It is possible that you have attended a Practical Consciousness course or read the book “Practical Consciousness: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Addiction to Live A More Joyful Life”. Today, we focus on your five bodies and how to become aware of them during your daily activities. If you learn this, it can be said that you have achieved clarity and awareness in life. And is clarity and awareness needed in life to achieve your goals? Exactly, being aware of the five bodies in daily activities provides a foundation for mastering life management.

What are the five bodies?

We are used to thinking that we have only one body – that is what we’ve been taught since childhood. So, how are there five bodies? According to yoga teachings, a person consists of five fundamental aspects, which can also be called five different bodies. This is all intended to enable you to become aware of the processes related to each level, differentiating them from each other, understand their principles of operation, and, if necessary, intervene in them and change them. A set of specific methods has been developed for dealing with each body.

What are these five bodies?

These five bodies are divided as follows: the True Self, Consciousness (the intellectual body), the Mental Body, the Emotional or Vital Body, and the Physical Body. Altogether, these are known as the five-body system.

• True Self – This is your actual essence or your true self.
• Consciousness or the Intellectual Body – Closest to you is consciousness, which has seven qualities (sometimes also referred to as super-qualities): awareness, discernment, understanding, concentration, insight, intuition, and inspiration.
• Mental Body – This is both your memory, and the information contained within it, which manifests as spontaneous thoughts, mental images, and inner commentary.
• Emotional or Vital Body – This is the seat of emotions, providing the energy that enables the movement of the physical body.
• Physical Body – Everything you have learned about it in school or through self-study.

What offers the awareness of the five bodies during daily activities?

Everyone has experienced a moment when they need to pull themselves together and get something done, such as fulfilling New Year’s resolutions. You may have forced yourself, given yourself a “pep talk” (or even harsh self-criticism), overcome difficulties, and finally succeeded through sweat, tears, and great effort. Have you ever asked yourself if this is the only way or if there might be other options? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all that struggle could be avoided? Indeed, reaching a goal often involves effort, as it requires learning, understanding, adapting to new situations, and moving forward, but it doesn’t have to be so exhausting – at least not if you learn to navigate within your five-body system.

What provides navigating in the five-body system?

It seems to me that we greatly underestimate our abilities or have forgotten what we are capable of. If you think back briefly, do you remember the curiosity and openness you had as a child? Or, if you are a parent today, do you notice how lively children are and how interested they are in the world? The right question to ask here is: What happened to you, or what has happened to adults? Where has that curiosity and interest gone? If you look at the five bodies listed above, what questions would you ask about them? Perhaps questions like these:

• Regarding the physical body: Why does my lower back hurt, or why am I so tired by the evening?
• Regarding the emotional or vital body: Why do I feel uplifted when the day goes well and down when plans go awry?
• Regarding the mental body: Why is my inner dialogue encouraging when I need to motivate others but powerless when I need to get something done myself?
• Regarding the consciousness or intellectual body: When I distinguish between different activities in everyday life, can I do it without constant thoughts and emotional ups and downs, or even in a state of flow?
• Regarding the true self: Why do I suffer, and is it necessary, or could it be otherwise?

Simple questions, but when you look a bit deeper, quite difficult to answer, right? That is why it is good to learn to navigate your five-body system. It helps you understand what is happening with each of your bodies in real-time. If you see that, for some reason, you are not moving toward your goal, you can intervene and explore how you feel, discovering that you are feeling down, which is why things aren’t progressing. Then, by further exploring the thoughts circling in your mind at that moment, you might discover a thought that says, “I can’t handle this.” That is already a big win because now you have clarity and awareness –you know exactly what your feeling is and what thought is commenting on the situation.

How to reach the awareness of the five bodies?

Awareness of the five bodies happens step by step. At least it has been like that for me – a bit rough, at least at the beginning. But if you are consistent and understand that you really can become aware of what is happening with each body and intervene when things are not moving in the desired direction, it will ultimately give you control over your own life.

What to be aware of or notice regarding the five bodies?

My discovery of the five bodies happened as a natural part of life.

• Regarding the physical body, I discovered during training that when the pain became unbearably intense, I realized that I am not the pain I feel in my body due to muscle (over) strain. The same phenomenon occurred when I started observing all my other activities – I understood that I am not these activities.
• Regarding the emotional body, I discovered constant mood swings while writing my first book. Even though I had plenty of free and uninterrupted time to write. Anxiety, self-doubt, and hesitation still prevailed – experiencing all those ups and downs.
• Regarding the mental body, I discovered my thoughts when I heard the complaint that at the most terrible day. Well, it was – right from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. There was an overflow of negative emotions, with thoughts that both commented on and fueled them. When I discovered these thoughts and heard them as something separate from myself, I burst out laughing, which lasted about five minutes straight. It was very liberating because I realized that I am not my thoughts. At that moment, I also understood that thoughts are something separate from me, just like the physical and emotional bodies.
• As a result, a natural question arose (differentiation, understanding, and insight – the qualities of consciousness): How do I know that I have a physical body, an emotional body with all its energetic and fluctuating baggage, and commentary in my head? As a result, I discovered awareness, or attention. I was amazed at the dynamism and universality of this “tool.”
• I did not discover my true self until attention was drawn to it. Even though I understood that I am not a physical body, emotions, and thoughts, my true self-discovery occurred much later, in 2015, when I first participated in the Art of Conscious Change (TMK), which is now known as Practical Consciousness.

