First Key - BE AWARE OF YOUR BODY

                                                     
                                                    BE AWARE OF YOUR BODY


Your body and the universe are a single field of energy, information, and consciousness. The body is
your connection to the cosmic computer, which is organizing an infinity of events simultaneously. By
listening to your body and responding to it with awareness, you tap into the field of infinite possibility,where the natural experience is peace, harmony, and joy.

There is but one temple in the universe … and that is the human body.
—Thomas Carlyle

Your first and most reliable guide to happiness is your body. The body is
designed to support the mind, and working together they create the state
known as happiness. When you’re deciding whether or not to act, ask your
body, “How do you feel about this?” If your body sends back a signal of
physical or emotional distress, reconsider the action. If your body sends a
signal of comfort and eagerness, proceed. Together, mind and body form a
single field. It is artificial to separate them as we usually do. Every experience
has a physical component. If you’re hungry, the mind and stomach are hungry
together. If you have an incredible spiritual experience, your heart and liver
cells share in it. You cannot have a single thought, sensation, or feeling
without your body responding.

The first key to happiness tells us that by being aware of your body, you are
connecting to the underlying field of infinite possibilities. Why do mind,
body, and spirit feel separate when they are not? Because of lack of
awareness. Awareness has tremendous power. It tunes into every cell. It
regulates the body’s countless interactions. Awareness is the invisible, silent
agent that lets your body know what your mind is thinking, and at the same
time it sends feedback from the body so that the mind feels supported and
understood. Ideally, when you experience being loved, your mind will grasp
that you are loved, your cells will be nourished by that love, and your soul
will rejoice that you have reached deep enough to find the source of love.
Every good thing in life saturates your whole being.

When mind, body, and spirit are in harmony, happiness is the natural result.
Signs of the absence of harmony, on the other hand, are discomfort, pain,
depression, anxiety, and illness in general. Unhappiness is a form of feedback.
It signals that disharmony has entered the field somewhere—either in mind,
body, or spirit. Awareness has become disconnected. Only when we look at
the situation in this holistic way can we link health, wholeness, and holiness,
for all three share the same root word, and all three share the same state of
harmony or disharmony. You may have heard the saying “The issues are in
the tissues.” This refers to the fact that psychological issues such as anger,
depression, neurosis, hostility, and free-floating anxiety are not simply
psychological. They have a correlate in the brain, and through the central
nervous system the brain makes every cell and tissue in your body aware that
you have an issue.

The entire field quivers at the slightest twinge of pain or pleasure. In other
words, the field is aware. When you consciously pay attention to what your
body is telling you, this awareness is tremendously increased. Awareness isn’t
the same as having a thought. A mother is aware of how her child feels
without having to think “A is bothering him” or “B has gone wrong.”
Awareness is intuitive. All you have to do is pay attention, and awareness
grants you access to every corner of the infinite field. This is like being
plugged into the cosmic computer, because when the field organizes the
smallest thing in creation, it organizes the whole.

The opposite is also true. When you withdraw awareness, disruptions occur
on many levels at the same time. Feedback loops no longer operate as they
should between mind and body. The flow of energy and nourishment needed
by every cell begins to diminish. By not paying attention to your body, you
are putting it in the same predicament as a neglected child. How can a child
be expected to develop normally if the parents pay no attention, if they ignore
its cries for help, and remain indifferent to whether their child is happy or
unhappy? The same question applies to the body, and it leads to the same
answer. The body doesn’t stop developing around age twenty, an arbitrary
time we call maturity. Constant change is always taking place, all the way
down to the level of genes. Change is never neutral. Either it leads to growth,
development, and evolution or it leads in the opposite direction, toward
decline, decay, and disorder. The difference depends on how you pay
attention, because attention is your connection to the field of infinite
possibilities.

The field has certain qualities or attributes that support mind, body, and
spirit. There are three qualities that contribute to happiness most significantly.
Intelligence is the first. When you listen to your body, you eavesdrop on the
mind of the universe. This involves many tasks at once. A human body can
think thoughts, play a piano, secrete hormones, regulate skin temperature, kill
germs, remove toxins, and make a baby all at the same time. That is a
miraculous display of intelligence. This intelligence also allows you to make
choices that lead to fulfillment.

Fulfillment seems mysterious to many people, but we can break it down
into its simplest parts. Fulfillment is the result of right thought, right feelings,
and right action. Each area involves the body. We don’t have to create
artificial boundaries between a liver cell that makes a right choice and the
mind making a right choice. Intelligence embraces both. If it makes a mistake
at the chemical or genetic level, the cell dies or becomes malignant. The mind
discriminates right from wrong at a different level, the level of ethics and
morals. The emotions have their own level, discriminating between
nourishing and toxic feelings, or between loving and harmful relationships.
When you are consciously aware of your body and what it is telling you, the
quality of intelligence is amplified. Its reach is infinite. While the human
body performs countless physical processes, it tracks the movement of stars
and planets, because your biological rhythms are actually the symphony of
the whole universe. That’s why we call it the universe—“one verse,” “one
song.”

