The practice of body-centered meditation will probably make us aware of aches and pains we hadn’t noticed before. These feelings could be powerful or mild. A pain in a certain area of the body will naturally make us want to stop or change it, or just get away from it. Unless this pain is connected to a very specific problem, like a knee injury, it could actually present us with an opportunity for growth and healing if we can choose to release it.

Many unresolved issues are actually held in the form of tension or discomfort that is held in the body. The subconscious holds the past that has not been healed. The body is a kind of storage for the subconscious to keep things that have not been completed in our lives. That is why in meditation we may discover pain from this, welcome it and use it to release the original hurt.

When we are able to release, we start to gain insight into what we might have been holding and how it has appeared in our lives. If we have an ongoing pain in our right shoulder, we may find through meditation the source of this was based in a childhood experience with our father. We are given a way to gain insight into ourselves through this childhood reflection from the father. The real issue is not based on what the father did, really. Rather, it is a reflection of something that existed within ourselves.

As a result of this insight into a childhood experience we can begin to look at the pattern we may have with all of our relationships with men. It could illuminate the way we have of relating, or not relating, to men in our lives. In the end we will see that this has distorted the pattern of our own masculine polarity. Frequently if we take a look back in our lives, we will notice that an issue in the masculine relates to the initial imprinting from the father, and if it exists in the feminine, than it is from the mother. They are both the reflection and the imprint of what we bring with us into life, and because of the law of sympathetic attraction will attract us to the parent that matches the karma that we have picked to work out in our lives.

Emotional pain works in the same way. We do experience emotions in our body, so in a similar way to how we let ourselves really feel it, that we are present and available to it as much as possible, then we can notice what happens.

Whenever we experience any discomfort either physically or emotionally, we can’t take the time to just sit and meditate. However, the practice of meditation will enhance our ability to really be available to the experiences we have in the rest of our lives that may be challenging, and through this we can become empowered.