Have you ever been in a situation where you did something without remembering you just did that? Take a shower without realizing it or driving home from the office or travelling on a tube and may be missed your stop. Your mind was so engrossed in something that you forget what you are ‘actually’ doing. 

Has it ever happened that your body reacts to something which is not accurate because it sees/hears/tastes or touches something? I remember standing on the escalator in Warren Street tube station, watching the ads on the sides of the walls. One of the ads was about a hamburger, and my mouth started salivating even though I was a budding Vegan).

We have six sense doors – smell, sight, sound, taste, touch and our thoughts. And our body is blind without these. Our body gets a sense of what is going on in the outside world only through these sense doors. 

Let’s connect the dots. Your mind has a strong habit, also called conditioning, of never being in the present moment. It lives mainly in the past or the future. For the most part, you are playing out the movie that the thoughts in your head are displaying. And if your mind is one of the sense doors, then your body starts to react to it as if it were real.

For example, you missed your tube in the morning, or you had a fight with your boss – and on your way home, you replay that incident in your head. Your physical body is sitting in the tube, but it reacts as if you are fighting your boss now. But, at the same time, a part of you knows that you are sitting in the tube – because you cannot deny it. Your feet on the floor, your bum is uncomfortable on the cushion.

What happens to a piece of string when pulled in two different directions? Or when you apply pressure on metal in different positions. They will break or become brittle and will not be able to perform the essential functions. This is what we do to our bodies all day long. We are somewhere, but we trick our body into thinking we are somewhere else. We may be in the car, but we are thinking about how nice our childhood was or how bad our childhood was. You may be eating your dinner, but you are thinking about your last vacation. No wonder stress is one of the significant issues on the planet earth today.

Merriam Webster dictionary defines hypocrisy as a feigning to be what one is not or believe what one does not: behaviour that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel. In this sense, are we all not hypocrites – doing something but accepting something else is real. And we go through our lives without really living. And even worse, our poor bodies have no idea what is going on. One Minute they are excited about getting the promotion, and the next, they are worried about the rise. Can you imagine what it does to your body? What happened to the body being a temple?

How are you treating your body?