*** Body Listening

Truly hearing someone when they’re speaking to you can be far more challenging than you might imagine and there’s lots of training out there to help you become a better listener. Most of this training, however, misses out on an important first step to genuine communication. When it comes to listening, it’s important to remember that each person must listen through herself. The body acts as the receiver for auditory information – it is the membrane of experience just as the eardrum is the membrane of hearing. Therefore, if you are the listener and your body and your Chakra system are out of balance, or if you are unhealthy in any way, then your capacity to truly listen to somebody will be distorted in direct proportion to the imbalances in your body. In this article I’ll show you how you can learn to listen to the body to better understand how you and those around you hear the world.

Body listening begins with an understanding of the body, but you can hear more from the body if you understand the Chakra system as well. This is because the Chakra system shows you how to understand the relationship between the body and the mind, and teaches you to see how our psychology manifests in our physical body. Though I don’t have the space here to explain the Chakras in the full detail they deserve, I’ll sum up the essentials so that you can see how they feature in the full story of the body (you can read Liz Simpson’s Chakra Healing if you want to go beyond what I’ve discussed here). There are seven Primary Chakras, each of which is coupled to a gland, a nerve plexus and a specific set of psychological traits. Furthermore, each Chakra, except for the seventh, has a front and a back. The front of the Chakra acts as an antenna, channeling energy and information into the body. The back of the Chakra releases energy and tells us what we are doing with the energy or information that we receive.

The following is a brief summary of the Chakra system:

First (Root) Chakra – is associated with issues of safety/security/wanting to belong. Psychological security and safety is the primary area of development from birth to age seven.

Second Chakra – is associated with sexuality, flow and rhythm. The onset of puberty occurs in the age range between seven and fourteen so it is no surprise that this issue is the next focus of development.

Third Chakra – is associated with personal power and will. This Chakra really begins to develop when you are beginning to direct your life toward a career.

Fourth Chakra – is focused on giving and receiving love. Especially in modern times, it is generally during the ages of twenty-one to twenty-eight that we form our long term, love relationships. Hence this is when we learn to really give and receive love from others.

Fifth Chakra – corresponds to communication. This means learning to speak with and listen to others.

Sixth Chakra – is associated with insight and in many ways it is the source of your creative energies.

Seventh Chakra – is associated with Spiritual Connection. It is through the seventh Chakra that we enter into the realm of the higher self.

If you understand the Chakras and how they can influence a person, then you will also be able to perceive a good deal about the well-being of people you meet and the source of many of the ailments that they’re suffering from. Some illnesses may result from an inability to receive certain energies and information, while others may be from an inability to use the energy that they have received from their Chakra. The crucial point here though is that there is an important connection between psychological issues and the body. Mental and emotional harm have physical manifestations and the Chakra system provides a guide to tracking those harms.

For examples, an imbalance in the second Chakra (rhythm) could cause the person to be either very aggressive or very passive, depending upon whether their imbalance is an excess or lack of energy. In the case of a person with an excess of energy at their third Chakra (personal power and self-will) you may find that the person is aggressive, pushy, controlling and disrespectful. A person who lacks energy at the third Chakra will let others walk all over them. These are also quite frequently people that cannot communicate effectively (the fifth Chakra). This is because the third and fifth Chakra are energetically linked. So someone who has a suppressed self-will will also have a reduced ability to communicate. And again, because the Chakras are connected to particular organs, the lack of energy at those Chakras will have particular effects at those organs. Thus low energy at the third Chakra can affect the digestive system as well as the muscular system.

By looking at a person’s body, you may be able to make important observations about why that person is feeling the way they are and expressing the opinions that they are expressing. Remember that the body is the mind and the body cannot lie. So when you see someone who is clearly out of balance at the level of their body-mind, have empathy and try to understand through reading their body where their perceptions may be distorted or why they may take the positions they do. The more out of balance the body is, the more stressful it is to exist in that body. An unhealthy person is more likely to communicate through their stress and as their stress, and therefore they are more likely to be reactive and less responsive or rational.

A person that is tired, stressed or unhealthy in general is most focused in the first three Chakras. They are just trying to survive. This means they are primarily concerned with answering the questions:

• Am I safe?
• Do I have enough money to pay my bills?
• Can I sustain my family and myself?
• Am I able to feed my family and myself?

The person in this situation is in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight. Everything they hear will be filtered through this state and they are going to have a hard time communicating.

The moral of the story is that before you can truly hear what any person is saying, before you can be present with that person, you must understand them. Listening first to their body is the best way to begin to connect to the speaker and to understand who they are and where they are emotionally, psychologically and physically. This will enable you to see the filters that your words will pass through on their way to the listener and to understand why others choose the words they do when they’re talking to you.