A blog begins

A blog begins.
Its purpose: to catalyze a shift in how we experience our bodily selves.

Why? So that we can learn to find, trust, and move with the wisdom--yes, wisdom--in sensations of desire and frustration, yearning and depression, pleasure and pain.

Is it possible to shift our experience of our bodily being?
Isn’t our experience simply raw data given to our minds to interpret?

Yes and no. Our sense of what a body is, and of what our own bodily selves are, is something we learn as we move through the years of education it takes to become an adult in the contemporary world.

For example, when we are born, we do not recognize our hands as ours; by the time we choose a career, we decide how to employ these hands for our maximum benefit. In between we learn what our hands are, how to direct their movement, and how to perceive and respond to sensations of pleasure and pain they transmit as they move. The same dynamic is true for every aspect of our sensory awareness.

In contemporary society, we do not learn to experience our bodies as sources of wisdom. We can hardly imagine it. We learn, rather, to identify ourselves with our mental capacity, and to experience our bodies as material objects, biochemical machines, that we inhabit and should control.

The implications of this training are everywhere evident, as we shall see, in the patterns of persistent, recurrent, and chronic pain, physical, emotional, and spiritual, experienced by many individuals across all walks of society. We have lost the ability to understand our bodily sensations as guiding us to move in ways that will enhance our health and well being.

Nevertheless, if we can accept that our experience of our bodily selves is something we learn over time, then it follows that we can also learn to sense and respond to our bodily life differently--and perhaps in ways that acknowledge and attend to its, that is our, wisdom. It is a wisdom present in our bodies' infinite capacity for movement.

This is the challenge raised here: to find wisdom where we least expect it--in our bodily life. Every week, drawing on my experience as a scholar and author, dancer and choreographer, life partner and mother of four, I offer a spread of ideas, anecdotes, and exercises; as well as analyses of both relevant scholarship and current trends in contemporary attitudes towards human bodies. I invite you to share your thoughts and experiences in response.

To begin....

Body/Block:
Which of the following best characterizes your sense of bodily self:
1. I have a body.
2. I live inside a body.
3. I am responsible for controlling, disciplining, dressing, and decorating my body.
4. I am a body.
5. I am the movement that is making me.

Chances are, most of us feel most comfortable with one of the first three, and perhaps the fourth. It is not surprising. Nearly ever aspect of our culture teaches us to perceive our "bodies" as material objects within which “we,” as minds or spirits or souls, dwell.

For one example, take a look at our systems of education, and the years we spend learning to become readers and writers. We learn to sit, for hours a day, grade after grade, so that “we” can learn to manipulate ideas and facts, numbers and formulas, pencil and keyboard. We learn to think and feel and act as if we were minds operating in and over our passive bodies. We learn to experience our bodily sensations as obstacles to our success, as problems to fix. If we can’t sit, we don’t fit.

The fact is, we could not think these thoughts about ourselves as minds operating in and over bodies without the breathing, beating hearts, without currents of water and warmth, without the relationships with other bodies that enable us to do so.

So what? Our bodies are, first and foremost, movement--and not just any movement. Our bodies are the movement that is making us who we are--able to think and feel and act as we do.

What would it be like to experience our bodily selves as the rhythmic movement that is making us who we are? What capacities for thinking, feeling, and acting would such a shift in our experience of ourselves open in us?

With such an experience shift, it is possible to discern the wisdom in sensations that we might otherwise be inclined to ignore, numb, or repress. It is a wisdom guiding us to move in ways that will enable us to unfold what we have to give. It is a wisdom, as we shall see, that impacts our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the world.

We begin to realize that all we have to offer the world is the work that the satisfaction of our desires demands.

Reflection:
Take a few minutes to think through an ordinary day. Think about what you do. When do you wake up? How do you wake up? What do you first? Next? Go through the whole day, and as you do, pay attention to what your body is doing at each moment of the day. Is "it" standing? Sitting? Walking? Being washed? Being fed? Being exercised? Put to work?

Now ask yourselves. How often do you touch the ground with anything but the soles of your feet? How often do you sit on anything but a chair-shaped apparatus?

Imagine, in your mind, that your day is a dance. What movements would that dance involve?

For most people, the range of motion required to get through a day is small. We sit to work, eat, relax, visit, commute, and even exercise; we stand in between and occasionally, lie down. For the most part, we move in ways that do not draw our attention into our bodies. As we do, we learn to think and feel and act as if "we" really were minds who are responsible for managing and organizing our bodies. It seems logical, even common sense. It isn't.

Next week:
Why does the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies fail to serve our health and well being? What do we need instead?