The Resilient Founder

22Prescription 2 – Get Out of Your Head

Like a room we may have occupied for too long, we may be too much in our heads, dwelling, ruminating, and spinning around. To get out of the head and move in the body sounds like a prescription that the shamans, sages, and reiki masters might offer. It's easier said than done, but the body does have a magical way of slowing down that overactive mind.

LESS HEAD, MORE BODY

Philosopher G. K. Chesterton writes, “It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens inside his head. And it is his head that splits. Madness dwells not in irrational minds but in rational ones that overestimate what they can grasp,” he warns.

Our mind has moved to the clouds – not the Amazon cloud but the one with too many ideas, fantasies, and self-absorption – and we seek to bring it down into the gravitational pull of our bodies.

One of the first steps toward “getting out of the head” and into the body ties to our breathing patterns. Notice if your breathing is shallow, irregular, unsteady in any way. “The relationship between our breath and our mind is like that of a mother and child,” writes B. K. S. Iyengar, in his treatise of breath techniques, Light on Pranayama. When the mind is agitated, like a restless baby, deep breathing techniques can often calm it down. A steady breath can bring the mind into a state of relaxation.

A founder described that they would find their own breathing patterns to be very erratic. When tensed, which was most of the day, they would ...