Health is much more than just the absence of disease. Exercise and healthy eating are typically what come to mind when most people think about physical health. However, your exercise of choice isn’t the only thing to consider when striving for good physical health. We all know people who have clean eating habits and are physically fit, but who carry excessive mental and emotional stress, which can wear on their health. While it may not be immediately recognizable, chronic stress takes a tremendous toll on the physical body. Stress occurs when our spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical needs are not being met. Stress triggers the fight-flight response, which is a survival mechanism that is hard-wired into our DNA. It is how our physiology prepares to respond to potentially life-threatening events. When this response is triggered repeatedly it creates wear and tear on the physical body.
“Priya was a 38-year-old married IT Expert. She was living a happy life until she joined a new company with a better salary and position. Which started to build a pressure on herself. She started thinking that her new boss and colleagues thought her work is poor and slow, this criticism made her unfriendly with them. She had no energy or enthusiasm at home. Instead of playing with her children or talking to her husband, she watched TV for hours, over eated and slept long hours. She gained 12-15 Kg in just three months, which made her feel even worse about herself. Slowly she became overweight and developed lifestyle diseases”. True health comes when we are able to create harmony between each of the four bodies.
The spiritual body is your connection to energy. For some, this may be more closely tied to religion than spirituality. For others, it could have more to do with the atoms in the body or the quantum energy that science refers to. Whichever way you choose to view the source of your energy is perfect. The Spiritual Body is home to our spiritual self and holds the deep wisdom of our purpose. Through visions, dreams, messages and intuitions, the Spiritual Body informs and guides us towards unfolding our emerging self. It moves us towards who we are to become and what we have come here to do. Through accessing the Spiritual Body we come into greater relationship with the vision of our lives and the next steps on our path to achieving that vision.
Our spiritual body contains energy that it transmits to our mental body. When we are in touch with our spirituality, when our spiritual self is balanced, we tend to be calm, not to give in to our fears, we feel the presence of love everywhere and trust in our higher power. We can manifest everything we need in life effortlessly.
The spiritual self is never really hurt or wounded, it is not out of balance, rather it is us that are out of alignment with it, and by being disconnected to our spirituality, we often create mental blocks (that stop the energy flowing from the spirit to the mind).
Our mental self is formed of thoughts as well as beliefs, desires, values, goals, and opinions. It is how we process information, how we learn, and focus.
This mental body is formed of two parts: our ego-based mind and our divine mind. The egoic mind is meant to be a tool that we can use in our favor to create our own beautiful reality (setting intentions, goals, planning...). We are meant to turn it on only when we need it and then back off to live from a place of presence in the divine mind. However, this concept has been lost and we now mostly operate from our ego-based mind, which is always on and has become an incessant chatter, exhausting and loud.
However, when we only operate from our egoic mind, letting our thoughts rule our lives, over planning, over thinking, staying stuck in past memories or in our own opinions, then we are creating mental blocks.
When our mental self is clear and stable, when we are at peace in a state of Being, and in alignment with our divine mind, the mental body can receive the energy from the spiritual body and use it to the fullest, before it creates any form of thought.
Confusion, brain fog, ideas lost quickly, lethargy, lack of purpose, doubt, a lack of work ethic, feelings of low esteem, and low worth.
Ego-centric, excessively driven, sociopathic, and having little or no empathy especially when it comes to work or success. In a less extreme way, it’s doing too much or frequently being on overdrive.
Your emotional body is composed of all your past, present, and future emotional experiences. It is the aspect of us that houses emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt, resentment, jealousy, and shame. Whenever we have an experience, it generates feelings that are associated with past similar experiences, and we develop a label to identify the emotion. Emotions and memories are categorized and stored, and they influence how we respond to experiences in the moment.
As energy flows down from the mental body into the emotional body, it can bump into stored baggage from the past and create some turbulence. Stored baggage can come from past fears, which can project into the future and cause anxiety. Or, it can come from experiencing a lot of anger or resentment toward someone, which can cause anger or resentment later in life. When the same thing happens with a different person, you may even develop a belief that all people are this way.
When there is excess baggage, thoughts from the mental body will generate emotional stress that trickles down and affects the physical body. A person with overwhelming stress will, at some point, experience physical symptoms because of the mind-body connection. Negative emotions can harm the body and happiness is linked to overall physical well-being.
This is why it is imperative to develop emotional intelligence and to adopt practices to have a more positive outlook on life, both mentally and emotionally. When our thoughts are more optimistic, our emotional states will be more positive, and when our emotional states are balanced, we are then free to enter a state of joy and love & our physical bodies will be healthier.
A general lack of emotional intelligence, trust, and very little intuition or ability to read and understand people. There’s also a lot of fear and neuroses, as well as concern for the self and less empathy for the experience of others. This can manifest physically as holding water in the limbs, joints, and face (especially from hormone imbalance), dehydration or bloating, inflexibility, and joint stiffness. Lack of sleep from emotional stress presents similar symptoms. Mentally, it manifests as self-doubt, projection, and thinking others have a better life, which again, causes us to lose sleep and increases the physical symptoms of imbalance. Ultimately, it means that we are not using the mental or physical body, either by talking ourselves down to a point of being rational, or using the lungs and breath to calm the heartbeat.
Oversaturated, passive then quickly aggressive, obsessive, irrational, extremely irritated, depressed, overly anxious, often with feelings of drowning or hopeless conclusion of relationships or situations. This can manifest as weight gain (even while dieting) and too much water in the aura and system, where the body is behaving like a sponge. Alternatively, if someone over-fires their nervous system, one can dry out the emotional body, which also manifests as being under-weight, dehydrated, or desiccated. Hormones are key to our health. The heart might feel heavy. The throat may feel closed, which also adversely affects hormones.
Our physical body is the only tangible body of the four. It represents our physical experience in this lifetime and it is through it that our spirituality, emotions and thoughts flow. Therefore the physical body is a good indicator of how things are going in all areas of our life and at each level of ourselves (spiritual - mental - emotional).
If we listen to our body, it will tell us if something is right or wrong. Our physical body is not only affected either in a positive or in a negative way by what directly goes into it (food, exercise…) but also by our thoughts and our emotions.
A balanced physical body is open, flexible, full of vitality, has all the vitamins and minerals it needs, functions well, is free of pain, is not acidic and is free of toxicity.
The body ages more rapidly, breaks down more easily, and loses elasticity. Organ function is disrupted, there are issues with absorption and elimination, and there’s a feeling of tightness, heaviness, and stress on our skeletal frame.
There’s too much focus on physical strength, beauty, and anti-aging. There’s a tendency to bypass elements of nature (whole food, water, air quality, in time, quiet, physical touch, balanced movement) for the sake of the fast and immediate.
Take your own time and try to develop each body type in yourself. Reactivating all your energies layer by layer, these energies will make you spiritually connected, mentally restorative, emotionally centered, & all these will surely make you physically fit.
It is good to focus on a balanced diet & exercise but also take maximum benefits by focusing on other body types which we were not aware of. Make a hub of happiness, joyfulness, gratitude, connecting with people, forgiveness, health fulfillment in your life.
Always wishing for your long & healthy life.Ayuskama