Annamaya Kosha your physical self

Annamaya Kosha Your physical self

Welcome to our series on the koshas. The Koshas are the 5 layers of self, set one within the other from the physical body to the Bliss body. Today is all about Annamaya Kosha. Anna meaning food and maya meaning illusion. This is our physical body. The self that is made up of food.  

Most of us listening today identify ourselves by their physical body. I would guess that a majority of the people on this planet identify themselves first and foremost as their physical form and what it can do.  That’s our work IN today. We’re going to talk about our perception of our physical form, the annamaya kosha and how that perception can create calm or chaos in our stress response and overall health.

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Transcript

Ep 194 

Annaymaya Kosha Your physical self

Welcome to our series on the koshas. The Koshas are the 5 layers of self, set one within the other from the physical body to the Bliss body. Today is all about Annamaya Kosha. Anna meaning food and maya meaning illusion. This is our physical body. The self that is made up of food.  

Most of us listening today identify ourselves by their physical body. I would guess that a majority of the people on this planet identify themselves first and foremost as their physical form and what it can do.  That’s our work IN today. We’re going to talk about our perception of our physical form, the annamaya kosha and how that perception can create calm or chaos in our stress response and overall health.

Have you ever watched an infant discover their toes? It’s a big day in their development. We mark it down in the baby book and take pictures. You may not be able to stand the cuteness of it. Babies swing their little arms and legs around and then all of a sudden they catch one of their feet and their eyes go wide, they look at it and taste it and experiment with each of the little toes and maybe find the other one. The way they do this it’s as if that foot and it’s cute little toes are something separate from themselves. Until that very moment they didn’t know they had a foot or what it was or what it tasted like or felt like. That foot was attached but baby had no awareness of it before that moment. THat one moment of accidental attention.

With all things physical we need attention in order to build awareness. Most of what the body does and is, flies below our conscious awareness and that’s by design. If we felt every little process that the body does we would never get anything done. Can you imagine how distracting that would be? This is one reason chronic pain is so disruptive and debilitating. Pain, by design,  draws our attention. 

For the most part as our body grows and develops we begin to find other parts of our body and understand ourselves as separate from our caregivers. And we are absorbing all of what we experience without any discrimination on our part. Our understanding of ourselves as a human being comes from our caregivers and environment. Then, about the age of seven (not all at once) but that’s about the time when our brain develops to the point that we can start making choices about what influences we keep or deny. But that doesn’t mean that we all of a sudden are capable of peeling off all of the negative influences and only keeping a healthy self identity. Essentially up until the age of 7 we are pretty much being programmed, consciously or unconsciously by our world. And that programming affects every layer of ourselves. 

The number one identifying factor is our physical body.

Our modern western culture reinforces the physical body as the main identifier of self. The body determines who we are, man or woman, its performance determines our job, our place in society, our health or lack of it determines many of the choices we make and/or have, where we live, how we live, physically determines literally “who we are” as a person.  In the unexamined life, this dependence on the physical body as self creates a very black and white, all or nothing approach that bleeds over into our perception of the world. Our society does not acknowledge any possibility of energetic polarity, or diversity of thought or the ability to detach ourselves from those thoughts within that body. In other words what you look like on the outside must be what and who you are. 

In recent history this is a source of a lot of confusion in our society. Because if you believe your body is who you are and you feel different or think different thoughts on the inside then something must be wrong. Since most of us accept every thought we think as the truth then the easiest scapegoat is that the body must be wrong in some way. This can create a very hostle environment for our body.

Anything that separates us from reality causes suffering. Physically, mentally and emotionally. In my world suffering is just another name for stress and self fulfilling trauma injury.

In today's society it drives people to fixate on changing the outside of their body to meet some perfectionist ideal or match how they feel on the inside, or to fix how they feel on the inside, or to try to change how others see them. This is driven by this black and white thinking that what we perceive or feel on the inside must match what is on the outside in order for us to truly “BE who we are”. My question is, is that true?

Is your body who you are?

The Kosha’s say no. None of these things are really possible because they deny the truth of what the koshas are trying to teach us.

You are not your body. 

Annamaya kosha is the first veil and it shields and carries who you truly are around in this world. It is made of the food we eat. We take care of it, because we live in it. The Upannishads say…

“From food are made all bodies, which become food again for others after their death. Food is the most important of all things for the body; therefore it is the best medicine for all the body’s ailments. They who look upon food as the Lords gift shall never lack life’s physical comforts. From food are made all bodies. All bodies feed on food, and it feeds on all bodies.” Taittiriya Upanishad 2.1 

Western culture understands this concept. We know it as “the circle of life” and “also you are what you eat” and “food as medicine”. 

