Where is consciousness?

Everywhere? In all living things? In the head?

Life, we can see, is everywhere. Even in a stone that looks rock solid with no apparent life in it. We know life is there, with all the atoms busy moving according to their set program. I have concluded therefore, that consciousness is everywhere.
I am ‘aware’ that ‘awareness’ is also in the body, in every organ of the body, in every cell etc…

And in all my experience of moving the body I’ve become more and more aware of it. I became aware of areas I never knew existed from the first day I started yoga and to this day, this continues! There is much depth and subtleties to this bottomless ocean. I became aware of the difference between a stretch and a contraction. I felt what it was like to feel both in a muscle and when I felt any pain, I had an acute awareness of it, even if it was little. The relationship between my mind and my body grew…

When I said in class ‘bring your awareness to your hips’, I imagined a flow of awareness moving from the head to the hips. It dawned on me quite recently, that underneath my belief that everything is conscious, I needed the intermediary of the head to feel the body. As if, without the attention of the mind to the body, the body wasn’t itself aware. Why don’t we say ‘notice the awareness in your hips’? Perhaps this internal visualization is due to our scientific model: the brain being the one that receives and processes everything. Whatever causes it, it’s becoming obvious to me that there is a split in the awareness between body and mind. As if internally, there is something that divides the two.

We say: I  am aware of the body which to me reinforces the split. How about bodymind is aware.

The body is the mind and the mind is the body. There is no separation between them. One isn’t just a reflection of the other, one is a reflection as the other. They are not two separate entities. When a thought crosses your mind, you don’t need to become aware of the body for it to live the translation of that thought and change its physiology. When a sensation is felt in the body, a thought is immediately formed which is again an interpretation of this sensation, whether you’re aware of it or not. This happens in real time. The body and the mind don’t have a distance and therefore no time delay in their response. When we let go of the illusion of a border between the body and mind, the bodymind becomes quieter. It seems that experiencing them as one, dissolves the perceived traffic between the apparent two!