"I'M IN SUCH A FOG TODAY" ... "if I only had a brain" ... "brain fart" ... these are some of the ways we've described our state of affairs when we feel our mental bodies to be dysfunctional. How does one heal a mind? First off, who really knows what the mind is? Is the mental body our thoughts? A crucible for making decisions? A psychic radio, tuning in strong, clear signals and homing in on weak ones? Our own private study? How private is this study, anyhow?

I would say the mental body is a halfway house, the balance point, between our spirits and our emotional and physical bodies. It receives input coming up from "below" (physical/emotional) and "above" (spirit) and synthesizes that input, hopefully into something cohesive.

Thinking in western culture is often a proactive activity, and I'm not so sure that is the right role for our mental body. A healed mind might look more like Mr. Spock, offering information and its considered opinion when asked, but otherwise staying behind the scenes, leaving the final decision and spring into action to Captain Kirk (playing the role of the physical body, which in my ideal model is the part of us who "leads"). Spock never took over, he never initiated the action; he waited to be asked, and had usually considered all the angles, because he had all the information at his disposal.

Spock's downfall, and our mental body's in its unhealed state, is the mind's disconnect from the rest of the self. Through damage or trauma, our spiritual essence, our "I-ness", the part we identify as "Me", does not descend all the way into our physical and emotional bodies, but merely has a toe dipped in those waters, and lodges some of itself in the mind, leaving its majority floating somewhere just outside the Self. Without spirit fully integrated into the emotional and physical, the "road" leading to our halfway house is in such shoddy repair that in many cases it is undriveable, impassible. There is no flow of information, so mind does not have all the information ... only what has worked or not worked in the past, and thus it is inevitably trapped in the same space that Spock's great mind was trapped: in the seductive vice-grip of The Great God of Logic. A cold, calculating god indeed.

Physical activity such as dancing or hiking helps draw the spiritual and mental bodies into closer contact with the physical and emotional. Intuition and spontaneous visions become unlocked as the mental and spiritual bodies "descend" into corporeal reality. Ever notice how much more alive and clear your thoughts and visions become at various moments while receiving a bodywork session? Integration is happening; the "road" is being repaired, information transfer is restored between emotions, body, and mind.

Stretching, yoga, bodywork (either on one's self or via a practitioner), and somatic exercises help deepen breathing and help the whole system slow down, especially the mind and its whirling thoughts, by helping spirit descend more into Body. When the spiritual body is fully integrated with the physical and emotions are being noticed and felt, mind becomes more fully embodied as well, and enters the "Now Moment". Habitually, our mental bodies like to take off into the past or future. At those times, we are not fully present.

The role of judgments, also known as belief structures and expectations, are like walls that compartmentalize and narrow the mind, and this is the main area in which the mental body needs healing.

Judgment Release
A wise teacher once said to me that words are like spells; they can work their magic for or against us. In this context, only a fool says that talk is cheap. The actual cost of pronouncements and the kind of generalities that pepper everyday conversation can be, in fact, quite astronomical, and to painfully extend the metaphor, we can find ourselves paying "interest" for many years, never touching the principal.

Judgments, spoken or thought, are one of the mental body's coping mechanisms for dealing with overwhelming realities. They give us the illusion of control by making rules or stating the way a situation, person, place, or thing IS. The hidden cost of making judgments is that they become a "thought form" clouding the mind that can magnetize and re-create unpleasant situations that match the judgment's expectations, narrowing the openings for epiphany. We re-condition ourselves negatively every time we reiterate a judgment we have been holding, both in casual conversation and emotional diatribe. Large parts of us would rather be right than happy, and something's bassackwards there.

Culturally, we have lost awareness of how powerful our expectations and judgments are; how they shape the realities and experiences that "come toward us from the future". We have also lost awareness of the intense emotions just under the surface, often powering the judgment's need to be right. Judgments empower denial of emotional realities within us. Even though we lose when a judgment we've been holding proves itself true, there is a "perverse deliciousness" in the satisfaction of saying 'I knew this would happen!', and the mental body trumps the emotional ... again. This is the main area in the mental body that needs to change if healing is to happen.

Clearing judgments can allow us to see a situation anew in the moment, and in doing so, we can reinvent our reality as it manifests before our eyes. A good way to release mental body judgments is by stating such a release out loud - the antidote to the "black magic spell" we put on ourselves in originally making it. With as much emotional presence as you can muster, say something like "I release the judgment that ..." and then name the judgment you've been holding, e.g. "... Rottweilers are dangerous". Then look for the judgments that support the one you just let go. "I release the judgment that dogs are only safe on leashes. I forgive myself for having believed that animals don't like me. I allow the belief to dissolve that the world is frightening. I let go now of the belief that I can never feel safe." Use any wording for the form of your judgment release that feels right to you in the moment.

Pay attention inside, as you sift through a particular nest of judgments during their verbal release, for the emotions underneath that may start to stir and move, and allow as much emotional release as you feel you can in whatever ways you can. Releasing judgments and the hidden emotions powering them can allow you to view a situation with fresh eyes, seeing it and accepting it for what it is now. Cultivate the art of speaking specifically rather than generally, e.g. "I got attacked by a Rottweiler when I was ten, and I have felt afraid of them up to now." Play with releasing as many beliefs as you can find ... do a little ceremony if you like ... and dare to release the judgment that this process couldn't work for you, is bullshit, and that you would rather be right than happy!

Avoiding the Unnecessary Danger of Future Thoughts
"Be here now" ... "staying present" ... "grounding into body" ... new age catch-phrases that can leave us going 'Yeah, sure, ok ... so what are we doing after lunch?' New-ageisms sound too pat nowadays, and we want something more concrete, some applicable awareness that can help us heal our lives.

