CHENNAI: It’s common for us to experience emotions directly through the body. For instance, when we go out to meet someone whom we love a lot, we walk lightly with our hearts pounding with excitement. Whereas, before an important job interview, anxiety might tighten our muscles and make our hands sweat and tremble. Numerous studies carried out over the last decade or so have established that emotion systems prepare us to meet challenges encountered in the environment by adjusting the activation of the cardiovascular, skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, and autonomic nervous system.
Although emotions are associated with a broad range of physiological changes, it is still debated whether the bodily changes associated with different emotions are specific enough to serve as the basis for discrete emotional feelings such as anger, fear or happiness. Before jumping to any conclusion, we need to understand that the mind and the body are closely linked and affect each other. To put it in simple words, it means that our thoughts and feelings can affect our body directly and they can very well have an effect on what we think, what we feel and what we do. So how does this whole mechanism work? According to neuro medicine experts, the brain and the body are constantly sending messages to each other and these messages tell the brain and body to make changes and adjustments to the way they are working.
The fact is that even though we are not faced with sabre-toothed tigers every day, life presents us with lots of situations that can be perceived as threatening, which naturally triggers a stress response from within us. For instance, you climb the staircase instead of taking a lift to your fourth-floor apartment. After entering your home, you may experience uncomfortable symptoms — a pounding heart and excessive sweating. You might instantly think, “I’m not as fit as I used to be, maybe I need to see my doctor and get a thorough checkup”.
Now, instead of having a negative thought as soon as you enter your home, if you just sit down calmly and do a simple deep breathing exercise, you may feel completely fine in a few minutes and you can continue with your day as usual without any great change in how you feel. This example shows that the same experience if interpreted differently, can result in very different feelings and emotions. We must understand the fact that our mind has tremendous power over our body and it directs everything in our body.
Today, most of us are living in body consciousness, resulting from the false identification of self with the body. When a soul identifies with the characteristics of the body, we limit ourselves as being male or female, young or old, ugly or pretty, black or white and so on. Such limited identities then influence our thoughts and actions. Body consciousness is the greatest challenge for the soul because it creates discriminatory attitudes and ego-driven complexes in our minds. Thus, those who are ignorant of the soul are severely bound by their body and they think, act and live their whole life in a narrow limited way that makes everything in their lives limited.
Hence, to live a liberated life, we need to realise the truth that we all are spiritual beings in a human body and birth after birth we continue to play different roles. Thus, by being soul-conscious, we can transcend our fears and attachments, and we can also conquer the fear of death and any kind of physical loss, thereby experiencing our original qualities such as peace, joy and love in an unlimited way.