Whenever I find myself overwhelmed by our fast paced culture, I find a quiet spot and place my hands in anjali mudra over my heart. I use this gesture to ground myself within the higher wisdom of my body – and I don’t mean this in any namby pamby new agey kind of way. I mean it literally. There is plenty of evidence suggesting our bodies possess a kind of transcendental knowledge that extends far beyond the limits of our ‘know it all’ rational mind.
I believe all the answers we need -and even lifesaving tips – can be found within the body, if we’d just take the time to listen.
For example, Princeton University and the University of Amsterdam used photographs to study ‘anomalous cognition’. They hooked up test subjects to heart rate and galvanic skin response monitors and showed them disturbing or shocking images randomly mixed with neutral ones in a picture slide show.
Not surprisingly, the neutral pictures created no response, but the offensive images did. But the amazing thing was that their bodies reacted with anxiety to disturbing images 4-5 seconds before the images were flashed onscreen. The participant’s bodies expressed foreknowledge of coming events.