3. Shifting the Balance

 Arn: So... in this chapter you are going to explain how you, as a Body-Spirit, shift the balances in my body so that it can optimally reflect my choices back at me.

Llualarth: I am. And, quite crucially, I am going to tell you of some of the ways in which I can also fail to do this.

A: Interesting...

L: Let's begin with a look at something that many, if not most, of your readers will find important. The issue of “body mass”. Almost every adult human being would like to lose at least a little weight. I mean, other than those who live in real poverty and privation. The kind of person who is likely to be reading this work, who is likely to have the luxury of engaging into an inquiry into their body relationship, is most likely able to eat more than they need, if they wish. They are also not likely to have to labour physically every day unless they actually choose to do so. And they are also quite likely to find themselves to be over-weight. Perhaps by just a pound or two... or perhaps by much more than they would like to think about.

You, yourself, a person who for most of your life found yourself to be under-weight, have in the last few years begun to gain a pound or five that you'd prefer not to have. Am I right?

A: Yes, of course you are right.

L: And, from what I see of the information available to you in magazines and television, the general idea is that you can lose weight, essentially, in two ways: Either you must work up a sweat and burn! burn! burn! those fat rolls away or you must cut back on your food and subsist on a lettuce leaf and a glass of tepid tap water per meal.

I exaggerate for humorous effect.

A: Yes, thank you. I enjoyed the humour. You don't have to explain that.

L: Ah.

So anyway. The point I wish to make is that this is not quite correct... and can actually yield a result directly opposite to that which is desired. To explain I would like to use you, yourself, as an example. If you don't mind my delving into your personal issues in this public way.

A: If my “issues” can be used to help others then that, at least, is a good use for them. So go ahead.

L: So to begin with: you did not wish to incarnate into this lifetime. You didn't want to be “here”. You didn't want to be in your body. This translated into you being both sickly and skinny right from birth all the way into adulthood.

You see? Your energy, your beliefs and your deepest desires all converged upon a minimal expression of yourself into this world. If your body was to mirror this to you then it would have to be very thin. And it was.

And worse than that. You hated yourself, your body, your life. You distrusted everyone and everything, from God down to those around you, your body, yourself and indeed, Life itself. That deep distrust was best mirrored to you as a highly allergic body. Essentially allergies are an over-active, inappropriately reactive immune system. You are defending yourself with all vigour against everything, even innocuous things. A little pollen in the air, which would do you no actual harm, was attacked as if it were a life-threatening pathogen. You would, as a result, regularly have a full blown infectious fever, without there being anything there that actually required that massive response. It was like getting the 'flu without there even being a 'flu virus present.

And this was a good analogue for the deep distrust that you felt for life.

Furthermore, you found yourself in a painfully dichotomous state: not only could you not accept life, take it into yourself and experience it, but you also knew that you could not just reject it, leave it and go away from here. You knew you had to incarnate... and so you did... but you also could not accept this incarnation and its circumstances. Couldn't live this life, couldn’t leave it. Couldn't take it in, couldn't let it go. If you understand that air is a great metaphor for Life itself for all organisms that respire, then you'll understand that the best metaphor for this inability to either accept or reject Life would be a congestion in your breathing. We could have resolved this as either a life-long struggle with asthma or with sinus congestion. Either of those afflictions would have reflected your belief back at you. I chose for the sinuses as I wanted the congestion to be “in your face”. Literally. Not because I am a sadist. Not because I don't love you utterly. But because you stipulated in your life-planning phase that you wanted, inside this incarnation, to find your way back to self love and self trust. I wanted to make it as clear as day that this was your struggle... that this was what you wanted to work on in this lifetime. So the metaphor had to be as obvious as possible and as blatant as possible.

A: Well... mission accomplished! (laughs drily) I certainly couldn't miss the fact that my face was constantly congested all my life.

L: Yes. But neither was the metaphor lost on you. You did eventually figure it out.

A: It's true, I did.

L: And you did find your way to a great degree of love and trust for yourself and for Life.

A: Eventually, yes.

L: And how is it now?

A: I use medication to help but, yeah, for a few years now I have been able to breath normally and have not had a single sinus attack or infection.

L: So we are not done with this journey but you are now far enough advanced that you are fully functional?

A: I'd say so.

L: Then the metaphor is working perfectly to present your deepest beliefs to you. But it took you some time to get here. And along the way you made the classic error of misidentification.

