The Mouth as a Threshold

In last night’s Your Body Is Yours to Know cohort session, we explored our mouth and jaw. One of the things I found really interesting both in my pre-exploration and during our class was really thinking about the mouth as a threshold, a space of processing. It’s a space where we take things in for nourishment, and it’s important to hold space for chewing,for processing. 95% of our carbohydrates - foods like grains and starchy vegetables - are processed in our mouth with saliva as one of the tools that helps with that processing. When we don’t let our food sit in our mouth during that time for chewing, it makes it significantly harder for the carbohydrates to be processed. If our food is not broken into smaller bits, our stomach will have a harder time processing the proteins and our small intestines will have a harder time processing the fats. Also, as small humxns, chewing is important for building our jaw structure and strength. It was a really helpful conversation around the importance of chewing!

We also talked about thinking of the mouth as a threshold of sharing, of communication, and also of clearing. As we breathe out, it helps clear things from our body through that space. We also can share our voice through our mouths. We may have been taught in our upbringing to block our voice, to not share our truth. That can create an energetic and muscular block in our neck and jaw. It’s also important to recognize that, though we sometimes spit out words that aren’t really aligned with how we want to communicate with the world, can we offer the space of mouth not as a stopping space but as perhaps a slowing space, a space of pause in consideration of the words that truly aligned with our intention and truth. Can we still then allow the forward momentum and not have it blocked by this curiosity and questioning…the threshold of the mouth.