Psyche and Soma: Healing and the Body

For those who wish to use it, the body is a highly sensitive instrument to the movements of the psyche. Migraines tend to visit during emotional distress, the stomach churns when we are about to act against conscience, we crave crunchy carbohydrates when we are overwhelmed. Diagnostic criteria for major mental illness often mention physical symptoms: depression is accompanied by a flat affect (expressionless face, monotone voice) and lowered sensorimotor response, and mania is often heralded by racing thoughts, words, and body. Much research has been done on the effects of meditation on mood. The vehicle for the change in mental state is the body. Meditation causes a physiological response: the heart rate slows, the blood pressure drops, and oxygen is more effectively circulated through the blood. After these changes take place is when research subjects and meditators report an elevation of mood and/or an increase in well-being.

The body also serves as a cultural instrument, creating meaning for those who interpret its shape and size to say something about the inhabitant. It is a yardstick by which to measure social acceptability, status, desirability, and worth. Individuals who are most susceptible to utilizing cultural standards in order to determine their own self-worth (such as adolescent females) are most susceptible to body image issues, eating disorders, and unhealthy relationships with their bodies, food, and sexuality. On the other side of the coin, there is a tendency to relate the human body to “the external world”, lumping it into one big category that includes all surfaces and all that is superficial, consumerism, ego, illusion, and that which is impermanent. This attitude taken to the extreme is as dangerous as unnaturally worshiping physical beauty. It is a denial of the body. Under this mindset the body is neglected, unadorned, and falls into disrepair, the potentiality for beauty and grace squandered by an awkward allegiance to something supposedly deeper.

While psyche is ancient Greek for butterfly/soul/mind, the word soma refers to the body. Psychosomatic illness is traditionally defined as physical illness caused by mental and emotional disturbance. However, all illness contains both psyche and soma, and is all in a sense psychosomatic. If you expand the idea of “mind” beyond the brain and the head, and into the intelligence of the various systems and parts of the body, psyche and soma have an interplay that is not necessarily cause and effect (mental disturbance creates physical illness) but that is systemic (disturbances in the bodymind manifest as mental disorder with some physical symptoms or physical disorder with secondary mental distress).

No matter how you conceive of the hierarchy of body and mind, or which you may decide is the chicken or the egg, it is interesting to observe the changes in yourself when you become more aware of your body. Tuning into the body can make repressed emotion more apparent, uncover chronic tension responses to events, and lead to more empowering choices. Moving the body or breathing deeply for ten minutes can lift a mood more effectively than an hour of talking.

There are many opinions on the nature of the body mind connection, and not all of us agree. What most of us can agree on is that there is a connection. When we explore that connection, the results are often favorable, and sometimes miraculous. Being in touch with the body puts us in touch with the non-rational and non-linear parts of ourselves, as the body can communicate and accompany emotions in sudden sensation or involuntary movement. Sensitivity to the systemic rhythms of the body can put us more deeply in touch with a slow, intuitive, natural rhythm just below the surface of our bustling lives. Sometimes that alone is enough to provoke profound life shifts. The breath, the heartbeat, the pulse, the sensations of muscles moving can put us in touch with a deeper way of relating to our selves. Being in that centered space that is the experience of the deep self can be a powerful source of illumination that can guide choice.