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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Donald Atler.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today we're gonna talk about how to occupy your body more. Because healing cannot happen without you getting in touch with the information in your body. But how do I do justice to this topic to explain to you with words what is only a lived experience? And I can't. Just like I can't explain to you with words what it's like to eat a mango. I mean I can try. I can tell you it's yellow, spongy, sweet, sometimes sour, and I can give you the glimpses and bits and pieces of information about what it's like to eat a mango. But I cannot tell you what a mango tastes like until you've eaten it yourself. You're not gonna know what the experience of eating a mango is like in your body until you've experienced it yourself. And the same stands with being experiential in your body, the embodiment. I can tell you with some words and information about what the experience is like, but I cannot do it justice. This being a disclaimer, I will try to do exactly what I said I can't do in this podcast, meaning tell you with words how to embody your life more. I will try that with hopes that I can convince you to live in your body more, occupy your body more, because that is a path towards healing. This podcast is my invite for you to start living an embodied life. So what does embodied living mean? It means that you're frequently bringing your focus of attention to the inside of your body, scanning, gathering information, occupying your body, and also sometimes switching it to outer focus whenever you need it. Embodied living means you're able to gather information from your body when it's relevant and important. And trust me, it's relevant and important majority of your waking hours. You're working with that information with or without your awareness, so why not start paying attention to it? Embodied living means that you're enhancing your inner cues, but also bringing your attention to the outer world when you need that information. There's information that your brain is working with that's inner focused, including your hunger cues, these sensations keep you inner focused, TV keeps you outer focused. Anything that brings your attention to the body sensations is inner focused. Thirst, tiredness, love. In your daily life, moment to moment, you keep switching from inner to outer focus. But in order to live more of an embodied life, you start with the basics. You start with the sensations because that's what grounds you in your body. Basil Vender Kalk says in his book The Body Keep Scores, fight, flight, stress, survival response keeps you outer focused. Because during a stress response, inner focused body sensations seem unsafe to feel. So you start with the basic sensations of basic necessities just so you can start occupying your body more and relax your mind into the safety of it. You focus on the necessities of thirst, hunger, going to the bathroom, sensations of feeling tired, so you can rest if that's what you need. You start with questions like does this feel like thirst to me? How does this water going down my throat feel like? Does it feel better when it's cold, warm, room temperature? Start with the basic sensations of your body's needs to start living an embodied life. When you do that long enough, you'll start to see that intangible things like emotions also start to give you information because emotions are also sensations and you are going to start to develop a better understanding of what these sensations are related to and what emotions to label them with, and how these emotions feel like when they are in your body. Not all sensations are emotions, but all emotions carry sensations. Now, this is universally true, but if you're not used to an embodied life and you don't know what sensations of low vibration emotions feel like in your body, emotions like apathy or detachment, then you might tell me that these emotions are not associated with any sensations. And no matter how hard you try, you're gonna be unable to quote unquote feel them in your body. And that's okay. Not all emotions carry sensations that are detectable to your conscious radar, and that is totally okay. That does not mean that emotions do not carry sensations, it just means that you're unable to pick up on them. It's like when you're staring at a very bright floodlight and all of a sudden I ask you to see a candle flickering far away, your perception is not going to be tuned to pick up that visual sensation of a light flickering candle, especially when it's been overloaded by staring at a very bright floodlight. The same thing happens. If you've been living in chronic stress survival, fight and flight response, your body is not attuned to be able to detect low sensation vibration emotions. And all of this is okay. Nothing is pathology yet. Although a lot of times it is labeled as pathology. It just means that you have to be able to provide yourself support in order to start detecting these sensations. There is a term out there called alexithymia where people are unable to detect their emotions, but the process behind alexithymia is exactly what I just described to you most of the time. So a low stimulation of a flickering dim light is going to be hard for you to pick up when your eyes are used to a very bright light. Just like that, a low stimulation of low vibration emotion is going to be hard for you to recognize because you're constantly living in a flood of fear and stress-based emotions. So to start living an embodied life, it does not mean that you criticize yourself for not being able to see the flickering candle, and it does not mean that you guilt yourself for living a stressed life. It just means that this is the design that you're dealing with, and there is a framework to go from one place to another, to go from seeing the bright light to seeing the dim flickering light. And you do it all without shame. So every emotion's cumbed sensations and seeming exceptions for this is where sensations are too dim for you to notice, where you're not able to pick up on them. When you're in chronic survival mode and you are not able to live an embodied life because you're trying to escape the danger that it feels to be in your body. Don't judge your body if you've been used to numbing these sensations or escaping them just in order for you to feel safe. Chronic stress offers very high vibration in your body, strong emotions that feel like a loudspeaker, which you cannot constantly attune to, otherwise you'll go deaf. So your mind has no choice but to tune out these sounds. And it definitely dims out the low volume sounds in the process of all of this. So a lot of this healing work is mind-based work, where we train the mind not to create this loudness in the first place, not to create this floodlights to overstimulate the eye and the mind. But like I said, a lot of work is also body-based, where you attune to the body in an ever-increasing level just so that the ears and the eyes of the mind don't get overwhelmed by the volume, the loudness, and the brightness of the stimulus. Just so you can start to attune to the subtle sounds of the body again. When the sounds coming from the body are constantly too loud, then the ears of the mind go deaf until you can train them to attune to the lower volume sounds. So just for simplicity's sake, as always, I explained these to you as if things are black