A: Explain?

L: Well, let's just take the issue of your body shape, how thin you were as a child, as our example.

When you went to school and began to interact with other children, it came to be that others remarked upon this. Some of those remarks were simple guileless curiosity and some were, as children often do, a malicious attempt to cause you to feel discomfort. I have never understood how this gleeful viciousness that children exhibit towards one another can be called something as innocuous as “teasing”, as if it were just a bit of playfulness. If adults ever treated each other the way children constantly do there would be bloodshed and war. But this is neither here nor there. Just something I have noticed. What I am actually wishing to get to is the way in which you responded to this “teasing”. It caused you to transfer your many negative feelings and beliefs about incarnating onto your body.

Odd, isn't it? In your heart you were carrying a dark sack of rocks. A mixture of all kinds of fears, negativity, resistances and self-loathing. As a result, you did not want to incarnate. And when you did incarnate, this bag of rocks was faithfully mirrored to you as a skinny, unhealthy body. And then you did what most people do, you made the shift to believing that your internal pain was because of your body. In your case, you thought that if your body was not skinny and unhealthy then you would be happy.

And, in so doing, you got it exactly the wrong way round. If you were not unhappy then your body would not be skinny or unhealthy.

A: Wow, that is interesting! I never got that, somehow.

L: Not unusual.

Dysmorphia, the deep-seated feeling that your body is the wrong shape and further, that this wrong shape causes you emotional distress, is ubiquitous. Very, very nearly everybody experiences some measure of dysmorphia at least for some portion of their lives. Most are somewhat, to significantly, unhappy with their body form for all or most of their lives. A few find a kind of grudging acceptance of their bodies as they get older. The number of people on the planet that go their whole lives feeling a joyful delight that their body is just perfect for them is... pitifully small. And you'd be surprised. Those that do are not the “beautiful people”. They are not the fashion models and Hollywood stars. That group is perhaps the most dysmorphic of all! No. Those that are truly joyfully loving of their bodies are not usually particularly spectacularly beautiful. They are beings who, for entirely other reasons, feel the sacredness of what it is to have a body.

So... dysmorphia. Almost everyone experiences it. And you, as a very young boy felt its unpleasant sting.

A: As interesting as all of that is, you said something that is staying with me.

You said that if I was happy as a child then I would not have been either skinny or sickly. You really mean that?

L: It's a 100% absolutely guaranteed fact.

I don't mean the kind of happy that you might have sometimes felt on the surface when something nice happened. I don't mean if you were pleased because something outside of you was nice for you. A new bicycle would not have made you healthy or physically robust. No. What I am talking about here is if you healed your core beliefs in your heart that caused you to feel that soul-sick unhappiness that you dragged with you into this life. If you healed those beliefs then your body would have had to reflect that back at you to the very best of its ability. That's my job, after all.

A: Okay, but one couldn't reasonably expect a child to figure all that stuff out for himself.

L: I suppose not.

A: I mean, it took me years and years to even begin to make sense of myself. Only very, very recently, now in my forties, am I arriving at a place where I can say that those painful beliefs seem to be more-or-less worked out.

L: Yes.

And are you still sickly?

A: Well... no. I really am not. As a matter of fact I am actually extremely healthy. It's been years since I have had so much as a cold. Hmm... so that would bear what you are saying out.

L: And... are you still skinny?

A: Hardly! I mean, I will always have an elongated body type. So I look quite slim. But I am really quite robust. I am not bragging when I say that I am really rather physically strong now. I mean I am living a farming lifestyle and every day I am very physically active and can heft heavy things around all day long. And I am fit from long walks too. So I will always have a slender body type. But I'm not overly thin any more. In fact I now have, as you previously mentioned, just a few extra pounds that I wouldn't mind losing.

L: We'll come to the extra pounds in a moment. So, other than the extra pounds, can you agree that it is your experience that, as you have found ever more of this soul-deep peaceful happiness inside yourself, so your body has become ever healthier and stronger? And as this has proceeded, so you have found yourself feeling less and less dysmorphia?

A: I have to agree. That is my experience.

L: And so? Is that all a big co-incidence?

A: No, I guess not. I can really see what you are saying. My body is reflecting my beliefs back at me.

