“I’m in such a fog today”…”if I only had a brain”…”brain fart”…these are some of the ways we’ve described our state of affairs when we feel our mental bodies to be dysfunctional. How does one heal a mind? First off, who really knows what the mind is? Is the mental body our thoughts? A crucible for making decisions? A psychic radio, tuning in strong, clear signals and homing in on weak ones? Our own private study? How private is this study, anyhow?

I would say the mental body is a halfway house, the balance point, between our spirits and our emotional and physical bodies. It receives input coming up from “below” (physical/emotional) and “above” (spirit) and synthesizes that input, hopefully into something cohesive.

Thinking in western culture is often a proactive activity, and I’m not so sure that is the right role for our mental body. A healed mind might look more like Mr. Spock, offering information and its considered opinion when asked, but otherwise staying behind the scenes, leaving the final decision and spring into action to Captain Kirk (playing the role of the physical body, which in my ideal model is the part of us who “leads”). Spock never took over, he never initiated the action; he waited to be asked, and had usually considered all the angles, because he had all the information at his disposal.

Spock’s downfall, and our mental body’s in its unhealed state, is its disconnect from the rest of the self. Through damage or trauma, our spiritual essence, our “I-ness”, the part we identify as “Me”, does not descend all the way into our physical and emotional bodies, but merely has a toe dipped in those waters, and lodges some of itself in the mind, leaving its majority floating somewhere just outside the Self. Without spirit fully integrated into the emotional and physical, the “road” leading to our halfway house is in such shoddy repair that in many cases it is undriveable, impassible. There is no flow of information, so mind does not have all the information…only what has worked or not worked in the past, and thus it is inevitably trapped in the same space that Spock’s great mind was trapped: in the seductive vice-grip of The Great God of Logic. A cold, calculating god indeed.

Physical activity such as dancing or hiking helps draw the spiritual and mental bodies into closer contact with the physical and emotional. Intuition and spontaneous visions become unlocked as the mental and spiritual bodies “descend” into corporeal reality. Ever notice how much more alive and clear your thoughts and visions become at various moments while receiving a bodywork session? Integration is happening; the “road” is being repaired, information transfer is restored between emotions, body, and mind.

Stretching, yoga, bodywork (either on one’s self or via a practitioner), and somatic exercises help deepen breathing and help the whole system slow down, especially the mind and its whirling thoughts, by helping spirit descend more into Body. When the spiritual body is fully integrated with the physical and emotions are being noticed and felt, mind becomes more fully embodied as well, and enters the “Now Moment”. Habitually, our mental bodies like to take off into the past or future, and at those times, we are not fully present.

The role of judgments, also known as belief structures and expectations, are like walls that compartmentalize and narrow the mind, and this is the main area in which the mental body needs healing.