An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #12: High on Life (originally aired April 7, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
“Your body language shapes who you are.” Amy Cuddy is a researcher, and she speaks with the science rhetoric. What her study found and the way she framed it in the TED Talk is that two minutes of standing up straight with your hands behind your head and your elbows out and your shoulder blades pressed together, just for two minutes a day, can make you more powerful at work or make you feel more energized and more in control of your situation.
She shows how across cultures, a lot of people who’ve just achieved something put their arms up with their fists closed and they pump the air with both arms over head, like in a cactus shape, like someone who’s just won a race. We make that pose all the time, and it reinforces that power.
When you watch this TED Talk, it’s 18 minutes of wow. We can’t believe all the research and what it shows and how conclusive it is. And it’s so easy — just two minutes of putting your hands behind your head and striking a power pose.
But let’s stop and take a moment to analyze what’s happening when you put yourself in that position: you are lifting your chin, opening your throat; you are opening your breastbone, the center of your chest; your shoulder blades are pressing back together, your ribs are lifted, you are creating space underneath your diaphragm. We’ve now covered opening the throat chakra, opening the heart chakra, and opening the solar plexus.
The common qualities associated with each of those chakras? The throat chakra is associated with communication and creativity. The heart chakra is associated with love and compassion. And the solar plexus, which is that spot above your abdomen but just below your ribs, where your diaphragm is — that’s the center for energy and power.
So that’s what’s happening: you’re creating that space in your power zone, and it becomes a “power pose.” For many people, the idea of standing in a power pose for two minutes before going into an important meeting seems totally worthwhile, given all the conclusive research. But then hearing about how they just did a chakra meditation — that sounds totally “out there.” It’s the same damn thing.
Every single one of us is a whole human being. That includes a mind, a heart and a body. Our mind and our heart are contained within our body, but we’re not often so good at remembering that.
Many of us are just disembodied heads floating around, and we often forget that our body even exists. Its only role in our lives is to carry our brains from one place to another. We don’t treat it the way it needs to be treated. We don’t even remember that it’s there during the day. We get so drawn into our work that we just abandon and ignore it completely.
We don’t recognize just how much we need it, not only to survive but to thrive. The body has its own intelligences, its own sensations. But we as a society tend to be so focused on thoughts and ideas and the productions of the mind, we put all of our attention there instead. And we end up not putting enough attention into the other intelligences that are a natural part of our essence.
The emotional intelligences — both knowing and managing oneself, and knowing and managing others. Then there’s the body’s intelligences — all of the senses and sensations, all of the pains and the languages. Our body can speak volumes to the rest of the world about who we are. It also has intel for us about what’s going on within ourselves that we otherwise may not be tuned into.
The chakras — even though it sounds flighty or “woo woo” or something that isn’t for everyone — in reality is just understanding how each part of the body is incorporated with the rest, knowing the body’s centers of energy and what they’re associated with in our lives. It can give you a lot of insight into what’s happening within you that your mind alone can never know.
An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #12: High on Life (originally aired April 7, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
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