So let's talk about this food body. Because we all eat but we don’t elevate how we eat to the level of self realization though do we? We eat for fuel, to punish ourselves, to reward ourselves, for comfort, for companionship, so many reasons. But rarely because we love this body and we want to take exquisite care of it. 

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the levels of toxicity that we’re now being exposed to through our food. To the point that our physical system is overwhelmed and can’t function very well at all let alone optimally. Just look at the rising numbers of children with type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease, the young people in their 20’s with stage 4 colorectal cancer, and the infants already born with phthalate exposure and micro and nano plastics present in the placenta and mecum. 

So our body is already in a fight for its life. For our life. And it’s a very real fight all the way down to our cell metabolism. Why would we make that any harder than it needs to be?

We don’t see the body as an illusion. Our body is pretty real, wouldn’t you agree? We’re all born into one after all. Maybe we believe it’s the only real thing about ourselves. We see our body as something to be tamed, controlled, brought into line, to be fixed. Most of us live in a constant fight with the body we’ve been given. We have this expectation of our body that it “should do its job” no matter what and when it doesn’t it has failed us. It’s quite cruel when you think about it. But could it be that we have failed our body in some way?

My body is real. (I’m pretty sure.) But I also carry my own perception of my body and that perception is not always true. (Your perception is real, it’s just not always true or factual) The truth is I can’t always “see” what is true when I look at or even feel my own body. Sometimes the sensations in my physical body can be scary. Especially if you don’t know why they’re happening, they’re new or they can’t be diagnosed. They're supposed to be actually so that I’ll notice and do something about it. Pain, racing heart, butterflies, muscle tension and others are ways the body tries to communicate. I wish the language was less extreme because those things put us in a very fearful activated state but it’s by design. It’s only when those things last too long we learn to be hypervigilant, defensive and hostile towards our body. It’s like living with the enemy.Then living with the enemy becomes our normal, familiar state of being. We don’t deserve that. We deserve better. 

 “Resistance is futile”

It takes a lot of energy to fight the body. It’s a battle that we can’t win. The body’s only mission is to survive and it does whatever it needs to with or without your conscious permission to make that happen. We may not like how it’s doing that but we are on the same team. So we need to get on the same page of the playbook. 

The illusory aspect of annamaya kosha is interesting. Intellectually we can know that our body is ever changing because we grow and age. We can affect our body with the things we do. How we eat, drink, sleep, exercise of course has effects on our body. Different stages of life and development affect our body through childhood, puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, and aging in general cause fundamental changes in the body.  Today we have ways to chemically and surgically change the body as well. 

Naturally the body has an incredible, almost magical ability to adapt to whatever life we choose to live. But Maya also refers to the fact that the body can’t exist forever. At some point we die and the body ceases to exist in this form. We don’t get to keep our physical form after we die. 

The awareness of the mortality of our physical self, as we know and love it, might bring us a different perspective on who we are. 

So many of us derive our entire identity from our body and what it can do that we have a hard time when something changes and we can no longer work the same way, or do the same things, or when we experience some permanent or even temporary disability. It changes our world.

There are a lot of examples of this in the trauma space that we could look at. Amputations for example, traumatic brain injury or even something as seemingly small as hearing or vision loss can turn someone's life inside out. People who identify completely with their body can become very imbalanced when all of a sudden they perceive some kind of bodily failure.

The thoughts of “who am I if I can’t be a soldier?” “Who am I if I can’t provide for my family?” “Who am I if I can’t see?” 

The koshas teach that I am not my body. I am with this body right now. I am having a physical experience in this body. Because of that I am taking exquisite care of this body. Because it is a vessel for my true self. I carry within this physical body a subtle body. A polarity of energy, both masculine and feminine, pingala and ida that is woven through each chakra and kosha veil. The more I understand and use those energies the more balanced they become and the better I feel within my own skin. All of us have this balancing act going on within us.

So that begs the question who is the “I”. 

We are making our way there through the Koshas but we have a few more veils to get through. Next week we drop into the Pranamaya kosha, our “energy in motion” layer of self our veil of vitality and link between our physical and mental selves.

Thanks for listening!

 If you're looking for ways to handle the effects of stress, physically, mentally and emotionally through the body head over to savagegracecoaching.com/theworkin you’ll find all the show notes for this and other episodes plus lots of free resources. And if you’re in a place where you are ready for more and you live in the Dayton Ohio area I’m taking private clients for trauma informed yoga and trauma release exercise in person and online. So book a discovery call and we can have a real life conversation. And of course I’d be ever so grateful if you would take a moment to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening. 

Thanks again everyone and as always stop working out and start working IN.   

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