Your Body is a Great Transformer

Tony Crisp

That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without your conscious effort or participation. You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with most other life forms that exist with you on this earth. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins. Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence. Without it you would immediately cease to be. In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part. Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process. However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process.

Your body is far more than you perhaps generally consider it to be. Recently the National Geographic Magazine has started the Genographic Project. This involves a mapping of the development and journeys of the earliest of human beings to ourselves in the present. This mapping can be done because our DNA holds in it a full record of how life and then the human animal, evolved from the beginning of life on this planet.

Your own body, in your blood and in your cells, holds that record. You have in you the collected experience of life on this planet. Geneticists think of this only in terms of physiological, social and psychological development. But some explorers of human consciousness such as Stanislav Grof have found that we each hold not just physical memory in terms of our DNA, but we also can achieve a personal awareness of our long past. (See The Symbol and the Reality).

My work, over the past thirty years has been in helping people discover for themselves the wealth of history and of healing capacity they hold within their own body. I know from personal experience, and from working with many people, that your bodymind has little know abilities to heal and to unfold a wealth of its long history and wisdom to you. (See National Geographic Genographic Project; Rituals of Beauty and The Secret Power.

This becomes easier to understand if you think of yourself as a seed that has grown. This is not an act of imagination. You were a seed – the joined sperm and ovum – that was planted in a fertile womb and grew. As such, just like any growing thing your development took you through different stages as the potential within yourself as the seed unfolded. The most extraordinary and delicate shifts and changes occurred, all of it spontaneous. This process carried on its work after your birth, taking you through the wonderful odyssey of being a baby, through childhood, youth, and then into adulthood and perhaps old age. Strangely few people I have met give much thought to this incredibly amazing process of life within them. Few attempt to discover how it works in them now, here, today. Perhaps they even try to dull its sensitivity, or manipulate it with drugs and medicines. But few stand before it in awe and say to it – “Teach me. Unfold me still further.”

One of the wonderful and mysterious things I have found through helping people to listen to and cooperate with this mysterious life process within them, is that although its potential unfolded into who you are today, it still has what is perhaps an infinite potential still waiting to unfold. But to do so it needs your conscious willingness to go along with the process.

Let us backtrack a little. You are one of the life-forms on this planet. As such you are an expression of life. But life can be anything from a virus to a tree or an elephant. Life can be almost anything, take any shape, exist in almost any way. Sometimes people say to me that one needs oxygen to live, to be alive. Well, that is true at the moment, but in the earliest stages of life on this planet, 3000 million years ago, organisms formed that did not need oxygen. As time passed an organism formed called stromatolites that started pouring out oxygen. This led to an oxygen rich atmosphere that killed out nearly all the life that had previously existed. The surviving organisms were the start of the creatures from which we evolved.

But the point I am making is that life can take any shape. It has an infinite potential, and that potential is what lies behind your own growth and existence. But do you suppose that as a human being you have exhausted that potential? Do you feel you have even attained your own best? Have you reached a full flowering and fruition in your life?

Even if you have, there is still more, and cooperating with the process of life within you, learning how to let it unfold more of who you are, allows you to move toward allowing that mystery that is Life to know itself in you. That is an extraordinary possibility. It has happened to many people all over the world. It can happen to you. Like any plant that grew from seed, life in you reaches toward its fulfillment in flowering. In your case part of your flowering has been to become conscious. Further opening means to become conscious of yourself as life, as the mystery behind all life forms, as the most amazingly creative force.

Meeting your essence in this way means you will find the resources to face and deal with the social and world changes that appear to be arising. We must find our own personal transformation along with a new relationship with the processes of life on this planet. The very nearest planetary life processes to you is your own body. If you cannot become aware of the profound processes within your own body, you have little hope of relating in a meaningful way with other life processes.

So here is a Master Class on opening this doorway your bodymind provides. I have nothing to sell you. There is no trick in my giving this knowledge away to you. It is not because I do not value it. In fact I value it so highly that I cannot put a price on it. I do smile as I offer it though, as I know that some of the most precious things in life cannot be seen for what they are.

As I say, there are no tricks. In one sense life is extraordinarily simple. You were a seed. You grew from your own innate process of life. You can continue this growth if you consciously open to life again.