You’ve adopted the highly scientific and very much accurate claim that the seat of your brain is located right there behind your eyes, that it sits there like an overlord ruling all that happens in a body, ruling you, ruling the way you view the world. This is of course true, but it is not the complete truth. The brain and the biology that created were smart enough to know that the brain all alone up there in its penthouse cannot do all of the complex things that being a human and staying alive entails and so it has been constructed as delegated to the whole body as well.

Sometimes you need your cortex to be fully engaged, sometimes you need the power of being able to grasp and manipulate complex notions to do what you have to do, to sort out feelings, memories, plan ahead, learn from the past or make a decision involving an x number of factors, but sometimes you don’t need to pour a river onto a match. Your body is the brain all in itself. There are reflexes as old as the first multi-cell bodies there and they completely bypass the brain. The amount of time it takes for you to pull your hand back from a hot object or to duck when something hard is flying in your direction happens faster than the thought process. Your body is smart, it knows. Knows what? Everything about you. It knows your true desires, strengths, weaknesses, insecurities, it knows what really elevates you and depletes you no matter how hard you try to come up with rationalizations via the brain, it knows what turns you on and what disgusts you and understands what you are naturally attracted to and- it knows when you are lying when even you might not be aware of it consciously. Try this. One person puts their hands out with palms facing upwards and you lay your palms on top of theirs. Then they ask you “Yes” “No” questions and each time you say “Yes” you push back on their hands with vigor. You’re in for a surprise. There will be questions you’ll say “Yes” to, things you may have believed were true for you maybe even your whole life, but what will happen is that the body knows you’re full of it… you just won’t be able to push back on the other person’s hands with the same power, the body won’t let you because it feels it to not be true.

We have all lied and chances are we’ll do it again, to others and ourselves, but the process of lying is so energy consuming that you won’t be able to lie with your words and bodies simultaneously unless you’re a sociopath, narcissistic or have delusions of grandeur. The body knows all about you, listen to the signals you get when you’re speaking of something. You might suddenly feel a sensation that calls you out and tells you you don’t really believe in what you’re saying, that you’re indulging in gossip, that you’re not saying what you really mean, that you’re acting and putting forth a persona. There is a reason actors need training no matter how talented they are – they need to teach their body to pretend even when the thing they’re saying is a make-believe scenario. The body knows. Listen, you could learn something.