Body Intelligence
Today, Let's Look at Body Intelligence:
Body intelligence may be considered an evolved intelligence that developed with the ways humans have used their bodies over the centuries.
It is the awareness of how we use our bodies but it is also the body’s own inate awareness of how the body uses itself. We can see body intelligence in two different ways. One is the way we are aware of our body’s signals and know how to adapt and re-balance to homeostasis on a conscious, cognitive level. The other is that sub-conscious intelligence which the body ‘knows’ and uses to maintain balance seemingly automatically. They sound like two separate ways of thinking of intelligence and yet they are actually very much interconnected levels of consciousness.
The past warrior trained the body daily preparing for war or preparing to defend their kingdom. Despite all of our wonderful health programmes and gym training routines, the “conventional” workouts we do these days would be no match to the kind of arduous training that the ancient soldier would have made. Physical limits were not in the equation of how one trained. Even when the body was put under extreme conditions and injuries due to overexertion, the ancient warrior would ignore their limits possibly because of their loyalty to the king and possibly because they felt there was no other way than to fight on. With the fighting skills, the ancient warrior was agile, flexible, spatially aware, had quick reflexes and amazing coordination and strength as a consequence of their training.
In modern times of peace, the use of the human body as a weapon is becoming less and less important in modern military strategies, being replaced by machines and computer technologies and relatively few people in the world have to train to fight to kill.
Therefore, the evolutionary need to train body intelligence is now for other reasons than being a killer or defender of land. These days we need to develop body intelligence for being alert and maintaining a good state of mind, body and mind being essentially connected.
We need in some way to be our own medical expert as we diagnose ourselves with how our lifestyles are affecting our physical health. How many times do we have conversations over lunch with colleagues about what we should and should not eat and how certain products on the market may be affecting our health? Our training “in honour of a king” is almost unheard of these days. Imagine that we would swear our oath to WIllem Alexander, King of the Netherlands every time we did a workout. It makes sense for a military troop to swear their oath and loyalty. It doesn’t make any sense for an individual member of a multi-cultural secular population in an individualistic society to do so.
The loyalty imposed on you today is imposed by yourself to yourself.
You promise yourself you will get up in the morning and go for that run. You do it because you owe it to yourself and to your health not because you are part of some military might which you have to be fit to defend and after the job is done, the satisfaction of having done so is with thanks to you and no leading authority above you. This leads to certain questions about how, then, does spiritual intelligence fit in this picture if all the intelligence levels are connected. We’ll address that a bit later.
The body gives off many signals about stresses, behaviors or pathologies that we might be adopting in our lives.
Therefore, our training of Body Intelligence in modern times has to be directed to awareness of those signals. To understand what we are holding when we keep the shoulders up, and what we have to let go of we have to go beyond just a physical fitness routine.
Physical fitness might give us a pristine body and help us with relieving temporary stresses, but if we don’t practice to develop body intelligence, our muscular body might just be covering up some important emotional issues that have been stored physically.
As a summary:
To train body intelligence as an ancient warrior: Practice fighting, hunting, develop wild instinct.
To train body intelligence as a modern warrior: Practice body response and awareness/mindfulness of signals arising from the body. Deepend connection of breath to the body's movement. Exercise propreception (awareness of body part positions in space and awareness of how the weight is distributed when balancing).
It would make sense that the advanced elite soldiers would have had some clue about the latter training approach in addition to their physical fighting skills which logically would have led to an advantage and made them more successful in their missions.
Body intelligence may be considered an evolved intelligence that developed with the ways humans have used their bodies over the centuries.
It is the awareness of how we use our bodies but it is also the body’s own inate awareness of how the body uses itself. We can see body intelligence in two different ways. One is the way we are aware of our body’s signals and know how to adapt and re-balance to homeostasis on a conscious, cognitive level. The other is that sub-conscious intelligence which the body ‘knows’ and uses to maintain balance seemingly automatically. They sound like two separate ways of thinking of intelligence and yet they are actually very much interconnected levels of consciousness.
The past warrior trained the body daily preparing for war or preparing to defend their kingdom. Despite all of our wonderful health programmes and gym training routines, the “conventional” workouts we do these days would be no match to the kind of arduous training that the ancient soldier would have made. Physical limits were not in the equation of how one trained. Even when the body was put under extreme conditions and injuries due to overexertion, the ancient warrior would ignore their limits possibly because of their loyalty to the king and possibly because they felt there was no other way than to fight on. With the fighting skills, the ancient warrior was agile, flexible, spatially aware, had quick reflexes and amazing coordination and strength as a consequence of their training.
In modern times of peace, the use of the human body as a weapon is becoming less and less important in modern military strategies, being replaced by machines and computer technologies and relatively few people in the world have to train to fight to kill.
Therefore, the evolutionary need to train body intelligence is now for other reasons than being a killer or defender of land. These days we need to develop body intelligence for being alert and maintaining a good state of mind, body and mind being essentially connected.
We need in some way to be our own medical expert as we diagnose ourselves with how our lifestyles are affecting our physical health. How many times do we have conversations over lunch with colleagues about what we should and should not eat and how certain products on the market may be affecting our health? Our training “in honour of a king” is almost unheard of these days. Imagine that we would swear our oath to WIllem Alexander, King of the Netherlands every time we did a workout. It makes sense for a military troop to swear their oath and loyalty. It doesn’t make any sense for an individual member of a multi-cultural secular population in an individualistic society to do so.
The loyalty imposed on you today is imposed by yourself to yourself.
You promise yourself you will get up in the morning and go for that run. You do it because you owe it to yourself and to your health not because you are part of some military might which you have to be fit to defend and after the job is done, the satisfaction of having done so is with thanks to you and no leading authority above you. This leads to certain questions about how, then, does spiritual intelligence fit in this picture if all the intelligence levels are connected. We’ll address that a bit later.
The body gives off many signals about stresses, behaviors or pathologies that we might be adopting in our lives.
Therefore, our training of Body Intelligence in modern times has to be directed to awareness of those signals. To understand what we are holding when we keep the shoulders up, and what we have to let go of we have to go beyond just a physical fitness routine.
Physical fitness might give us a pristine body and help us with relieving temporary stresses, but if we don’t practice to develop body intelligence, our muscular body might just be covering up some important emotional issues that have been stored physically.
As a summary:
To train body intelligence as an ancient warrior: Practice fighting, hunting, develop wild instinct.
To train body intelligence as a modern warrior: Practice body response and awareness/mindfulness of signals arising from the body. Deepend connection of breath to the body's movement. Exercise propreception (awareness of body part positions in space and awareness of how the weight is distributed when balancing).
It would make sense that the advanced elite soldiers would have had some clue about the latter training approach in addition to their physical fighting skills which logically would have led to an advantage and made them more successful in their missions.
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