What is Mental Health?

I am lying on the floor, knees held gently against my chest. My heart hurts. Thoughts flail and screech in ear-splitting rings around my head. Why did she say that? Doesn’t she understand? Who does she think I am? Why can’t she see me?

The pain sticks under my ribs, sucking vital energy in and down. I don’t want to move. I can’t. My stomach is locked shut. I just want to curl up in the palm of this gripping pain and dissolve into nothingness.

I breathe again (I can’t help it) and exhale sharply. I cling to my knees, drawing them in tight. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to open my body, my self. I don’t want to be this vulnerable. I want to be safe, protected, enclosed like a small hard ball.
*
What is mental health?

I take my cue from the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. “Great health” is an ability to digest our experiences. To digest or metabolize experiences is to take whatever is given in any moment—any thought, feeling, or sensation, any cruel word, kind act, or humiliating fall—and transform it—by chewing, mashing, churning, breaking it down—into a sweet stream of energy capable of nourishing our ongoing bodily becoming.

We humans are essentially creative at a sensory level. Our bodily selves are always sensing, always moving, always creating the patterns of sensation and response that make us who we are. Some of that bodily movement—firing and wiring—gives rise to a thinking mind as an inward extension of our bodily self. Our minds are tools that our bodily selves create in order to help us live well. Minds look forward and back. They predict what will happen on the basis of what has been. They calculate options and risks, and all in the service of keeping our bodily selves moving, creating, thriving, becoming who we are.

A healthy mind, then, is one that helps us embrace our experiences as occasions to discover the range and reach of what our bodies know. A healthy mind is one that finds in whatever fear, anger, sadness, despair, irritation, confusion, or frustration we feel, a potential for pleasure that has yet to unfold—an energy and guidance impelling us to move in relation to ourselves and others in ways that align our well-being with the challenge at hand. A healthy mind helps us move in life-enabling, experience-metabolizing ways.

Sometimes, however, our minds get sick: they can’t help us move. Nearly half of all adults, at some point in our lives, will endure times of acute mental, physical, and emotional suffering, and find ourselves unable to work, play, eat, sleep, or open deeply to others—times when we are arrested by anxiety or depression, anger or fear, compulsions or addictions, and unable to digest our experiences.

Why sick? Why stuck? We live in a culture that teaches us to ignore the movement of our bodily selves. From the earliest age, we learn to think and feel and act as if we were minds living in bodies. We learn to identify our “self” with our mental power; we learn to perceive our “body” as material thing for which “we” are responsible. Then, when faced with the stress of a life-altering change, a critical decision, or draining fatigue, we tend to mobilize the resource we think is best: mind over body. We try to control our bodies: we impose diets, schedules, and plans, or rely on drugs and surgery to exact a will we lack. We distract and numb, starve and indulge our sensory selves. We rehearse a separation from our bodily selves that prevents us from feeling what we are feeling. Our emotions remain lodged in our throats and bellies and hearts and limbs, undigested, causing so much depression and despair.
*
As I breathe again, unable to help it, I feel it. In spite of myself, I feel something new—a sensation of the earth pushing up from below me. I am not falling into a black hole. I am resting on a presence that is larger than me that is pressing up through me and holding me up.

Instinctively, I let go. I can’t help it. I breathe again and drop into the earth, holding on to nothing. Emptying my mind. The plug in my heart releases and sensations of disappointment and despair run through me, along me, out of me, into the earth.

In spite of myself, impulses to move arise within me—I feel them—expressions of the irrepressible, undeniable flow of life that will not stop beating and breathing, growing and healing, searching for new ways to move through me. My mind resists, holding on to fear, but my bodily self knows more.
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Our hungers are prophetic. The scope and kinds of mental illnesses that we as individuals and as a culture are suffering are calling us to reconnect the activity of our minds with the movement of our bodily selves. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of the movements that are making us.

The truth is that at the heart of any and every pain is a desire—a desire to move, to love, to heal, to give, to receive. We would not even feel the pain of not caring if we did not care. And within every desire is in turn an impulse to connect—an impulse to create the relationships with whatever and whomever we need to support us in becoming who we are, and giving what we have to give.

When we move, we breathe. When we breathe, we feel. When we feel we open the floodgates to all of our searing sensations, past, present and future. But we also open ourselves to the possibility of sensing what is always true: that our bodily selves, in every moment of our lives, are providing us with vital information about how to move in ways that will not recreate the pain.

When we breathe to move and move to breathe we open to the possibility of sensing the wisdom in our desires. Whether we are wrestling with issues of food, intimacy, and purpose (see What a Body Knows) or with our parents, partners, and progeny (see Family Planting), how we move matters.
*
I breathe down again, along the stream of my spine, feeling the bed of earth cupping its flow. My experience shifts and I am suddenly aware of the desire at the heart of my pain.

