Integration of Mind and Body with Spirit

If you have been following my work, you can see my direct examination of the pitfalls of living in mind.
To live in no mind allows one to live in spirit. In this moment, you have the ability to turn off your mind.  Another way to describe no mind is to live in your consciousness. It’s to live in your spirit.
It’s quiet and peaceful. You can feel the texture of the air in the room. You can feel your body responding to every breath.
From this place of no mind, many tools become available to you.
The mind becomes your idea genie. It’s separate from you. You present it with a question and it presents you possible answers and ideas for you to assess. Your mind can also act as a template maker or an organizer. It can repackage what your spirit says into boxes and categories that other minds are accustomed to experiencing. I will warn you that when your mind repackages the message from the spirit , it diminishes the strength and the feeling of what your spirit intended to make.

A natural occurrence of living in no mind is to have the mind off as the baseline state.

The spirit has more power than we ever know.
The body can act as a container for the spirit. In a life traditionally lived, there is little to no awareness of one’s body. People act after being told what to do. They copy the IG fitness guru for workouts. They will do exactly what their personal trainer says without any self-awareness. This is typical and it is seen in many athletes. It’s even seen in those same fitness gurus who repackage the common place. Monkey see, monkey do.

The exceptions in the world, walk a different path.
You can listen to Arnold or Jay Cutler on mind-muscle connection. What they speak of is awareness of their muscle. It’s not training splits or rep schemes. It’s perfecting the muscle contraction and tension, the ability to contract the muscle at will, and the understanding of how much tension is in that muscle at any given time. This is what expert-level bodybuilding is about.
Calling it mind-muscle doesn’t do it justice. My mind and yours can think about a thousand things at once, left to its own devices.
Muscle awareness is more precise, more surgical.

The focus of turning off ones’ mind, through body was once the foundation of yoga before it became commercialized into the focus on asanas, yoga pants, music driven classes, and the overall materialistic aspect of the practice. Originally, the physical positions were a natural manifestation of one’s journey into no-mind.

When you live with spirit, there is a natural inclination to know and to learn your body. You have the option to fill your body with spirit and allow for integration of the two.
I wish to expand on this matter. The integration of body with spirit is a path with many subtleties.
I must admit, this realm is somewhat of a natural advantage for me. From the beginning, I had a natural inclination to understand the body. My personal and professional adventure into this space has uncovered many layers of complexity within the human body. I believe I have unlocked some, but not all of its secrets.
Awareness of the body is only possible when the mind is off. For some, any physical activity turns their mind off.

For the rest, a secret to starting on this journey is awareness of one’s breath. Close your eyes as you take your next breath. You have the option to feel your diaphragm contracting slowly and your lungs expanding . With this awareness, your mind can turn off.

You can’t feel the texture of your breath and think thoughts at the same time.
Go ahead and take another breath, this time with the intention of breathing into your pelvic floor.
If you have this awareness, your next pelvic floor breath will pull your diaphragm down, without significant outward expansion of your chest wall.
After a few of these breaths, a full body breath becomes available to you. This is initiated by the pelvic floor. It’s a slow breath in with exploration of a point of maximal inspiration. The moment when you’re at the peak of your breath, what is that sensation like?

I feel a weightlessness, quietness, an innate peace.

