A blog post based on a shower thought.
It recently struck me how the body is similar to a kingdom. You, your thinking brain being the king, ruling the land of the rest of the body.
Just like a king your brain is taxing the rest of the body, not for money, but for energy. Something that can fuel its electrical circuits like a battery. The more demanding the brain is in this, the more you think, the more the organs in the body have to work to supply it with energy. The more energy they give away, the more you are in a fight-or-flight mode, the less energy they have to repair themselves and go into regeneration.
As it easily happens with power, a king could turn out to be an unjust ruler. Your brain may be taxing for a lot of energy, but at the same time it can create problems in the organs. For example sending out stomach ache in moments of fear, tension into the throat in times of emotional hurt or general disease in the body, particularly the heart, in times of stress.
A body that is hurting or in a state of disease, will naturally generate problems for the brain. Until that emotional stress is resolved, the system is still in the state of disease and cannot function optimally. Extreme athletes know this, psychologists know this and also meditators know this.
Professional athletes will know on what days they can break their records and on what days they wont. Everything has to be right, including emotional stresses and distractions.
Mastery over the brain thereby naturally requires giving attention back to the body. One could say it requires a certain amount of balance. This giving back of attention and energy is one of the things that the brain can decide to do in regular meditation. You exit the thinking process and pay attention to the bodily sensations.
In doing so one thing that I found that tension and stress in the organs can be reduced or released. Breathing into areas that hurt is a common meditation technique to heal these kinds of stresses. Only once those basics are clear the meditation can move on to greater depths or bigger heights.
While the kingdom analogy is definitely not perfect, it could give you a useful pointer to something you might not be aware of. What is the state of your kingdom?