I hurt. I hurt because I want. I want because I am alive. This desire, this life, is a power in me that is stronger than the fear. Stronger than the hurt. It is the point of the pain—to wake me up to the power of this desire. To my need to move.

A resolve appears. I take a small step. I can act out of my love and not my fear or anger. I can meet her where she too is hurt and coming toward me—in the heart of her desire for more. The knot of pain softens and unfolds in affirmation. I am OK. Healing happens.

When an Infant is Dying

A friend of mine, the writer Emily Rapp, has a one-year-old son named Ronan, which means "little seal."

In January, at age 9 months, Ronan was diagnosed with Tay Sachs disease, a progressive, genetic disease with no cure. Over the next couple of years, Ronan will slowly die. Emily was tested for Tay Sachs while pregnant, but the standard test only checks for nine primary varieties. There are hundreds of mutations.

Emily is keeping a blog of her experience, and asked me to contribute. Here is what I offered. For more about Ronan, please visit: Our Little Seal.
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Today, as I write my way into the ring of voices drawing together around Ronan, I marvel at what I hear. Throughout these pages sounds a sustained, tenacious refusal to grant any meaning, purpose, or reason to Ronan’s diagnosis. There can be none. There is no stroke of luck, no will of god, no hand of fate at work. There is only Ronan, sitting and smiling and dying and shattering our expectations of what would, could, and should be; only Ronan, as his squeezable self, reaching with pleasure for toys, ears, lips, fingers, and hearts. Only Ronan, slowly stilling, as the chorus around him swells.

What do we make of this?

We cannot not try to make something. It’s human. It’s what we do. We make things. Sometimes what we make is meaning, but not because we need meaning per se. We make things because we feel pain; we feel a feeling we don’t want to feel. We feel a feeling that impels us to find new ways to move—new ways to think, feel, and act that will not recreate, in this case at least, the despair at living in a world where beloved infants die. We make things because we can and want to move our bodily selves in ways that feel good—in ways that stir in us an affirmation of life.

So what do we make, what can we make, of this?

I am a philosopher and a dancer, on a mission to affirm bodily movement as a source of knowledge and even wisdom. I ask: what can a body know? Emily asks me: what does Ronan’s body know?

What does Ronan’s body know?

What every body is and knows: he knows how to move. He knows how to make the movements that make him who he is. Heart beating, lungs pulsing, nerves crackling, muscles firing, Ronan is making patterns of sensation and response that align his bodily self with the resources, the pleasures, the arms at hand. He is remembering these patterns (reaching, smiling, sucking, kicking), playing with them, and using them to explore his world (what happens when I suck toy, finger, bottle, block?). His sensory realm is open, not yet cluttered and confined by the culturally-inherited patterns of sensation and response encoded in objects, language, values, and ideas. He is in touch with freedom and a creativity that we too easily forget in our mind-over-body world.

So too, with every move that Ronan makes, he calls to those around him, inviting us to respond, such that we create and become our own patterns of sensing and responding that relate us back to him. We make new moves, consciously or not, opening up new spaces of sensation that are us that we would not have discovered were it not for him. We do so for our own pleasure—for more of the smile that lights our bellies, for the clasp of his squeezable self.

Yet as Ronan grows, he will stop remembering the patterns he has made. He will never extend his play to shapes or words or numbers. Moving less, he will sense less and respond less.

Even as patterns fade and his sensory span thins, however, Ronan will not stop making movements in the moment, for the moment, with whatever sensations he has and is. Ronan will keep exploring and playing with whatever appears, until there are no sensations left. Until he dissolves into light. It is what his body knows.

We, on the other hand, will not stop remembering the patterns we have made in response to him. Because of him, we have discovered stretches of sensation that we had not before. Our thoughts and feelings and arms will reach out for him and find that there is nothing there.

What are we to make of this?

Ronan is showing us the way. In making the movements that he is making—at the most basic levels of sensory creativity—Ronan invites us to do the same in response: to feel what we are feeling, and find in our pain an impulse to move.

So, we howl, weep, and flail; walk, dance, and sing; write, counsel, and agitate for change. And as we do, we know in our bodily selves what Ronan also knows—what he, is reminding us—that our primary pleasure as human beings lies in making new moves. Doing so, we bind ourselves back to life in an affirmation of what is.

Must we accept that nature toys with our hopes and dreams, indifferent to our desires? Must we believe that we are out of control, at the mercy of forces of creation and destruction beyond our imaging?

No, for as we experience the power of our own movement, we know viscerally and palpably that we too are part of nature. Life is very much for us, actively creating the world through us, at least in the scope and scale of our moving, making bodily selves and the rings of relationships we create to sustain them.

