The Body, Mind, Spirit Connection
What is the first thing you do or feel when something exciting or positive happens in your life? You may jump for joy, feel like you’re riding an unexplainable high, you may even feel more confident and on top of the world.
Let’s shift that the opposite way. What happens when something disappointing or negative happens in your life? You may feel down in the dumps, bummed, and you may just overall feel heavy both emotionally and physically.
In each of those moments, your mind, body, and emotional and spiritual self are aligning and adjusting to work in tandem.
You don’t hear of the person who didn’t get the well-deserved promotion jumping for joy.
Traditionally when you think of mental health, your first thought is healing your emotional scars or dysregulated behaviors, when the reality is that mental health is viewed as an all-encompassing whole-person perspective.
That is because the mind, body, and spirit are intrinsically connected. They are all the parts that make you exactly who you are and when there is dysregulation in one area, the other parts become imbalanced.
As therapists, when we see you, we SEE you as one whole individual.
We do not have the ability to compartmentalize the physical and the spiritual and only place value and focus efforts on the mind only.
We place equal value on the physical aspects as we do the meta-physical aspects. This allows us to guide you to a place of introspective healing, giving you the skills and abilities to recognize when your mind, body, and spirit are misaligned and how you can recenter those aspects to reestablish connection and equilibrium.
How Do I Know If My Body, Mind, and Spirit are Connected or Disconnected?
When your mind is in a healthy place, you are in a better position of keeping stress and worry at bay. We exhibit more:
- Positive thoughts,
- Gratitude
- Feelings of fulfillment and peace
You will find yourself often thirsting for peacefulness, calm, knowledge, learning and exploration.
When your body is in a healthy balance, you will naturally seek:
- Activity
- Movement
- Nourishing foods.
We tend to focus on our body as a well running machine and provide it with those things it needs to stay working properly and in alignment.
When you have a healthy spirit, you will feel:
- Balanced
- Centered
- Your thoughts, actions and deeds come from a place of love, caring, compassion and understanding.
You will have an understanding that you are part of something much larger than yourself and acknowledge that you are part of a sharing community and give without expecting anything in return.
When your body, mind, and spirit are disconnected you may notice that when something is troubling you that you may feel:
- Consumed by worry
- Your body may feel tight
- Headaches
- Faster heart rate than normal
- Increased blood pressure
- Trouble sleeping
- You stop doing things you previously loved to do
- You disengage from friendships
- You no longer go outside and exercise or take time to nourish your spiritual self
How Can I Repair the Connection and Maintain that Alignment?
There are several ways to maintain the mind, body, spirit connection. All of these take a more holistic approach to overall wellness; however, there are direct benefits to each part of who you are.
By tapping into your whole-self to make a grounded connection, you are allowing the mind, body and spirit to experience introspective healing.
There are several good ways to begin this journey to wellness:
- Perform daily self-care
- Focus on healthy eating
- Incorporate regular daily exercise / movement
- Engage in mindfulness meditation and deep breathing techniques
- Gratitude journaling
These activities help keep you centered, grounded and balanced, but it is something that you must integrate into your life as a part of your normal routine. There is no quick fix to healing the connection, and it is something that must be honored each day.
It is also beneficial to learn where you hold your tension.
When you are tight and tense physically, you are more likely to see emotional and mental manifestations that mirror this tension. It is also common to experience mental health symptoms that are somatically manifesting into physical ailments. Practicing muscle relaxation can help to reduce stress and anxiety by encouraging the slow and deliberate release of each muscle. This conscious awareness allows you to experience a full release and to learn where you are holding most of your tension.
Therapist Aid has a free Progressive Muscle Relaxation Script that you can use to guide you through the exercise of muscle relaxation. Over time you will learn to have more body awareness of your tension and the skills from this script to help you relax in the moment.
If you are looking for a deeper dive, you can check out the book The Body Keeps the Score. This book highlights how much our bodies are impacted by trauma and experiences, regardless of age or severity and is very telling when it comes to the mind, body and spirit connection.
Using or being more mindful of one or more of these wellness methods are ways to regularly focus and reflect on positive things, while creating a more stable mood and positive optimism about the future.
Need More Support?
If you find yourself having a difficult time tapping into this connection, or you feel you need to have some deeper conversations to reach this alignment, please let us know. All of our Calming Waters staff uses a variety of techniques to “check-in” with where you are physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Our focus on the whole-self allows us to know the full scope of your being, and guides us to where to start the healing process.
All of our provider bios can be found on our About page and are separated by the location that they practice. You can also use our Contact page to reach out directly to a team member who will help assist your onboarding process and answer any questions you may have.
