Balancing our body and mind

We can cultivate the art of balancing our body and mind through the profound principles of the Five Bodies.

Decades ago, my journey into the exploration of the five bodies began, drawing inspiration from the ancient Sanskrit text, Vivek Chudamani. This text, a blend of practicality and profundity, continues to hold immense relevance in my life.

The Five Bodies are as follows:

  1. Physical Body
  2. Energy Body
  3. Mental/Emotional Body
  4. Intellect/Rationalization
  5. Ego

Understanding these five bodies serves as a compass for achieving balance in our lives, fostering heightened awareness. Let's delve deeper into each:

  1. Physical Body: Taking care of our physical body involves maintaining a healthy diet, in Vedic text a plant based diet is recommended, if not entirely, at least in part, and appropriate exercise. While this aspect of our body is more tangible, it interacts intricately with the other, subtler bodies.
  2. Energy Body: Often overlooked, our energy body manifests in feelings of vigor, fatigue, or agitation. Paying attention to these subtle cues is essential, as ignoring them can lead to illness or exhaustion.
  3. Mental/Emotional Body: This body encompasses our personality and mindset. Recognizing and understanding mental patterns is crucial for growth. Unaddressed issues can linger and impact all other bodies in varying degrees.
  4. Intellect/Rationalization: Our ability to reason, discern, and understand resides in the intellect body. Developing this aspect is beneficial, with its pinnacle embedded in compassion and wisdom.
  5. Ego: Often elusive, the ego is foundational to our identity, fostering a sense of separation. While essential for survival, an unchecked ego can lead to a narrow, dualistic perspective, causing a sense of duality and interpersonal issues.

To achieve balance, we must learn to expand our limited self-view, transitioning from egocentric to a more inclusive and larger perspective.

This progression involves embracing our connection with others, evolving from egocentric (not necessarily egotistic, but it mainly concerns self needs) to ethnocentric (perceiving others and their fate, stretching out of ourselves to feel other’s predicament) to world-centric views (universal). This is a complex subject, but for the sake of this article I will keep it as simple as I can.

Balancing Our Physical Body: Achieving balance in our physical body involves heeding messages from the energy body. Meditation and relaxation techniques can aid, but distress in the mental body can impact both energy and physical aspects. Delving into philosophy and reflecting on the power of thought becomes crucial. True humility, described as "egoless," arises from understanding the limitations of the ego and expanding into empathy and universality.

Understanding the ego field reveals a deeper layer – as we can discover latent to it our free spirit or True Self. Recognizing this inner core provides stability, grounding, and lasting freedom amid life's challenges.

In essence, comprehending the five bodies and the spirit beyond them equips us with the tools to stay balanced, aligned, and grounded, fostering a fulfilling life.

- Lynne Cardinal (c)