and white when they're never like that. You experience a combination of the above, you have glimpses of moments of being able to hear the lower volume sounds and experience the low vibration emotions while in other windows in time you can't hear any of them at all. And all of that is normal. What I want to bring your attention to is that embodied living is the most joyful experience. Starting with a bite of food, washing your hands during wudu, hugging a loved one. Embodied living is available to everyone, so you have to start. And this is independent of your zip code, your tax bracket, your body size. It is especially independent of any past you might have lived. Many Muslim women think that just because their past was hard, their experiences have been hard, living an embodied life is going to be out of reach for them, which is luckily not true. Eating and drinking mindfully, as the sunnah of the Prophet peace be upon him describes it, being mindfully present in the prayer, and I use the word mindfully, but what I really mean is being bodyfully present, being present with your attention and with your body, all of this leads to a full embodied living experience. And yes, of course, the mind is involved, you can't experience an embodied life if you're in a coma, so you would have to have an active nervous system, you would have to have active participation, but you direct your mind more and more to pay attention to your body when you're consciously integrating into a life of embodied living. This podcast is an invite for you to up level this skill in the upcoming weeks and months. Inshallah, I pray that you live an embodied life. Because embodied prayers means grounding yourself in the body, then elevating your mind by focusing on Allah. Embodied living means that you have a radar for both good and bad sensations that occupy your body. Attuning to both the positive and the negative emotions and not recoiling at the negative emotions. Because any attempt of your shutdown towards this information that your body is holding that might be in the shape of difficult emotions like grief, sadness, anger. If you turn away from this information, that is usually the first slip up towards living a disembodied life. This is what usually happens first until you start losing touch with both bad and good emotions. Even when you don't have a conscious radar for bad emotions, when you don't have your perceptions attuned to these negative emotions because you're constantly living in avoidance, disengagement, numbness. Again, these are all survival mechanisms, nothing necessarily to judge yourself for. But when you're living and disengaged without having a conscious radar of bad emotions, you still act from them. You still avoid them, you still suppress them, you still engage in activities that will otherwise help you forget them and pretend that you don't have these emotions. These activities that you're trying to suppress these emotions from might otherwise be halal, but create a net negative effect in your life. Meaning maybe dealing with the state of your worldly affairs is too overwhelming for your nervous system. So you doom scroll to avoid the despair that you're feeling. You overeat to avoid creating a successful business so you don't have to feel the fear of failure. You suppress your frustration, but your reactivity comes out sideways on your children, your families, your colleague, because the sensations of these emotions are there regardless if you bring them into your awareness through embodied life or not. Once you've started developing the skill of attuning to your body from pleasant emotions to low vibration pleasant emotions to low vibration negative emotions to eventually expanding your nervous system to be able to include the high vibration negative emotions, then you will have truly learned the skill of embodied living. This is a developed talent. It's not something you're born with. It comes with the spectrum of allowing yourself to experience all of the sensations that your body can carry, especially including all of the good and the bad. All of your negative emotions are just a set of bad sensations. They all come with a message. So there's really no downside to embodied living. You enjoy living in the good emotions and you learn from the bad ones. Either way you're feeling them. Embodiment is the start of this level of healing. Ninety percent of your intelligence is the subconscious mind, and your body houses the subconscious mind, then it only makes sense for you to learn how to listen to it. In my coaching programs I give a lot of emphasis on embodied living. And a lot of women start out with completely disregarding their bodies and then eventually learn to trust it more and more, until they learn to trust their experience fully and completely. You're gonna know what a mango tastes like once you've tasted it yourself. All of this means that you learn to occupy your body. And it almost sounds comical because I mean you're always occupying your body. You're not living in somebody else's body. But the difference here is that you're learning to occupy your body in a meaningful way, something that creates change. Scanning and gathering information like hunger, thirst, tension, tiredness, warmth, heartbeat, tightness, trusting those signals instead of always ignoring or overriding them. Switching between inner and outer focus, knowing when you're attuned inwards to sensations and when to shift outwards to the world around you. Letting sensations anchor in emotions, recognizing that emotions carry some physical component, even if it's subtle or muted in stress. All of this is gonna help you meeting your real needs instead of guessing. You're gonna learn to trust yourself more and more. If you have a need to stretch, if your body is giving you instructions on taking a break, occupying your body helps you respond accurately. All of this is so that you can understand your emotions more clearly, because emotions are what fuel actions, even if you're not aware of them. Tuning into your body to let you recognize what you're actually feeling instead of getting lost in overthinking and overlabeling. All of this is also a gateway to healing from stress and trauma, because that is what drowns your subtle emotions. Learning to notice smaller, quieter sensations, you retrain your nervous system to stop numbing out and start processing safely. This is what leads to making better decisions. Your body give intuitive cues before the mind rationalizes. That leads to you becoming a more natural leader, a more successful person. This enhances your presence in worship and relationships, and all of this prevents reactive patterns which you're then not spending hours and hours later trying to repair from. Healing really begins when you occupy your body. Listen to the sensations that hold your emotions. There is infinite wisdom in your subconscious mind. When you live bodyfully, every signal becomes guidance, and your presence becomes the ground for both joy and worship. With that I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. Ya Allah, allow me to return to my body with peace and gentleness. Help me notice the sensations you've placed in me, and help me trust this design that you've created with your infinite wisdom. Let my body be a place of safety, my emotions be a source of learning, and my presence be a path to your worship and closeness to you. Amin Yarabul Almin. Please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.
