The Body Doesn't Lie

Classical physiology understands the body as an instrument for action. According to it, the function of muscles would be to do what we want to do - that's why it calls them "voluntary muscles". They move the body to put the self in contact with the world.

There is another function, involuntary and unconscious, that Physiology does not mention: the muscles express. Fundamentally, to express is to show what the person feels. The muscles move according to the emotions. When we receive an attack, without thinking, we protect our most fragile parts and we bend. Everything that happens in the emotional life is expressed by movements. Etymologically, expression means "outward pressure"; Emotion, "outward motion," they are almost synonymous.

When a unicellular amoeba finds something hostile in its environment it contracts and even paralizes. When its medium is adequate, it distends and extends pseudopodia. Does the amoeba also have emotions?

Our body, far from being a mechanical structure, says with its movements what we feel. The emotional life needs to be discharged, moved outward. It does so through movements and tensions. The energy we generate in the act of feeling uses the muscles as a way of unloading itself. Simultaneously, the entrails adapt to the needs of the organism in every moment of daily life. An unforeseen shock, for example, produces startle with gesture of terror and attitude of defense. At the same time, the heart beats harder and faster, breathing accelerates, we become pale, the sphincters loosen... there is a considerable discharge of adrenaline. All this is defensive and prepares us to face the aggression that brought about a change in our emotional life.

The world around us constantly impresses us in a thousand different ways. We live excited, impregnated with sensations and feelings. We spend our lives mobilizing psychic energy that is expressed by changes in muscle tone. We are permanently expressing. We can spend two minutes without breathing, but not a second without expressing. All movements - even the restrain of impulses- are expressions, the external image of our emotional life: what we feel, what we think, what we want.

The Best Witness

Movements have their own characteristics in each moment and in each person. "I move as I want," someone can assert with presumption. In truth he only moves as he can. That means that each person has a limit, determined by its constitution, its history, its tensions ... Each moves within its limits.

And with his particular way of being. Moving is a private property and no one can stop moving like himself. An observer can know what someone feels by watching as he moves; If he's trained he will know what is the nature of the personality by the attitude and shape of the body. Our bodies take their own form by moving always in the same way: each person has a different face and body from everyone else. As a permanent expression of individual ways of being, feeling, thinking we can not hide with the body what we disguise with words. Even the tone of our voice shows sometimes the opposite of what we say with them.

Understanding the messages of the body, learning to "read" it, requires a code based on an adequate capture of that language: for that we need a referential scheme that fits the reality of that which is observed and felt.

When we play the string of a musical instrument, our ear perceives a sound, the eyes see a movement and the finger feels a vibration. The phenomenon is one. It is the method of registration employed that divides it. In the same way, we manifest ourselves on different planes of expression just because we have these different ways of perceiving. We must be able to understand that fragmented expression dispersed in different centers, considering that it is the man unit that comes to our fractionated mode of knowing . The reality is total. The man is whole; By the way our perceptions are trained, we fragment them.

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Source of Images:
http://www.gamba.fm/wp/caracteristica-masculina-que-enamora-a-las-mujeres/
http://www.penard.de/Explorer/Amoebozoa/Tubulinea/Euamoebida/
http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-develop-lie-detector-for-tweets-2014-2
http://ed-guitar.com