The Body (Part 6)

Intuition and the body

It is estimated that only 5% of our brain capacity is within conscious awareness. This means that we have another 95% of brain/consciousness capacity we can tap.

Applied Kinesiology (AK) provides methods for using the body to facilitate access to the unconscious mind . When you are emotionally upset, as in depression, anxiety or anger, your body becomes weaker. If you think about something that is distressing, your muscles will reflect this.

AK exercises:
Do these only if your hand and arm are normal and free of any injury or other problem.

1. Hold your arm out sideways from your body. Ask someone with whom you feel close and safe to press gently but firmly downward on your wrist in order to test your muscle strength. The object here is not for him to break your position, but to see how strong your muscles are. This is your baseline, your starting point in checking the strength of your arm muscles.

Next, have him ask you, twice in succession, “What is the last digit of your phone number?” In response to either the first or the second time he questions you, tell the truth, and in response to the other time he asks you, you will say a false number. (By not revealing which time you are telling the truth and which time you are lying, he can’t press harder in line with any expectations.) After responding to each question in turn, your partner will press down again on your wrist, using the same degree of pressure as on the baseline testing. Note any changes in your muscle strength on each occasion.

Most people will find that when they give a false answer their muscle strength is weaker.

2. Now, think of something that makes you sad. When you can feel the sadness of it, ask your partner to press down again on your outstretched arm. Note any changes in your strength.
Next, repeat this process, taking turns thinking of something that makes you happy and then of something that makes you angry. Note any changes in your strength with each feeling.
Most people will find that their muscles are weakened as they focus on sad or angry

Discussion:

Exercise (1) demonstrates that your body can be used to answer “Yes” or “No” questions, providing access to the 95% of your brain capacity that is outside of your conscious awareness.
Despise no new accidents in your body, but ask opinion of it.
Francis Bacon

Exercise (2) shows that your emotional state can influence your muscle strength. This provides a tool for accessing the degree of upset when focusing on an emotional issue. It also points to the possibility that emotions might interfere in muscle testing for “yes” and “no” answers.

AK for non-local explorations
Because the mind can reach out through non-local consciousness to anywhere and anywhen in space and time , it is possible to use your body responses to access intuitive and psychic information. Theoretically, there is no limit to the information available to you. For example, you may ask whether a particular food item is good for you, whether it is for your highest good to consult a particular therapist, or whether a specific invitation (social, work, spam mail) is likely to be of benefit to you. Therapists, with the consent of their clients, may use kinesiology similarly on themselves to ask questions about how to proceed with the therapy. I call this transpersonal kinesiology.

The difficulty in any use of intuition is that intuitive information appears to enter consciousness via the deeper parts of the brain or mind, much like dreams do. As intuitive awarenesses surface to consciousness, they may become distorted by various images and mental associations. You may, for instance, intuit an image of the President having a heart attack. You check the news media and find that no such thing happened. A few days later, however, you hear that your high school gym teacher, who was an important person in your life, was hospitalized with a heart attack. It would appear that the Unconscious mind has used the image of the President as a vehicle to bring to your Conscious mind something the Unconsciou has picked up that is important to you.

Skeptics will say any such experience is pure coincidence and that AK and alleged psychic phenomena are no more than chance events that happen to occur at or about the same time.

Exercise (2) shows us that factors other than our thinking mind may influence these muscle responses. If we have particular feelings about the questions asked, or if we have psychological associations to the questions that evoke feelings, our muscle responses may reflect these feelings rather than the answers to the questions being asked. Many other factors could influence these muscle responses. You must therefore be cautious in accepting the answers your body gives you. There will always be leeway for several possible interpretations to your responses, and a significant margin of error. While this may be discouraging to those who want a system that is completely reliable, this is the way your intuition speaks through your body and we must accept it and work with it the best we can if we are to access our intuition this way.
If you seek transpersonal information from outside your own experience and fund of knowledge, where does this come from? Extrasensory perceptions (ESP) can bring us information from the minds of anyone, anywhere. Time is not a barrier, so information from the past and future is also available. We can thus access the collective conscious of all of mankind. Whom we access, however, may make a big difference in the answers we get to our questions. You probably wouldn’t accept advice from just anyone on the street, nor should you seek or accept uncritically advice which comes transpersonally from unselected sources.

