How Emotions Affect Our Body

...continued from last week

Shakespeare had rightly said “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” The fact is that even though we are not faced with sabretoothed tigers every day, but, life presents us with lots of situations which can be perceived as threatening that naturally triggers stress response from within us. For e.g : if you climb staircase instead of taking a lift to your 4th floor apartment and immediately after entering home, you experience uncomfortable symptoms like a pounding heart and excessive sweating, you might instantly get this thought that, “Gosh, I’m not as fit as I used to be, maybe I need to see my doctor and get a thorough checkup”.

Now suppose instead of having a negative thought on entering home, if you just sit down calmly and do a simple deep breathing exercise, you may feel completely fine in a few minutes and you would continue with your day as usual without any great change in how you feel. We must thus understand a fact that our mind has tremendous power over our body and it directs everything in our body. According to medical experts, 70% of our diseases can be changed by changing the mind, because they originate from there.

Today most of the us are living in body consciousness – resulting from the false identification of self with body. When a soul identifies with the characteristics of the body, we limit ousrselves as being a male or female, young or old, ugly or pretty, black or white and so on. Such limited identities then influence our thoughts and actions. Body consciousness is the greatest challenge for the soul because it creates discriminatory attitudes and egodriven complexes in our minds.

Thus, those who are ignorant of the soul are severely bound by their body and they think, act and live their whole life in a narrow limited way that makes everything in their lives limited. Hence, in order to live a liberated life, we need to realise the truth that we all are spiritual beings in a human body and birth after birth we continue to play different roles. Thus, by being souI conscious, we can transcend our fears, attachments and vices and we can also conquer the fear of death and any kind of physical loss, thereby experiencing our original qualities such as peace,joy and love in an unlimited way.