Nevertheless, in becoming parents, we open ourselves to a conundrum faced in some degree by every person who cares to create in whatever medium they prefer. What comes through us and into the world is both wholly and thoroughly ours, and a complete mystery.

In becoming parents, we open ourselves to a combined stream of genetic material, reaching back 400 generations, that pools in our cells, waiting to (pro)create. We open in this way because we want more in our lives. We want to know more, experience more, give more, become more than we are and have been. We open because, at some level, we know there is more to love.

Yet we never know what will emerge. We open to welcome as a very cause of our being something or someone we do not know. Something that in its ultimate mystery is still us, extending our sensory surfaces. Our vulnerability in the world. Our hopes and dreams and desires. We feel with and for and through our children because we are them and they are us.

Here then lies the ultimate parenting challenge: how can you affirm the life of what is (also) you to such a degree that you are willing to let it live, on its own terms, in its own way, according to its own logic, even when that law and logic baffles?

It is tempting to think that Ronan can be separated from his Tay-Sachs gene, but I do not believe that this is true. Ronan is who he is—his sweet and magical self—because of that gene. He would not be who he is without it. The movements he is making invite responses in us.

Ronan is perfect as he is. He is unfolding in time as the nature in him desires. Our hearts break, our minds protest, our limbs flail through empty space, but Ronan is perfect. And once we affirm this, we are free to move with him, to be the movements with him and for him that will allow him to complete the arc of his life as fully and richly as possible. We let go. We let live. It is what we can do. It is love.

Tales of a Moose Mother

The fire storm unleashed by Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” (besides being a publicist's dream) swirls around a hot-button question that has dominated discussions of parenting and education since the 1960s: how do you help kids develop a strong self-esteem? 

While Chua, a self-named “Tiger Mother,” doesn’t herself claim to have a “superior” method that would work for everyone, she does accuse “American” parents of coddling their children’s egos by protecting them from overly-harsh criticism or demands, in the belief that self-esteem produces achievement. “Chinese” parents, she counters, convinced of their children’s inherent strength, hold high demands and lavish pointed criticism, in the belief that achievement produces self-esteem.

Many of Chua's critics, however, share a common assumption that self-esteem rides on a perception of ourselves as being the best at something—whether it is schoolwork, music prowess, or parenting.

We all want to be the best. Why else would the WSJ choose the provocative “superior” in its title for Chua’s piece? Why else would so many readers lunge for the bait and disagree?

Even those respondents who claim that there is no formula for parenting, that every child is different, and that every relationship must find its own logic, do so from a place of wanting to be the best parent, or the better parent, for their own children at least.

So, what is wrong with wanting to be the best? Nothing. It is as “American” as it is “Chinese” as it is human.

However, there is a problem when we tie our self-esteem to a perception of ourselves as being better than someone else. For when we do, we bind ourselves—and our children—to an obsessive practice of comparing our accomplishments with those of others, ever suspicious and resentful of anyone who appears to be better than we are. We train ourselves and our children to perceive such individuals as threats to our well-being. So cramped and bound, our competitive spirits generate insecurity, fear, and bitterness in us.

Is that what we want for our children? Or for ourselves? 

I remember the day that I learned: there are other moves to make.

*

I am about to dive into the pool for my regular workout. I am looking for a lane in which the swimmers are swimming more slowly than I do. I know that I always feel better and more energetic when I am passing others, rather than being passed.

Then I see her—the lone swimmer in her lane—swimming undoubtedly faster than I can. I stand there, mesmerized by the smooth rhythms of her churning limbs and split-staccato of her dashing flip-turns. An inner cry erupts: I want to swim like that!

Ordinarily I would avoid her lane. She is faster than I am. But this time I jump in eagerly, knowing she will lap me many times, and secretly glad. I will have more chances to watch her, and to learn from her how to move with such a graceful, easy flow.

My workout that day was one of my best ever. I hopped out of the pool, suffused with joy and celebrating with gratitude the strength of the woman who was a better swimmer than I was. I was free to affirm my self, and thus, free to learn how to become more.   

*

Wanting to be the best is not a problem. This desire to be the best is what motivates us to learn from other people how to do what we want to do better than we are doing it. It is a vital energy that opens us to the benefits of being the social creatures that we are. 

At the same time, in order to take full advantage of this energy, we must detach our sense of self-esteem from a perception of ourselves as better than others. 

In this process, it helps to remember several crucial facts. First, any measure of “best” is arbitrary. There can be no absolute best—only various sets of hurdles and obstacles designed to pull out aspects of an infinite human potential at a certain time and place. Second, on any measure you choose, there will always be people who do what you do better than you do, and others who don’t. Third, as a result, it makes no sense to tie your self-esteem to being better than anyone at anything. It is simply impossible to be the best at anything other than being yourself.

