.

Then we stimulate her: we inspire and, when exhaling, we exhale more air than normal. We wait a few seconds and inhale again without forcing the waiting time. The entire process is repeated three times. After returns to natural breathing of the body, observing how it has changed.

The exercise is completed by retaining the air after inspiration, without suspending it for a long time. Repeat the exercise face down.

So we will notice a change: the freer we feel when breathing, the more contact surfaces we will have with the ground and vice versa. Relaxation will come.

Breathing is a good mirror of body awareness. The voluntary allows us to influence the involuntary, amplifying it if it is not clamped down.

Also awareness makes it possible to positively influence movementbut it cannot be a policeman or a judge who tightens the unconscious like a corset, but someone who loves us well and helps us.

The most important moment in life is the present, this instant that did not happen nor will it ever happen again. Bring with you the possibility of transformation and the experimentation of the most important events of living: love, freedom, beauty, truth or silence.

Only by entering this present moment does one live a full life. And this occurs through the awareness of the five senses, which teaches to listen to the signs of life.

How to open up to the senses?

You can start practicing a simple exercise:

taste is appreciated from the mouth, savoring it.light is perceived and the images that reach the eyes are recorded.are heard the sounds around.odors are captured of the space in which one is. When the clothes come into contact with the skin, his touch is noticedits texture and the temperature of the whole body.

Once the five senses have been placed in the place where one is, the sixth sense comes by itself, enveloping the other five. After this preamble it is warned three body messages:

The first is that body memory is cumulative: what is learned physically is hard to forget. The second is that the relationship with gravity, breathing and the senses will be awake and ready for any event, even if it does not go through thought. The third is that, although with repetition comes bodily learning, after a while the habits begin and with them the mechanisms that do not respond to the evolutionary present in which we live. Those habits become obsolete. Body awareness helps change them trying other movement patterns to make us more adaptable.

the danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard He said that, by professing medicine, would remedy the ills of the world by creating the drug of silence for the man.

accurate body awarenessbehind each exercise, a moment of silencewhich can last from half a minute to three, in which nothing is done and conscience is left to fly and the senses perceive and enjoy the life that passes through the body and our being.