The second attribute of the field is creativity. Creativity keeps the flow of
life fresh and new. It prevents inertia; it dispels habit. Much of the time the
body seems stuck in routine. One breath is the same as another, one heartbeat
repeats the action that came before. Simply to process food and air, your cells
must endlessly repeat the same chemical processes with tremendous accuracy;
no improvisation is allowed. But miraculously, the body also has complete
flexibility to adapt to new situations. When you decide to do something new
—have a baby, run a marathon, or climb a mountain—billions of cells adapt
to your intention. This flexibility isn’t mechanical. It’s not like your car
accelerating because you push down on the gas pedal. Rather, your body
adapts creatively.

You can observe this in how creatively you can think and speak. No two
thoughts are required to be exactly alike; no two sentences demand exactly
the same words. The brain displays a pattern of neural activity to match any
thought or sentence, even if that thought or sentence has never before
appeared in the history of the universe. The ancient Vedic wisdom tradition in
India identified creativity with Ananda, or bliss. Bliss is usually described as
intense joy, but cells have their own bliss in the form of vitality, flow, and
infinite dynamism.

To be most alive is to be in bliss. When you are in that state, everything
feels possible. Your body is no longer a burden; you feel light as air. Nothing
is old or stale. Instead, your creative potential is ignited. Creativity depends
on the constant ability of life to refresh itself, and that ability is founded on
bliss. You don’t have to force yourself to be blissful—you couldn’t if you
tried—but only to be aware. Bliss is innate in awareness, which by its nature
is lively, alert, effervescent, and joyful. The absence of those things can be
corrected simply by accessing deeper awareness.

The third attribute of the field is power. Although cells operate on a
microscopic level, they contain the power to survive, thrive, and evolve in an
environment that erodes entire mountain ranges and dries up vast ancient
seas. Power doesn’t mean aggression. The power you don’t see or feel is the
greatest power of all. It organizes a thousand billion cells into one smoothly
operating organism. It defends against every virus and germ that could harm
the body, and monitors outbreaks of cancer inside the body itself.

Once again, it is entirely artificial to put boundaries around this quality of
the field. Mind, body, and spirit express power in their own ways. The mind
expresses power as attention and intention, turning wisps of thought into
outward achievement. The body expresses power through physical strength
and endurance, but also by organizing infinite processes into a coherent
whole. Spirit expresses power by turning pure potential into reality. In the
Indian tradition, spiritual power, called Shakti, is the most fundamental. When
you possess Shakti, you can turn the invisible into the visible. Whatever you
imagine manifests as reality. There are no obstacles between your desire and
its fulfillment.

Shakti isn’t mystical. It’s an innate quality of awareness, without which
invisible molecules of oxygen would drift randomly through the atmosphere.
Apply awareness, and those same molecules carry life to every cell in the
body. Going even deeper, Shakti allows you to cocreate the universe. You are
not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself
through you at this very minute. It knows itself through you as awareness
folds back on itself. Like a transformer that steps down the massive voltage
running through high-tension power lines, your body steps down the energy
of the universe to human scale. But it remains the same power. The
infinitesimal electric charge emitted by a single brain cell is exactly the same
as the firestorm of electromagnetism in an entire galaxy. This power is
channeled through awareness, which means that when you become aware of
anything, inside or outside yourself, you are increasing your share of power in
the universe.

I want you to see that this one simple act—being aware of your body—
unleashes intelligence, creativity, and power. Being aware isn’t trivial, and it
isn’t optional, either. Once you withdraw your awareness by being distracted,
depressed, restless, unhappy, or anxious, the flow of intelligence, creativity,
and power is broken off. Most of the “natural” decay and disease seen in old
age is actually the unnatural outcome of decreased awareness, which is felt by
every cell and damages every cell.

One of the most basic ways to be aware is by grounding yourself in the
body. There is no mystery to this. Simply tune in to the feelings in your body
whenever you’ve been distracted. Let’s say you’re driving a car and
somebody cuts you off. Your normal reaction is to be agitated or angry; when
you feel this way, you lose the calm, relaxed focus that connects you to the
field. So try this: instead of being disrupted by this disruption, just go within
and feel the sensations of your body. Take a deep breath, since that is an easy
way to come back to body awareness.

Keep your attention on these distracting sensations until they disappear.
What you’ve done is break the chain of stimulus-response by creating a gap,
an interval of nonreaction. This stops the reaction from fueling itself. It
reminds the body of its natural state of harmonious, coordinated selfregulation.
And that grounds you. Harmonious self-regulation is the body’s
ground state. Stress pulls you into another state, of heightened biological
responses that trigger a flow of hormones, increase heart rate, stimulate
hyper-vigilance of the senses, and many other linked reactions. But these are
all temporary; they are emergency measures only. If you allow the stress
reaction to become a habit, however, disharmony enters the field. The normal
state of relaxed awareness tries to coexist with the agitated state of the stress
response, but the two don’t mix; they aren’t meant to exist at the same time.
Anytime you’re feeling distracted, overwhelmed, stressed, or
overshadowed, there’s a tendency to escape. Denial is a form of escape.
Distracting yourself through overwork is an escape. Altering your mind with
drugs and alcohol is an escape. What they all have in common is absence of
awareness. You numb or distract yourself under the false belief that being too
aware will only increase your pain. In reality the opposite is true. Awareness
heals, because awareness is truly whole, and healing is fundamentally a return
to wholeness.