Once you detach your self-esteem from the idea of being the best, then the path to making the best possible use of your competitive energies lurches into view: celebrate the accomplishments of others, especially, those who seem to be better than you at doing whatever you want to do. Acknowledge them. Applaud them. Open to them. And when you do, you will be free to learn from them all they have to teach you about how to be the best... at who you have the potential to be. 

The same holds for our children, and we can help them learn so by being and becoming the best that we can be.

Call it Moose Mothering.

*

I wake in the morning, surrounded by mist. Crawling out of my sleeping bag, I perch on the edge of the lean-to, looking out into the wilderness I know surrounds me. I can see for twenty feet before my vision disappears into shrouds of gray. Geoff and I are here camping, at the foot of Mount Katahdin, in Baxter State Park, hoping to summit today. I am five months pregnant with my first child, wondering at the changes this small being will bring to our lives, wondering what kind of parent I will be.

A rustling to my right turns my head. A moose cow lumbers into view, calmly nosing about in the underbrush, paying no attention to me. I pay attention to her.

As she passes into the clearing in front of the lean-to, a calf prances out of the bush behind her, quickly catching up. He gazes around, meets my eye, glances at his mother, and then sinks his nose into the underbrush too. Two steps behind, three feet below, he is doing exactly what she is doing, making her moves. He lifts his head again, peers around, and returns to his nibbling.

 I watch her some more. She is not looking at him. She doesn’t react to his antics. She stays the course of her own nourishment. Yet as I watch her, I know: her every cell is alert and alive to his presence. She smells, hears, and feels where her calf is with every sensory surface. If her calf strayed too far or fell in the way of harm, she would be there in an instant, all heft and hooves.

The thought flares through my mind: it’s perfect parenting. This moose mother is making the movements she would ordinarily do, with an expanded, heightened sense of self. Everything she does is more important than it ever was, for the little one is learning from her how.

At that moment, I vowed to be a Moose Mother, making the moves in my own life that I want my children to make in their own.

*

So, I applaud Amy Chua for having such accomplished daughters! I congratulate her for staging such a stunning book release! (My family memoir won’t be out until June.)

Give Thanks for Pain? You're Kidding

A question often arises in response to my book, What a Body Knows: What if my body is wrong? It isn't doing what I want it to do--it hurts! Where is the wisdom in that?

While I have addressed the issue indirectly in other blogs (see below), it is time to address it head on. At the heart of the matter is the question of pain: what it is, how we sense it, and how we respond to it.

Pain, together with pleasure, comprise the primary feedback available to our thinking selves about how well the movements we are making in the world are making us.

My aim (or one of them) in writing What a Body Knows was to shift our experience of pain along (at least) four registers, in each case, moving from a mind over body perspective to one that affirms our sensations of pain as resources guiding us along the path of our own unique bodily becoming.

1) Part/ Whole: When we hurt, our mind over body tendency is to identify the pain with one part of ourselves, isolate that part from the rest, and work to make "it" go away. Whether our head hurts, our stomach cramps, our back aches, our hips creak, our heart pines, or our energies flag, we either try to ignore our sensations, or we become obsessed with fixing them. Pain is the problem. "I" must fix "it."

However, when we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement--the movement of creating and becoming patterns of sensation and response (as described in What a Body Knows)--we realize that any manifestation of pain in one part of ourselves always expresses a movement pattern that engages every moment of ourselves, physical to spiritual. A part is part of a whole, and that whole is what is hurting.

The implications are several. Because any pain involves a whole person, any healing must also engage the whole person. Any effective response will involve integrating the part into the whole, understanding the connections among person parts, and discerning as best we can how the movements we are making are creating this pain as a guide to move differently than we are now.

2) New/ Old: When something begins to bother us, we also tend to think of the pain or illness or injury as new--that is, as a departure from our otherwise usual or normal healthy state. Most pain feels accidental. It comes upon us as a surprise that we were not expecting. We experience it as an obstacle to our forward motion.

However, once we understand our bodily selves as movement, we realize that by the time we feel a part of ourselves as pain, the whole-body patterns that that pain is expressing have already been in play for a while and at many levels of our existence. Our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others, the movements we make as we go about our usual activities, our hopes and fears, as well as our general outlook on the world, are all, to greater and lesser extents, bound up in the pain.

The implication here is that healing involves recreating patterns of sensation and response that have been at work for a long time, slowly creating a situation where we feel a particular point of pain. Healing takes time.

3) Read/ Felt: Further, when people acknowledge the importance of "listening" to their feelings of discomfort, they often talk about reading "the" body or listening to "the" body, as if there is an "I" that exists above and apart from the body who can see it, know it, and fix it.

However, the kind of wisdom that our bodily selves have is not a formula or a schema that "we" can read and then impose upon our bodies, so as to make them do what we want to do, and stop hurting.

