I am currently reading The Headache Healer’s Handbook by Jan Mundo. Mundo has spent decades researching headaches. She’s been applying that knowledge to help herself and many others reduce or eliminate that pain. Her book is a comprehensive self-help guide.
One of the things she discusses is the connection of thoughts to physiology. She writes, “[E]very thought has a bodily response. I repeat: there is no thinking without your body responding.”
When I read those words I was thrilled and inspired and dumbfounded. Of course, I’ve read this in one way or another many times. This time though, it settled with me in a completely different way. I had a full-body experience of YES! In the context of her book, she is asking what thoughts are you thinking habitually and how is your body responding. Because some of those thoughts are contributing to tension in your body that is causing your headaches.
Moshe Feldenkrais wrote extensively about the inseparability of body from thought. He wrote of the physical expressing the mental—that there is nothing we do that does not invite the entire nervous system to participate. Understanding this and observing it is a practice one cultivates.
I meet weekly with a friend and colleague to trade practices. Her training in Body-Mind Centering is a boon to my self-knowledge and understanding of anatomy and physiology. When I mentioned the energy that thinking expends she told me about being in workshop and hearing her teacher say, “Thinking is a motor response.” She was blown away. Thinking was always some kind of sensate experience to her and now it made total sense that it was actually a kind of movement response.
What does it mean that “thinking is motoring”? We have parts of our nervous system that receive sensation and parts that activate movement—minuscule to grand. Sensation provides information to which a motor response is made. And thinking is part of the motor response.
Studies have shown that just thinking about a movement preps the neural pathway to and activates the muscles involved with that movement.
In a free-writing about this concept, I began to wonder about the goal of mindlessness that is at the root of some meditation practices as well as the goal of taming the “monkey mind.” I was wondering if, at a level we have forgotten or that has gotten lost in the explanations of these practices, we are making a step towards not-thinking as a way to provide rest for our systems at a very deep level. When we are meditating in this way, are we attempting to relieve the body of the persistent demands made by thought at the neural/cellular level?
Mundo approaches it from a different perspective. She offers a practice where you explore one set of phrases (thoughts) that makes things seem hopeless and then another set that offers possibility. She asks you to move as you speak these phrases. The shift in body language and movement choices is revelatory.
Please check out her book. I think it is useful for many kinds of chronic conditions because of the guidance around habit and self-awareness.
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I offer in-person and remote sessions that help you develop your ability to observe your mind/body connections.
“I highly recommend spending a portion of each week with Eve. It is a clarifying experience that seeps into and transforms your day-to-day life.”—GHS
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