How to be aware of your five bodies in everyday activities?

We have reached the golden question. Based on my experience and journey, here are some tips that have helped me over the years to become a more conscious observer of my five bodies in everyday activities. If you start observing these bodies, here’s the first tip – do not judge these activities or yourself. This is a stumbling block, as it can decrease motivation and hinder reaching the end result. Judgment-free observation of your five bodies is the key. To achieve the desired outcome. I made an agreement with myself that for one week, while observing my five bodies, I would not make any judgments, even if I wanted to. This helped me maintain a neutral tone and be a pure observer. Like watching a movie on a screen, realizing that you are not any of the actors there, but merely the observer of the moving picture.

• For the physical body, observe the following:
  Track your time usage over the course of one week – for the best overview, mark in your calendar (I used a digital calendar in a weekly view) with half-hour accuracy what you actually did. Exactly what you actually did, not what you planned to do – update or change the calendar as needed when summarizing your day. By the end of the week, you’ll have fact-based information about where your time “went” or where you “invested” it. Yes, along the way, you may realize that you actually wouldn’t use your time that way, certainly not in such quantities, etc. But don’t change anything in your activities during this week while you observe the five bodies. You want to get the best information, and for that, neutral observation of what physically happens in your life is key. Be honest with yourself; the more honest you are, the better overview you’ll get. And if you don’t like something, it’s just one week out of your whole life.

• For the emotional body, observe the following:
  At the end of the day, when you summarize the day and write down the facts about what you actually did, note how you felt during each activity. In other words, what emotion did you predominantly felt while doing that particular activity? For example, when you were exercising, you might have felt motivated on one day but tired on another. The same applies to work – some tasks may have felt like being in a flow state, while after the meetings you felt frustrating. Again, honesty with yourself is the best feedback. For example, it may be easy for women to describe feelings or emotions, but men, here’s a tip just for you: Yes, you are capable of feeling various emotions, so write down what you actually felt, not what you thought or believed you felt. Even if it may be difficult in the first few days, it will become easier by the end of the week.

• For the mental body, observe the following:
  When summarizing the day, write down the first thought about why you did that activity. It’s the first thought you should focus on, and that answer comes quickly – in one to three seconds. If you start pondering over it, then it’s no longer the first thought. Why just one to three seconds? It’s important to understand that the first thought is an automatic thought that justifies the necessity of the activity – regardless of what the activity is. Just to be clear, the thoughts in your memory are not you or true self. So, when you get an answer about the reason for an activity, write it down, and again, ensure that you don’t judge what comes from memory, neither the activity nor your feelings. Simply observe everything neutrally, like watching a movie on a screen, describing what you see.

• For consciousness, observe the following:
  When summarizing your day, you certainly become aware of different activities, differentiate between them, and also recognize what you felt or thought while doing them. Notice whether, during the awareness, differentiation, understanding, deepening of these activities, or during any insights, intuition, or even inspiration, did you experience peace? Did this happen in silence? The emergence of the qualities of consciousness indeed occurs in the process of quiet analysis. Notice this analysis done in silence and peace, without mental comments or emotional turmoil. And when you discover this, continue in it, as this leads to a significant increase in effectiveness in your daily activities.

• For the true self, observe the following:
  If asked at the end of the week, who observed the activities of the physical, vital, mental body, and consciousness? Or who felt the emotions behind each activity? Or who heard the reasoning behind each activity? You probably answered all of these with “I,” right? Exactly, you are the one who knows these were the physical activities; the emotions add color to each activity (e.g., whether you liked it or not); the thoughts provide commentary (positive or negative), but you were the one observing all of this – the true self. It can also be said that you witnessed these activities happening in your physical, vital, and mental bodies, as well as in consciousness.

As I mentioned in the beginning, practicing the observation of different bodies takes time, but by applying this consistently. It is possible to achieve lasting clarity and awareness what is happening. Continuous awareness ensures the possibility to intervene in processes at an early stage when obstacles are appearing. If you also know different methods that help to remove these obstacles, life becomes more effective, calmer, and more enjoyable. I wish you a fruitful journey in observing your five bodies.