Body Wisdom

I’ve had a recurring sickness over the last ten years. I think it may be because I am going too fast for my body. I guess I go off-center and then the body is affected.

“Your understanding seems to be on the right track. Everybody has to understand his body’s functioning. If you try to do something that is more than the body can tolerate, then sooner or later you will fall ill.
“There is a certain limit you can pull on against the body, but that cannot go on forever. You may be working too hard. It may not look too hard to other people, but that is not the point. Your body cannot tolerate that much; it has to rest. And the total result will be the same. Rather than working for two or three weeks and then resting for two or three weeks, work all the six weeks and reduce the work to half...simple arithmetic.
“This is very dangerous because it can destroy many fragile things in the body — being continuously overworked and then exhausted, depressed, and lying in bed and feeling bad about the whole thing. Reduce your speed, move slowly, and do it in an all-round way. For example, stop walking the way you walk. Walk slowly, breathe slowly, talk slowly. Eat slowly; if you take twenty minutes usually, take forty minutes. Take your bath slowly; if you usually take ten minutes, take twenty minutes. All around, activities should be reduced to half the pace.
“It is not only a question of your professional work. The whole twenty-four hours should be reduced; the speed brought back to the minimum, to half. It has to be a change of your whole life pattern and style. Talk slowly; even read slowly, because the mind tends to do everything in a particular way.
“A person who is too much of a worker will read fast, will talk fast, will eat fast; it is an obsession. Whatsoever he is doing, he will do fast, even when there is no need. Even if he has gone for a morning walk, he will go fast. Going nowhere... it is just a walk, and whether you go two or three miles makes no difference. But a man obsessed with speed is always speedy. This is just his automatic mechanism, automatic mechanical behavior. It becomes almost inbuilt. So stop this.
“From today, reduce everything to half. T’ai Chi will be very good for you. You will enjoy it tremendously. Stand, stand slowly; walk slowly, and that will give you a very deep awareness also, because when you do a certain thing very slowly — for example, moving your hand very slowly — you become very deeply alert about it. Move it fast and you do it mechanically.
“If you want to slow down, you will have to slow down consciously; there is no other way. You have been doing more than your body can keep pace with so the body drops, collapses.
“A few basic things have to be understood. There is no such thing as human nature. There are as many human natures as there are human beings, so there is no criterion.
“Somebody is a fast runner, somebody is a slow walker. They cannot be compared because they are separate; both are totally unique and individual. So don’t be worried about that. This is because of comparison. You see that somebody is doing so much and never goes to bed and you do something and have to go to bed, and so you feel bad and think your capacity is not as much as it should be.
“But who is he and how are you going to compare yourself to him? You are you, he is he. If he is forced to start moving slowly, he may start getting ill. Then it will be against his nature; what you are doing is against your nature. So just listen to your nature. “Always listen to your body. It whispers, it never shouts, because it cannot shout. Only in whispering does it give you messages. If you are alert you will be able to understand it. And the body has a wisdom of its own which is very much deeper than the mind. The mind is just immature. The body has remained without the mind for millennia. The mind is just a late arrival. It does not know much yet. All the basic things the body still keeps in its own control. Only useless things have been given to the mind — to think; to think about philosophy and God and hell and politics.
“So listen to the body and never compare. Never before has there been a man like you and there will never be. You are absolutely unique...in the past, the present, or in the future. So you cannot compare notes with anybody and you cannot imitate anybody. So drop that idea. For two weeks slow down. Start from this moment!”

Centering Through the Body

Your body has its own wisdom — it carries the wisdom of the centuries in its cells.

Your body is feeling hungry and you are on a fast, because your religion says that this day you have to fast — and your body is feeling hungry. You don’t trust your organism, you trust a dead scripture, because in some book somebody has written that this day you have to go on a fast, so you go on a fast.

Listen to your body. Yes, there are days when the body says, “Go on a fast!” — then go. But there is no need to listen to the scriptures. The man who wrote that scripture has not written it with you in his mind, not at all. He could not have conceived of you. You were not present to him, he was not writing about you. It is as if you fall ill and you go to a dead doctor’s house and look into his prescriptions, and find a prescription and start following the prescription. That prescription was made for somebody else, for some other disease, in some other situation.

Remember to trust your own organism. When you feel that the body is saying don’t eat, stop immediately. When the body is saying eat, then don’t bother whether the scriptures say to fast or not. If your body says eat three times a day, perfectly good. If it says eat one time a day, perfectly good.

Start learning how to listen to your body, because it is your body.

You are in it; you have to respect it, and you have to trust it.

It is your temple; it is sacrilegious to impose things on your body. For no other motive should anything be imposed! And this will not only teach you trust in your body, this will teach you, by and by, a trust in existence too — because your body is part of existence. Then your trust will grow, and you will trust the trees and the stars and the moon and the sun and the oceans: you will trust people.

But the beginning of the trust has to be trust in your own organism.

Trust your heart.

A sannyasin is one who trusts in his own organism, and that trust helps him to relax into his being, and helps him to relax into the totality of existence. It brings a general acceptance of oneself and others.

Trust gives a kind of rootedness, centering. Then there is great strength and power, because you are centered in your own body, in your own being. You have roots in the soil.

Otherwise you see people uprooted, like trees that have been pulled up from the soil. They are simply dying, they are not living. That’s why there is not much joy in life. You don’t see the quality of laughter; the celebration is missing.

In your very body, in your very being, this very moment, the divine is there — and you have not celebrated it. You cannot celebrate.

Celebration has to happen first in your own home, at close quarters.

Then it becomes a great tidal wave and spreads all over existence.