My Body is My Temple

I'm here now at Tanjong Jara Resort for another travel writing assignment for the magazine. Didn't really expect them to forward an invitation to me so quickly after the last one to Bali. But I'm happy to have it anyways, and I consider it a birthday gift from the Universe! Thank you!

Spiritually, the highlight of this working holiday is 'honor your body.' For the past few weeks I realized I had been living in my head - I was overanalyzing almost everything in my life - especially relationships. Questions came and the Ego tried to answer everything, but of course I only ended up with a really heavy head most of the time. I could practically feel my head area fluffed with thought forms. Also, I was obsessively overanalyzing everything. Yet, I couldn't pinpoint what was bothering me - I was feeling dispassionate, lifeless and I wanted to sleep all the time.

So happened I got this book "The Power of I Am" by John Maxwell Taylor. I had began reading when I got here and I couldn't put it down. As I believe there are no coincidences, it was the perfect book for me at this time. Taylor's main message was for us to get out of our heads and get in tune with our body to allow the energy of I Am to flow through.

I have never been comfortable with the physical aspect of myself. I never liked sports, and I preferred to indulge in mindworks most of the time - thinking, reading, analyzing. And I wondered why I feel ungrounded most of the time, considering my head was constantly in the clouds!

This book brought me down to Earth - it was the wake-up call I needed. I realized I was really getting out of balance with too much upper chakra work. And this resort was the perfect setting to practice it all.

With tropical gardens and a beautiful beach surrounding me, you might think that it's easy to get into that groundedness state since Mama Nature was all around. But the mind/ego/personality was totally uncomfortable about that. When I first got here, I was experiencing frustration and slight depression. I couldn't really relax. But since there was minimal modern stimulation here, there was really nothing else to do. Except sleep.

I slept the entire day the day before. Right after breakfast, took a short nap. Right after lunch took another nap. Then I went to bed early. It was good. Of course it helped that the room interior was totally cosy. YTL has a way of doing their resorts this way.

It was like having sleep therapy. In between all practising the tips from the book on how to go out of the head and come back to the body, I feel more alive today than I was a week ago.

On the second day, there was a spa treatment scheduled, so that put me back into a relaxed state. The itinerary was actually really packed, but I canceled everything just to get a grip of myself. And it worked.

Frequent naps somehow de-cluttered my head and the grounding techniques and massages made me pay attention to my body - hands, feet, everything. As I type this I realized I was going through a mental detox. While I managed to get into a state of serenity on and off, in between that were other discomforts like stomach bloating up, nausea, headaches, eye irritation, dry throat and skin rash. I thought I had an allergy to something. But I realized now they were all symptoms of detox. After all, detox-ing shouldn't just be limited to physical toxins, right?

Nature was a big help. When those symptoms came up, I turned to the sun for recharging me, the Earth to ground me, the waves to help me release, the colorful flowers all around to cheer me up and the grass to refresh me.

The mind is calm as I type this now. So often that when we journey on our spiritual path, and unconsciously the ego can slip in to take over and fill your mind with plain clutter that is masked as spiritual studies because the personality loves being intellectual. We can easily lose our balance when this happens. And for me, it is important to come back again and again to my body when I get a tad too intellectual for my own good.

And from today, I HONOR MY BODY. I TUNE IN TO LISTEN TO WHAT MY BODY NEEDS. Simple and sorta cliche, right? I mean I have heard and read about it all the time. But funny I never learned the real meaning of it until now.