The kind of wisdom our bodily selves are is an ability to sense impulses guiding us to move in ways that will coordinate our pleasure, our health, and our well being. This is who we humans are--this impulse to connect with whatever will support us in becoming who we are. We can and must connect with other people, with elements, with our own bodily selves, with ideas, activities, and cultural forms in order to unfold our skills and abilities.

In every case, as we connect in life-enabling ways, we learn something more about how to move in ways that will connect us more effectively with what nourishes our well-being. This is what pain teaches us: not how to deal with it, and not to obsess over it, but how to discern and move with whatever impulse to connect it represents.

Pain is a desire to be free from it. Yet unless we allow ourselves to welcome it as offering us vital information about our selves and situation, we will not fully grasp that desire.

Pain is not holding us back. It is calling us to be free from whatever is holding us back.

4) Responsible/ Participating: Where I am moving with this line of thought is far from the all-too-common self-help theme: you can heal yourself. People seem to think that once they acknowledge their pain and admit that their sensations have something to teach them, then any pain they feel is their fault. They are responsible for healing themselves. When the pain persists, self-judgment can weigh heavily.

Once we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement, however, we realize that pain is not our fault, that "we" are not responsible for our pain, and that "we" cannot heal ourselves. Rather, healing is who we are: it is an ever-ongoing process in which our bodily selves are ever and forever active. In this process, our pain is helping us appreciate how and where our healing energies have more potential for creating us anew. What that "we" can do is learn how to align our mental energies with the trajectories of healing already at work in our bodily selves.

The question then is this: how can we participate in our healing as consciously as possible?

What a Body Knows offers a response: if we cultivate a sensory awareness of how our movements are making us, we have what we need to begin to discern the wisdom in feelings of disease, discomfort, dissatisfaction, and depression.

It is not just a matter of allowing ourselves to feel what we are feeling, though such mindfulness is an important first step. Nor is it a matter of identifying the patterns of mental, emotional, and physical movement that are knotting us. What is most important is being able to open a space in ourselves where we can find in our sensations our core desires, our impulses to connect, and begin to move with them, in ways that do not recreate the pain that troubles us.

Every pain is a potential for pleasure that is yet to unfold.

For more blogs on this topic:
1. about the seemingly pointless pain of the flue: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/201008/what-do-you-do-the-flu
2. about the limits of "listening" to your body
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/200909/the-limits-listening-your-body

Movement = Play = Love

Every time I turn around these days, Leif is standing on top of a table, grinning broadly. At sixteen months old, my son is a stealth mover, quick and quiet. If I simply look away for an instant, he pulls out a chair whose seat is as high as his chest and levers himself onto its flat expanse, using a dip of his shoulders and head to haul up his legs. He then lifts one leg to the side to bridge the span from chair seat to table top, and pulls up to standing.

Why? He's not usually after any object in particular--he is not even tall enough to see what is up there--though once there he inevitable notices his brother's glass of milk or an uncapped marker. He climbs spontaneously, almost instinctively, whenever a chair enters his field of perception. Or a couch; the toy box; a flight of stairs. A parental leg, or a sister's back.

What motivates him, it seems, is less any retrievable object than the doing of the movement itself--the sheer joy of its accomplishment. He is in a phase where this urge to climb is his movement pattern of choice for connecting with his world and discovering what it has to offer him: what new sights and sensations will this chair-climbing, table-scaling move generate in me?

Leif's play reminds me: movement matters. Moving our bodily selves is not just about strengthening our muscles so that we can hold up our heads. How we move is about how we play. How we play is about how we learn. And what we are born to learn is how to love.
*
I have been watching Leif move since before he was born, and seen a progression not only in the kinds of movements he has made, but in the focus of his play with those movements. At each stage, he is learning and making new movements, for sure, but he is also exploring different qualities of bodily movement itself, motivated, in every case, by an impulse to discover and connect with whatever will provide him with the nourishing nurture he needs to thrive.

At first, Leif's movements seemed random and purposeless. His arms and legs fluttered and flailed. Any patterns were as chaotic as any current, with his physiological makeup banking the flow. The one exception was the movement he made to connect with the stream of sustenance coming from me. That move had purpose.

Yet it was soon evident that Leif's seemingly random movements were giving him all kinds of information about himself and his world. Every movement was a hook, pulling in impressions about how it felt to move that way and what happened when he did. Every movement yielded some new sensation of weight, force, and gravity; space, time, and causality; temperature, pressure, pleasure, and pain. His random movement was both pure play and systematic research at a sensory level about his self and world.