The body can give you an insight of what no mind feels like. A place that is always available if you choose.
Within this moment of no mind, you have the possibility to bring your awareness to each joint and each muscle. You can start with your awareness at the feet and move the big toe of one of your feet.
You can see how it feels when you flex that toe and then extend that toe.
You then have the opportunity to wiggle one of your little toes, one by one. Wiggle and move them in whatever direction feels right. The option to feel the tension in the small muscles of your toe is available to you.
Now you can bring your awareness to the other foot. You have the opportunity to explore the same exploration with the toes in the other foot.
You then have the ability to flex and extend your forefoot with all of your toes, down and up. Then you can add your midfoot along with your forefoot and flex and extend. You can do this very slowly and intentionally.
If you wish, you can feel the energy swirling in your feet. Note the character of this energy.
From here, you can engage the entire ankle, flexion, extension, supination, pronation. You can explore  this on both feet. Subsequently you may engage the calf muscles. Flex each of them slowly and then release them.
You can bring your awareness to each part of the muscle and experiment with flexing it with a certain strength. Subsequently, you can bring your awareness into your hamstrings.
One by one, reposition your body so that you can flex your hamstrings. Then turn and reposition your body so that you can explore flexion and extension of your quadriceps.
What does it like when you flex each of your quadricep muscle? How does it feel when the tension builds within them?
Next, you can bring your awareness to your abdominal muscle. There are sheets of muscle that lay atop of each other. Slowly contract and release whichever muscle you have awareness of.
You can do this with all the muscles in your shoulder, arms, forearms, hands, neck, and face. When all the muscles are contracted and released, tension is released from the body.
This practice has been described in ancient literature. Even in modern adaptations of those concepts, such as in the Dune series, the Bene Gesserit practice contraction of each individual muscle separately.
When this is done with intentionality and awareness, one can unlock and access total body control.
Each muscle can act with just the right amount of effort in balance with the rest.
This is a foundation.

Awareness of body is a home for the spirit. It allows one to spread into their physical home.
Just as one can become aware of each muscle in their body, they can also become aware of how their spirit ebbs and flows through the body. When one begins to understand how the spirit lives and flows through the body, they have a chance to identify the barriers and the blocks that live within the body.
These, many times, are physical manifestations of prior trauma. Events that our body hangs onto that serve no purpose in the present. When these are released, an opportunity becomes available.
An opportunity to channel the energy and tension throughout our body.
One can learn the ability to derive tension from the ground and transfer it throughout their entire body and use it in their favor.

The body can become a conduit for the universe. When it is free, when every muscle is unlocked, when the entire skeleton is free of trauma, when the mind is off and the spirit is in full force, a connection with the universe, the home for where the spirit came from, becomes possible.
When this happens, the body acts on its own accord. No strategy, no method, no hacks are needed.
The body will do what it’s supposed to do in the way that it’s supposed to do it, and it will follow its own natural intelligence.

Some truths about body that experts will laugh at.

Rest days are a scam. There are moments of periodization or adapting to the changes of tension in our body, but our body does not need an entire day of inactivity to recover. The muscles clear lactic acid in less than six hours.
Awareness of the moment and the muscle tension is more favorable than technique. Your femur and humeral length is far different than Arnold’s. Your squat will be different. It will be just as effective if awareness is brought into every rep, into every second of the movement.
The body needs far less food than we have been led to believe. A significant portion of eating is for pleasure or social interaction.
The amount the body needs, even for an individual who’s training at the highest level, is less than they expect.
The literature strongly suggests that CNS fatigue is short-lived. Your fatigue post-exercise is local muscle response, which your mind is generalizing to the rest of your body. Local muscle fatigue is best addressed with local stretching, soft tissue, range of motion techniques, and heat.
The body is a decaying corpse. Excessive energy to preserve its shape with silicones or toxins only works locally. As a whole, this home is aging. External renovations will only go so far. The body is, in this way, a depreciating asset. Should you discard and disregard it? Absolutely not. But excessive adornment of it will not lead to lasting results.
The body has a natural reserve that keeps it in homeostasis. In order to grow it beyond its natural reserve, it must be challenged far outside its comfort zone.
When the body is pushed in exercise, physical adaptations begin after the lactic acid threshold is met. Once you’re fatigued and tired, then your body starts responding to training stimuli.
Prior to that, your body has a reserve of ATP and nutrients such as creatinine and creatine, which cycle and provide energy. Once these are sufficiently depleted and you continue to work out, you then begin to experience the adaptations that lead to changes in the body.