L: Then I'd like you to understand that in every instance I am only following orders. And I am following orders because I love you. So, when you needed your body to be unnaturally thin, I pushed the balances held by the proto-consciousnesses in all the directions that would lead to low body mass. I drove your metabolism up and your appetite down... for just two examples. There were many other mechanisms in my bag of tricks that I used. The sinusitis, for example. I used the constant infections to voraciously consume resources. Between these factors you had no energy to do anything. You felt limp and disinterested. Which was what your beliefs called for. And so you did as little as possible. It all worked together perfectly to give you what you were calling for.

Do you understand? It is as if, down here in Engineering, I have millions and millions of little levers, each pushing this or that balance one way or another. And, depending on how I shift those balances, there will be alterations in the performance of the body. And since each of your systems are impacted by many, many levers, they all affect each other. Move one lever and others move in sympathy as the inherent intelligence of the system seeks balance and homoeostasis.

So it takes constant work from me to have your body continue to reflect back to you a state of imbalance. Even if I did not love you, still I would prefer to be able to sit back and enjoy allowing the body to find its healthy balance.

What I wish to indicate is that I find no joy at all in shifting the balances toward unhappy, unhealthy states. It's constant hard work that goes against my natural inclinations to create joy and harmony. And, on top of that, I really do love you and wish the best for you. So your suffering is, to a slightly lesser extent, my suffering too.

It is therefore a great source of relief for me to observe you healing your psyche and coming to more harmonious beliefs about yourself, since it is then my job to reflect these back at you. I can allow the systems of your body to begin to seek their own healthy, harmonious balances. And indeed, in times when you make a remarkable leap of consciousness, it is my great pleasure to actually intervene to bring your body closer to healthy vitality at an accelerated rate.

So this is what I wished you to understand about shifting the balances.

A: To sum up. There are these proto-consciousnesses. They each manage one biological process. You can interact with them and cause them to shift the way in which they manage their respective processes in my body. You could, for example, get that proto-consciousness we spoke about earlier to detect carbon-dioxide earlier and make me respire faster than necessary if you wished.

L: I certainly could. I might do that to drive the oxygen levels up in your blood if I needed that for something else that I was doing. Quite possible.

A: And so this is something that you do. You shift these balances to cause the body to reflect, as nearly as you are able, my deepest psychological state back at me.

L: Exactly so.

A: So okay then. As has already been mentioned in this conversation, I now have a few pounds that I'd like to lose. Thankfully it is really just a few. But it's there. I am aware of a “thickening” around my middle that doesn't really please me. And before it becomes a whole spare tyre, I'd really like to do something about it. What is the underlying belief that I am holding onto that is causing this?

L: Good question and perfect timing.

So, as we have just seen, when it comes to body issues, the first port of call is to heal the Self. You must begin with the way you feel about yourself. You must heal your beliefs about yourself so that you find your way to perfect self-love and perfect self-acceptance. This is paramount. So work on this first. When you are working on this and sure that you are well on that path, then you can begin to identify and address secondary issues. And weight-loss is the first of these secondary issues that I would like to address.

At the risk of belabouring the point: if you hate yourself, find yourself to be weak and despicable and you also find that a fat body perfectly reflects your self-loathing back to you, and you find furthermore that your inability to cease binge-eating perfectly reflects your own beliefs in your own weakness back to you, then you should stop right here. What lies in the pages that follow will not help you. Just as the countless fad diets you have tried did not help you. In point of fact nothing will be able to help you to lose weight. If that is what you believe, then you must be fat because that is the only way your body will be doing its job of showing you what you believe. That is the only way your body will be following orders. And your body will follow orders.

If you hate yourself, forget about “whipping your body into shape” at all. Nothing will work until you cease hating yourself. It is as simple and as powerful as that.

But if you are beginning to love yourself as you, Arn, now really and truly are, then there is much I have to share with you that will help you to better manage your body.

And so you ask about the few extra pounds. This is one of the numerous cases of a simple misunderstanding. There is actually no underlying issue with your beliefs here. You have responded to the stimulus of your environment in a perfectly understandable way and this extra bit of body fat is the result. You, quite simply, need some additional input and insight and you'll very quickly lose that weight and move closer not just to a form that is more pleasing to you but, more crucially, has greater health and vitality.

A: Wow, okay! So there is just something I need to be taught and that will fix the problem?

L: Well, yes, if you make choices congruent with this information you will certainly move towards a slimmer waist and, as mentioned, greater vitality.

A: Awesome! Let's have it then!

L: This is all in the next chapter called, “The Energy Balance”.

A: I can barely wait!