Some of the movements he was making connected him with a range of sensory pleasures that felt good--a nourishing flow, a warm embrace, a facial grin. These movements began to make him. He learned from them, repeated them, and as he did, the locus of his play began to shift. No longer was he playing with movement simply at the level of sensation, he began playing with movement patterns themselves. Aware of the pleasure that mouthing for milk provided, he was soon experimenting with what else he could put in his mouth. Would sucking on it yield the same nourishing connection?

There were other preferred patterns too. The same movement pattern that pulled his knees to his chest could curl him into his dad's arms, roll him over, and help him hold himself up.

His play with these movement patterns, again, began to open new registers of knowledge and new dimensions of play. Suddenly he was using his movement to play with objects, but not because the objects themselves were interesting. What he wanted to know was what his preferred movement patterns could do with whatever new item he could hold in his hand. If I bend my arm at the elbow and hurl my hand forward, what will happen to this ball? Or a sock, a piece of toast, or my brother's truck?

Soon enough, Leif was honing in on particular objects and exploring the different movement patterns he could make and with what results. That spoon could get apple sauce to his mouth. It could also leave a broad smear of it across his chest, make a clanging sound when hit against his cup, and when dropped from the high chair, verify that gravity indeed works.

Suddenly a ball was really exciting, because of all of the different movement patterns it enabled him to make. He could throw it, kick it, sit on it, play toss with it, and put it into his wagon.

This object-oriented play is what we typically mean by the term "play." When we think of play, we think of toys--objects specifically designed to elicit developmentally appropriate patterns of movement.

Even then, however, as most parents know, the best "toys" are found and not made. Leif can spend long minutes with a plain cardboard box, climbing into it and back out again, putting on the lid and taking it off, turning it upside down and sideways, loading it up with other toys, and taking them out again. The box is so exciting precisely because it doesn't preprogram his play. It requires, or enables, him to play at the levels of sensation, movement patterns, and patterns of relating. The possibilities are infinite.

The same is true for table tops. What can't you do on them?

*
The play with the sensory and patterning potentials of movement that I see in Leif is never over. We humans are ever and again mobilizing the movement patterns we know in relation to new contexts, objects, and persons, looking for connections that will yield the sensations of pleasure we associate with nourish and nurture. The sensations of pleasure we associate with love.

The objects with which we play, of course, evolve. As we grow, we move to emotions and sounds, words and imaginary realms, books and songs and dances and cultural forms of all kinds, in an increasingly complicated network of movement patterns. Yet in every realm, we play--making movements we know in order to open us to what we do not. We move to connect in life-enabling ways with what our movement is constantly revealing to us.

Yet, this observation also yields a withering critique of our culture's chronic and characteristic ills. Our realms of play have dwindled to such an extent that we rarely if ever play at a sensory level, or even the level of pattern making. We no longer know what to do with boxes or spoons, a blank sheet of paper or a blank hour. We prefer toys that will tell us which moves to make, and games that remove us to a finite world of someone else's making. We play with objects designed to exercise and reinforce particular sensory and kinetic options--not open new ones. We play with ideas, with information, and with plans for the future, but not with our sensory, movement-making selves. Even when we move, we want to learn someone else's forms, to "play" by someone else's rules.

We claim that we have no time for play, but time is not the issue. The issue is that we have forgotten why movement matters. We no longer value the ability to make new movements, to find our own movements, from within the infinite range of our sensory potential--movements that will connect us in life-enabling ways to the places and persons who matter most.

We have forgotten that the ability and the willingness to discover new sensory moves is very skill that enables us to learn to move with another, dance with another, in a word, learn to love.

When was the last time you climbed onto a table?

What Do You Do with the Flu?

Sometimes, what our bodily selves know is not obvious. So it was with the case of the flu I contracted two weeks ago. It was a Monday evening. The symptoms began as soon as I pressed “publish” on my last blog entry. My skin felt hot and prickly. It hurt to move. I felt generally strange, askew in myself. I rushed to get everything and everyone washed and put to bed as soon as possible, so I could be too.

Tuesday morning was worse. I stood up and nearly passed out. Nausea churned my stomach; I broke into a cold, clammy sweat. Not good. I felt as if I were turned inside out. My skin ached and pulled when I moved. My head reverberated with a glistening pain. I set my sights on bed, wondering. Why this? Why now? The blog had been the last of several assignments I needed to complete before diving in to a major project I was hungry to do. Does my bodily self know anything? My mind was blank.

As I crawled into bed, a wave of relief washed through me. I don’t have to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. I don’t have to fight. I can rest. The flash of relief was soon swallowed by a fierce discomfort. I don’t want to be here. My bodily self was a hostile environment, and I wanted out. Now.

I doubled back and set out to heal myself. I tried the cycle of breaths. I tried circular breathing. I tried colors and lights and flooding myself with feelings of love. I couldn’t move the pain. None of my methods, tried and true, were working. The pain would ebb ever so slightly, only to crash back at the slightest break of concentration. I couldn’t find a way to sink inside it and through it to a deeper wellspring of health, as I so often do. Something else was going on.