So how do you assure that you get good advice when you use kinesiology? My recommendation is that you should put out your questions with the request that they should be answered from the highest possible source, for the highest possible good of all. Sometimes this may mean that your own needs are bent to the needs of the collective. This may be one explanation for apparently negative responses (relative to our personal expectations) to our questions, healing wishes and prayers. What may appear to be negative or erroneous responses to questions from your present personal perspective may turn out to be a positive response for you in the light of future developments or in the context of a greater whole – within which your question may have implications that you cannot foresee or understand.

Research in kinesiology has produced very mixed results. While some studies have shown significant effects, others have not. Many researchers have despaired that this is an unreliable test. My own impression is that its reliability is dependent on the mental and emotional clarity and steadiness of the people doing the testing.

Biofeedback gives us conscious influence over body processes that are usually under automated control of the autonomic nervous system . You can train your mind to alter functions of parts of your body such as the iris of your eye, your blood pressure, the dilation of blood vessels (and consequently the temperature) in your hands and feet, spasms of arteries that cause migraines, and your brainwave frequencies. Such control can contribute to treatment of anxiety, hypertension, headaches, painful constrictions of blood vessels in the extremities, hyperactivity, and more.

Spiritual dimensions of healing the body

In spiritual healing, it is assumed that the spirit is the primary essence of being. The body is a garment worn by the soul in its explorations of physical existence and in relationships with others who are engaged in similar explorations. Lessons that are not fully learned in one lifetime in one body garment may be re-worked and re-learned in other lifetimes.

From some spiritual perspectives, illness may not be viewed as a negative experience. It may be a message from your spirit or soul to bring your attention to particular aspects of your life. Physical problems may be viewed as alarm bells that are sounded by the body to alert the conscious mind that there is a disharmony in your spiritual being. Bodily ills are, in this perspective, encouragements to move beyond your focus on physical existence and to seek deeper meanings in your life.

This is not to say that all illness is in every case a spiritual message. You may be the chance victim of food poisoning, viral infections and accidents. Conversely, not all apparently chance misfortunes of health are pure coincidences. Some seem to come from a deeper wisdom than we can fathom, guiding us to spiritual lessons through adversity.

There are many ways in which spiritual awareness may surface to consciousness.

“Why me?” is a question often asked by a person with serious or chronic illness. While this question may initially come from a place of hurt and anger, with a feeling of injustice, it may lead to deeper questioning and spiritual questing for answers.

Prayers are often offered by people who are ill and by those who care for them. Coming from a place of true need, they both carry a strong impetus to connect to spiritual dimensions and a strong energetic to promote healing. Careseeker prayers bring you into spiritual awareness directly, and caregiver prayers may do so secondarily – through fulfilling your soul mission on earth and through the mystical consciousness that accompanies healing.

As death approaches, and we can see that we will have to give up this body-garment that we have worn for a lifetime, we ask more spiritual questions, and often seek avenues and offer prayers to prolong life. We sometimes overlook that healing into death is also a healing. This point of transition may be the most important time in your life. Eastern traditions teach that if your mind is clear and fixed on spiritual dimensions as you transition from physical existence to spiritual dimensions, you may be released from the cycles of lessons in physical garb . Here, too, kinesiology may help to guide us through the challenges of this transition.

Bereavement opens into spiritual awareness in several ways. It reminds those of us left behind that our time to cross the great divide will also arrive someday. Messages from our body through kinesiology can also help us find inner guidance to work through our hurts, angers, guilts and return to a normal existence that doesn’t include the departed.

Conclusion

The body is a vehicle for rich lessons in life. When we listen to what it is saying, we can move into deeper connections with the All.

Conversely, when we are connected with our bodies and with higher dimensions of awareness, we can better understand and deal with the physical challenges our bodies face.

*An expanded version of this article appears in Benor, DJ, The Body, International J of Healing and Caring – on line, http://www.ijhc.org September, 2002, 1-18.