The Impact of the Mind and the Vital Nature on the Body Consciousness

We many times fail to recognise the extent of the impact that the mind, and the vital nature, have on the body, its health and its capacities for growth, resilience and development. The mind-body connection is starting to come into focus, however. When the mind sends repeated ‘suggestions’ to the body it impacts the response of the body. It can send positive affirmative messages and the body will respond with a renewed vigor, energy and resilience. Or it can send negative messages, which then increase the body’s sense of helplessness, victimization and failure. We are constantly taking in thoughts and ideas from our social circle. If we internalize and accept them, they become part of the mental dialogue that we send to the cells of the body. We receive and retransmit what we receive, and in many cases this occurs subconsciously or entirely unconsciously.

Similarly, vital reactions can also impact the body and its sense of strength or weakness. This is where reactions such as fear of harm from a pandemic can play a role in weakening the body and its ability to resist the onslaught of a particularly virulent disease. Some individuals are able to consciously resist these reactions and thus, they send strengthening energy to the body consciousness and thereby provide the body additional power to withstand illness. There are many instances of doctors who have waded into wards filled with sickness without fear, and who do not fall ill themselves. In other instances, they may do this for a considerable period of time, but then if the thought creeps in that the disease is insurmountable and they will eventually succumb, then at that moment, they open the door for the body to fall ill!

The Mother writes: “But if when very young, from your earliest childhood, you have been taught all sorts of disappointing, depressing things — things that cause decomposition, I could say, disintegration — then this poor body does its best but it has been perverted, put out of order, and no longer has the sense of its inner strength, its inner force, its power to react.”

“If one takes care not to pervert it, the body carries within itself the certitude of victory. It is only the wrong use we make of though and its influence on the body which robs it of this certitude of victory. So, the first thing to do is to cultivate this certitude instead of destroying it; and when it is there, no effort is needed to aspire, but simply a flowering, an unfolding of that inner certitude of victory.”

“The body carries within itself the sense of its divinity. There. This is what you must try to find again in yourself if you have lost it.”

“When a child tells you a beautiful dream in which he had many powers and all things were very beautiful, be very careful never to tell him, ‘Oh! life is not like that’, for you are doing something wrong. You must on the contrary tell him, ‘Life ought to be like that, and it will be like that!”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XVI Body, pp. 127-128