Meanwhile, my mind clamored relentlessly. Hopelessly obsessed with the unanswered emails in my inbox, my mind kept composing “I’m sick!” messages I was too ill to send.

I kept asking myself: what does my body know? What am I supposed to do with this pain? I had no ideas. No insights. Just empty pointless rambling. It was as if the pain were a wall separating my chattering mind from the silent knowing of my sensory self. Bereft of its sensory ground, my mind was mindless, lost, in exile. It was running in circles, unable to connect with any insight, unable to move my bodily self in any way.

One thought broke through: maybe my mind is always this dependent, always this unable to function without its sensory ground.

As the morning progressed, so did the dis-ease. Wrapped in fleece, piled under two down comforters, on a balmy summer day, I convulsed with cold. I tried to eat. I am still nursing. Two bites and I couldn’t swallow another. It was strange. I had no congestion or altered digestion; no sore throat, cough or other tubal ailment. I had never known that this layer of my sensory self could register so much pain without involving the rest. What was going on?

I checked in with a nurse to make sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious. She recommended Tylenol. I never take Tylenol. The bottle at the bottom of our bathroom drawer sported an expiration date of 2003. I took two. Within twenty minutes I felt the numbing effects. My body fell silent and I fell asleep, hoping my bodily self would heal without me.

That night I was too hungry to sleep, too nauseous to eat. I lay awake, too hot and too cold, head pounding, perched on my side, trying to make room for a restless toddler who couldn’t understand why the milk wouldn’t come.

One stream kept me going. Water. I could drink. I wanted to drink. I had to drink. Bottle after bottle of clear, cool, cleansing water. Usually it makes me sick to drink water on an empty stomach. It didn’t.

On Thursday morning, the pain finally, suddenly, let go. A large metallic sheet dropped from the back of my head, and slid away. The sky opened up above me. My bodily self began to reappear. I sunk in and began to reconnect with my sensory self.

I felt weak; echoes of the pain trembled at the edges my awareness. Yet joy steadily gathered. Food was revolting, but I cast about, trying to imagine something I would want. Saltines and ginger ale? Geoff went to the corner store and bought the only box of saltines on the shelf. It was dusty; the crackers stale. I popped them into the oven, nibbled a few and stopped, wanting to want to eat.

Hours later, a first breath of hunger returned. It was the sweetest sensation I have ever felt. Oh to be hungry! To want to nourish myself! To be able to give myself the pleasure of nourishing myself! To be able to feel and move with the sensations of meeting this life-enabling desire!

This sweet hunger—it is what my body knows.

I was careful. The hunger was fragile. I paid attention, wanting always to pay such attention.

Then, as I began to eat, small amounts, crackers and cheese, I felt the hum. My bodily self was humming. Humming. I lay down and closed my eyes to investigate. There was a glow, a vibrating halo, emanating from the shape of my bodily self. Currents of energy crossed and swirled, in shimmering colors and complex textures. My bodily self was humming in response to the food, in celebration of its own healthy hunger, in its return to consciousness. My mind rested in its embrace.

Thoughts welled—the sweet insights for which I had been yearning. This hum is me. It is the movement that is making me. It is not just a hum that I hear; it is the hum through which I hear—the medium in which any awareness that “I” have, any ideas or imaginings, appear as ripples and waves, patterns of possibility. Any thought that I have and am is a vibrational echo of this bodily hum.

Soon I was swimming in gratitude at this inexplicable gift. The fever had ignited a new sensory awareness—a register of possible experience I would mine again and again for insights. Already I knew: it was what I needed to complete the project I had been so hungry to begin.

What does a body know? How to hum. How to heal. How to transform pain into understanding. How to dance.

Radical Homemaking: A revolution in progress?

Forty-five minutes from now my cultured milk will be ready for the next stage in the cheddaring process. It’s time to write, for I’ve been stirring thoughts while stirring this foamy white elixir that my son and daughter pulled a couple of hours ago from the teats of our three cows.

I am thinking about an excellent book I just read by Shannon Hayes called Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. At the heart of the book are a set of home visits Hayes made to twenty families and individuals whom she describes as radical homemakers. These are people who are—how can I say it—like us. It has been five years since Geoff and I packed our belongings, sold our house, and left work, friends, and family to make art on a deserted farm in upstate New York.

Indeed, Hayes’ critique of contemporary culture lands close to home. In pursuit of affluence, she writes, we Americans of the western world have created an economic system that is ravaging the health of our selves, our communities, and the planet. In this “extractive economy,” women and men leave home to work for wages they spend to fill their emptied homes with food and domestic goods they no longer know how to make. These goods are generally produced in bulk, far away, by strangers working under exploitative conditions, as part of a production and distribution process that extracts resources from the earth, and leaves polluted air, soil, and water in its wake.

