Clarity

"Our bodies are our medicine" that is what my spiritual teacher taught me. In many cases, I can clearly point out how taking care of my body and instead of fueling or fighting what is wrong with it, by listening, by feeling, and by seeing what my body is missing, I have always used my body as it's own medicine. Medicine, let it be known, is not to heal physical or emotional wounds, it also helps and guides us, almost like a light. It reinforces our confidence, clears our minds, and assists in directing our path. By using my body within the past year or so to find myself, find my goals, my dreams, I unconsciously became very connected with my heart. So, now I listen to my heart, it "whispers the truth" as they say.
However, when we use and become one with who we are physically, meaning, we know how to care for our physical self (eat, exercise, protect ourselves at times) and we hear, listen, and see our bodies when they need help, well then we REALLY know ourselves. This also does not mean that by knowing yourself, you should be or are egotistical, or that you know everything because you know yourself, it also doesn't mean that you really are doing or living what you want to be doing or living.
In using our bodies as medicine, we also bring out the best in us. There is a difference between homeopathic medicine AKA "natural medicine" and over-the-counter medicine. The biggest difference is that while scientists found the right chemical dosages to knock something out of your body, it may also knock something vital out of place or bring in something new to fight off. Natural medicine on the other hand, is available to almost anyone, there are no side effects to it and there are usually no allergies to it either. Placing this example of real medicine into the context of how we use our bodies as our medicine for our ailments, first we all must understand and accept that our lifestyles are very well conditioned in many senses. So the medicine example I gave earlier can not only prove how non-natural medicine can cause more harm than good but, and for many it may be hard to see this viewpoint, but there is also a conditioning within our society that has kept us going back to the same traditional ways to help our bodies when they are hurt.
When someone is not feeling right, not feeling confident, not feeling themselves, are they using their body to find and correct or strengthen these areas? Well let's take, for example, the old traditional way of looking at challenges: "I can do this, I have been through worse. I know this cannot defeat me. I will do whatever I need to do to overcome this". We say all these things, how do we act on them? How strong are all these words? Do we really believe them? And at the basis of all of this and the most important question, why do I want this? Well to answer of these questions, the only answer lies in the last question. No one likes going through something they already went through before, whether it be in a relationship, a job, school. If we were to go through what we already went through to get to where we are today, right now, no one would want to do that again. So what holds us from going through the same stuff again? Ego.
Ego is simple to understand but hard to accept in ourselves. Ego, simply put, we think we have in us what we need to keep going, to get by, to surpass obstacles, to overcome, our egos are so in control of us, we rarely, maybe never, step outside of that ego to tell it to shut up and take what we are given for what it is. Ego is that voice in our heads that sometimes is spoken aloud or even acted upon because the voice is so incessant and repeats things over and over. It's even hard to catch our ego, it moves so fast, it's on the next thought, on the next action, before we simply put an end to it. The next thought catches us, we think on and on about it, it grows, then comes the next thought, and on and on goes this cycle. Our ego actions are even worse to catch. They start with a thought, then gets to our feelings, soon we're acting on a thought that started out of nowhere with no reason for that thought to grow, yet we will defend our action and why we even had thoughts about it and we will defend why we think it's right to have the thoughts we have. There is nothing wrong with thinking, it's our loss of control over our thoughts, how we lead into more thoughts. Thinking is essential to grow and learn, but our minds must not be on auto-pilot during our days, they tend to go off-course and make us feel overwhelmed, they disrupt us from what we are doing in the present moment. There is nothing more important and more worth than our present moment.
Going back to where I started, we tell ourselves we can overcome challenges, that nothing can deter us from our goals and dreams, yet how are we going to get to the next step without focusing on the present? Or better yet, how can we plan out our future without realizing how our present moment is more important than the next moment? Recently, I saw a beautiful movie called "Nostalgia for the Light". The movie played out in content the context of astronomers looking towards the sky to look for evidence of our past yet in the same location where the astronomers are located, there are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, all different types of kin looking for remains of loved ones within the ground where their body parts were buried, so in what is almost nothing comparable, both astronomers and relatives of the dead buried amidst the ground, they are all looking for a piece of the past to put together their present moment a little more. In one scene, in the most telling scene of the whole movie, one astronomer says "Even this moment right now, even as you are filming me right now, there is a delay in what the camera is filming, even as you stand only a few feet away from me, it may be a millionth, a billionth of a second but nothing is more present in life than what we see, hear, and feel through our eyes, ears, and emotions". Light travels as fast as we want it to travel but yet when do we actually bring full light into our lives? Often we hear, "before you know it, life will pass you by and you won't even notice it or know". So instead of worrying of how to take on a challenge, instead of telling ourselves who we are and how strong we are, or even instead of worrying about our futures, the present is so much more powerful, it is so truthful to who we are and where we are, the present brings us all we need. Notice how wonderful it is to feel so present, to notice all beauty around you, to notice all that you are, you don't need to remind yourself of this or tell yourself this because before you know it, life will pass you by and you won't even notice it or know.