Try this one on for size - we are safe, invulnerably safe, if we stay put in our current moment, breathing, doing, being .. whatever we are doing and being. There is no danger in the moment! We can't be hurt if we are in our bodies, fully. When we jump ahead of ourselves, when we spin future pictures based on assumptions, judgments, plans, and pictures of various sorts, we are by definition out of the moment and generating fear, or excitement. It's either "going to be so good" or "going to be so bad".

When fear is generated by the passing pictures, it is not often processed. And this is how we set ourselves up for "reversals", experiences that set us back. By generating more fear that is not then processed, we put ourselves in danger, without even realizing it. Unprocessed fear and the judgments that accompany it have a tendency to attract the very experience feared. We can avoid fear generation by staying as present as possible, refusing to go down the ratholes of the pretty or scary visions. And of course, when we do feel afraid, it is vital to feel and organically express the fear, not technique or rationalize it away.

How to return to the moment when I've left it? Just do it. Just come back, accepting that I left for awhile, and express the fear generated by the dangerous experience of having left the safety of my fully embodied moment. Excitement can be expressed too ... judging fear or excitement wrong or bad to exist or express is not healing and dealing. "I release the judgment that my fear is wrong to be." Verbal, out-loud releasing of judgments is crucial to assisting myself to stay present. Which, by the way, is not the same as blocking out all thoughts - it means having the "loving discipline" to bother noticing what feels like truth to incorporate into the moment, and what feels like a distraction that pulls me out of my body. Practicing being able to tell those two types of thoughts apart can assist in learning to tell the difference.

My fear has been that if I allowed myself to stay completely present, letting the pictures of future possibilities roll by unexplored, that I would constantly get blindsided and unprepared for incoming situations. But, what does "prepared" really mean? Armed to the teeth with expectations of how I am going to handle the situation that has not yet come to pass? That behaviour only locks the future into the past. I can't allow magic, epiphany and serendipity into my new moments if I have already decided how I will respond and act ahead of time. When I do that, I miss the impact of the new experience and my organic response to it.

How will I make informed decisions without considering all the angles in advance? Ask for inner guidance and accept that I have the power to KNOW what to do when the right time comes for acting and responding. Taking full responsibility for my experiences, including my old imprints of victimization and perpetration, means accepting and getting comfortable with my ability to respond. Response-ability generates acceptance, which generates a greater sense of comfort with myself, which generates an increasing ease with staying present in my body, which generates trust and safety instead of more fear and danger.

When the moment for decision comes, the choice will be obvious.

Asses Out of U and Me
"Well, I just assumed you knew" ... "You assumed I wouldn't be up for it?" ... "I went on an assumption that we would never make it on time". Ahhhhhh, yes ... the assumption hole. We magically transform normal homo sapiens into braying donkeys, performing this dark, calcifying wizardry on ourselves and others on a daily basis (with due apologies to our full-time burro amigos).

How often have we uttered or heard word for word recitals of the above? How often does assuming we know what is real for a given moment match what's really happening? (What's really happening? Hindsight will tell you!) So often, after our assumptions have proven faulty, we sheepishly grin to our partners or friends, "y'know I was wrong about that thing" ... or, we polarize and say something that defends the assumption, or the reasons for making the assumption.

Either way there are a few things we did there. First, we felt we had all the information we needed to 'safely' make an assumption. Secondly, we were operating on old information and failed to check back in to see if it was still true. Thirdly, we were running on fear which led to making the assumption, such as fear of confronting the source of our fear, unsafety around the source itself, be it a person or place or thing, fear of admitting that we don't know everything already, or fear of success, which subconsciously sabotages a situation in order to prove judgments such as "Nothing ever works" or "life sucks".

Healing the fear around knowing the truth could be a key to discovering why we make so many assumptions in our daily lives. Releasing this fear and other fears is crucial in order to regularly make decisions that work for us instead of backfiring. In a quiet moment, try touching into a fear of a situation, interaction, or person and see if you can contact root fears that lead to your assumptions about them/it.

See if the fear has an energy in your body. You can release fear through sound that wants to organically emerge directly from the energy you've contacted in your mind or body, or through chattering teeth, shivering etc. Allowing and accepting fear's existence is the key to true release, including allowing it to move through you however it will. Perhaps it will leave you without your emotionally vibrating it, but don't just banish it ... ask it what it needs and give it, including the right to move on. Acknowledging and/or expressing fear can release it, but banishing, or denying fear tends to split the parts feeling the fear off from the rest of the self ... throwing our babies out with bathwater.

I said earlier that calcification, or mental, physical, emotional stuckness, is part of the assumption process. Assumptions spring from stuck energy in our minds and emotions, reflected in the hard places in our physical musculature. Unquestioned assumptions powered by unfelt, unaccepted fear can manifest in the body, emotions and mind as rock-solid, protected places. A friend said to me today that people who are calcified in certain areas of their being will see calcification everywhere they look, e.g. other people being the same as they were five years ago in all that they do, situations never evolving and always having the same result time after time ad infinitum, etc.

Ani DiFranco said, "dig deeper, dig deeper this time" and that is what we assumers all need to do inside ourselves if a more flowing and pleasant set of experiences is to befall us as a matter of course.

© Peter Cloud Panjoyah, 2007

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Cloud Panjoyah is a healing facilitator living in coastal BC. He has been in private practice for fifteen years as both a spiritual counselor specializing in emotional trauma recovery and as a professional bodyworker specializing in Somatics, Swedish, Shiatsu and Thai massage. While in process of completing his first book, to be entitled Healing and Dealing: Essays on Becoming Wholed, he has posted samples of his essays on healing published in various Gulf Island periodicals on his blog at http://earthmatrix.net/healinganddealing.