Science is just beginning to understand the phenomenon of healing. Over
millions of years our bodies evolved to regulate thousands of microscopic
processes simultaneously. Disease occurs when the body forgets how to selfregulate
itself. Healing occurs when the body remembers how to self-regulate
itself.

You can be exposed to pneumococcus bacteria, for example, but exposure
alone isn’t enough to create infection. You don’t contract pneumonia if your
body knows how to make the appropriate antibody, and that ability ultimately
comes down to awareness. Your immune system recognizes an invader,
identifies it, and calls for the appropriate intervention. These are all conscious
acts. Healing therefore cannot be understood unless the mind is as fully
conscious as the body. In medicine we have isolated the nervous system, the
endocrine system, the cardiovascular system, but we ignore the healing
system. It’s invisible, it includes every part of the body, it responds to the
ghostly wisp of thought and feeling. Yet nothing is more intelligent, creative,
and powerful than the healing system, the one thing we keep ignoring.

Healing should be as constant as breathing, not an isolated process for
fending off illness. Healing should mean constant communication with the
field. We’ve covered the most important step: becoming aware of the
sensations in your body. The other thing you can do is begin to become aware
of the field that invisibly unifies everything. How is that done? Ordinarily you
focus on things, people, and events—all kinds of outward stimuli. Instead, try
looking at the spaces between things. If you’re looking at another person,
shift your attention to the space between the two of you. The field exists
where we think there is nothing—in the space between thoughts, the space
between objects, the space between breaths, the space between movements.
It’s all the same space, but what we call nothing is lack of awareness. If you
are aware, space is full, rich, dynamic. It’s the field of pure potential, the
unknown region from which the next moment and everything in it will
emerge.

Space is always still. So when you bring your attention to space, you still
the mind. At the same time your body can begin to release the stored-up
frustration, tension, and residues of past stress. In this state of deep relaxation,
healing becomes most active. Your body needs to release the energy that is
stuck to outworn emotions, memories, and traumas. Ideally, you wouldn’t
identify with these negative influences; you wouldn’t hold on to them and add
more energy to them. But we all do. We keep the body from relaxing by
constantly putting excessive demands, both conscious and unconscious, upon
it.

If you don’t think your body is operating under the burden of such
demands, you can prove this quite easily. Just relax, sit quietly, and tell your
body that it can do anything it wants. One of the following is likely to happen:
deep sighs, drowsiness, a rush of memory, unexpected physical sensations
(usually discomfort or tightness), spontaneous emotion, perhaps tears, and a
sense of relief. These are all signals from your body that it needs space to heal
and refresh itself.

If your body is actually in a natural state that is self-healing without
resistance, the experiment will produce the opposite effect. If you sit still and
tell your body to do whatever it wants, one or more of the following will
result: a sense of deep stillness and peace; faint effervescence; lightness;
bubbling joy, however faint; and a sense of wonder at the unknown that is
peering through the mask of material existence.

In other words, when your body is in a natural state, you are experiencing
happiness. When you’re happy at this effortless level, you regain the memory
of who you really are. Your consciousness is fulfilled, because in every cell
there is a state of knowingness, joy, and the certainty of immortality. In India
we call this Sat Chit Ananda, or eternal bliss consciousness. In this state of
being, your body heals itself simply by knowing itself. What does it know?
That the greatest attributes of the divine—omniscience, omnipotence, and
omnipresence—are actually the most basic stuff of life.

TO ACTIVATE THE First Key
IN EVERYDAY LIFE, I PROMISE MYSELF
TO DO THE FOLLOWING:

1. I will make choices to maximize the energy in my body. My body is my
connection to the universe’s infinite supply of energy. If I am feeling lack of
energy in any way, it means that I am resisting the flow of this infinite supply.
I will ask my body what it needs and will follow its advice. The ideal state is
to experience such lightness that I do not feel bounded by my body. It and the
universe are one.

2. Before I act on any emotion, I will consult my heart. My heart is a reliable
guide when I put my trust in it. It helps me experience empathy, compassion,
and love. The heart is the seat of emotional intelligence. Emotional
intelligence allows me to get in touch with my deepest self. It nurtures all
relationships by reminding me to see myself in the other.

3. Lightness of being in my body will be my indicator of happiness. If I feel
heavy or dull in my body, I will pay special attention, because these feelings
are signs that I am suffering from inertia and the force of habit rather than
experiencing the potential in every moment for freshness and new life. The
best way to replenish my body is to give it what it needs most, whether it’s
sleep, rest, life-giving nourishment, the joy of movement, or communion
with Nature.