Page after page Hayes shells out the statistics: despite our relative affluence, we are not happier, healthier, or richer. We are depressed, stressed, and restless. Our local communities are weak; our planet is dying. Many of the jobs available to us are not what we consider meaningful work, and yet, because of those jobs, we don’t have time in our lives to do what matters most to us. “The extractive economy,” she insists, “is terminal” (58).

There must be a better way—or many better ways—and Hayes sets out to document what some intrepid explorers are discovering. These radical homemakers, as she describes, are transforming home from a place of consumption to a place where women, men, and children work together to grow, make, and create what is vital to their living.

I get up from my computer and check on my cheese, where it waits on the stove. The milk is still warm, a balmy 90 degrees. I add a half-teaspoon of rennet and stir for a minute, slowly, as not to slosh. I set the timer again. Another forty-five minutes and I should have a nice firm curd.

None of the radical homemakers Hayes describes milk a cow, but in the end, Hayes’s concern is not with the practical activities of homemaking themselves. She maps the phenomenon in general terms, describing three overlapping, cyclical phases: radical homemakers redefine wealth in terms of family, community, good food, pleasure, and health. They reclaim skills lost in the increasing dependence on corporations for our livelihood, including nurturing relationships, setting realistic goals, redefining pleasure, and cultivating courage. They work to rebuild society, engaging in civic, artistic, and entrepreneurial activities often in their communities. In these ways, Hayes insists, radical homemakers are building a bridge from an extractive economy to one that is “life-serving,” where the goal (she cites David Korten) is “to generate a living for all, rather than a killing for a few” (13).

As I reflect on this book, I am struck by how dangerous it is. Isn’t Hayes promoting a nostalgic escape to a romanticized home life that never existed? Isn’t she advocating poverty and deprivation for all? Doesn’t she risk perpetuating gender stereotypes that have trapped women in domestic drudgery, denying them the opportunity to share their talents with a larger public?

I chew on the thought as check on my cheese. The curd should be forming now, firm to the touch, floating in a halo of whey. I am making this recipe with three gallons of milk—a bit more than half of this morning’s catch. The rest we will skim and drink, churning its cream into butter and ice cream, making cottage cheese, yogurt, and mozzarella too. Later.

I turn back to Hayes, a radical homemaker herself. She is well aware of the dangers. A Ph.D. from Cornell who graduated with fistfuls of ambition, she is wrestling with these issues herself. It is why she is writing the book. It is why she lays out the historic, economic, and cultural contexts that enable her readers to appreciate how radical the work of homemakers is. As she explains, the history of the United States is a history of a shifting balance of power from homes to corporate institutions, spurred by industrialization, the rise of advertising, and the shift to a consumer culture. By embracing home as central to their living, then, radical homemakers are saying no to corporate dominance, and yes to good old American values of democracy, self-reliance, family, local community, and quality of life. Ambitious indeed.

Nevertheless, the question lingers: is it enough for homemakers to know that what they are doing is radical in these ways? Hayes admits, the radical homemakers who are “truly fulfilled” expand their “creative energies outward,” beyond their homes, in that third phase of rebuilding society. Home becomes the philosophical and practical base for “deeper social accomplishments”; “the fertile ground” that feeds a “deeper fulfillment” (250). As important as this rebuilding phase of homemaking is to her thesis, Hayes spends five pages on it, versus sixty plus pages on the phases of redefining wealth and reclaiming skills.

What is it, then, about radical homemaking that allows us to feel this “deeper fulfillment” more than we would in any other way of living? Is it really about working in the home—or about moving beyond it?

The timer goes off. I stroll to the stove. The curd is done. I smile as it pushes back against my finger. I take out a long knife and cut the curd, back and forth. The knife clicks on the edge of the pan, tapping out a rhythm I consciously repeat. I finish the checkerboard, make some diagonal moves, turn the stove to low, give a good firm stir to the mass, and go back to my desk. It’s coming. So is my blog.

I think about my latest book, What A Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire. In it I talk about the cultural epidemic of depression (that Hayes also describes) as evidence of a dissatisfied desire for spirit. Humans, I argue, have a need for a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that allows us to affirm that our lives are worth living. In the west we undergo a mind over body sensory education that leads us to believe that we will secure the affirmation we seek when we find the right belief, the right practice, or the right community—the right something outside of ourselves to fill our inner lack. We aren’t finding it.

What we need instead, I counter, it to cultivate a sensory awareness of the movements that are making us. When we do, we learn to participate consciously in the process of naming and bringing into being a world we love that loves us. It is this participation, I argue, in our own bodily becoming, that will yield the sense of affirmation we seek.

I trot back to the stove and give the cut curd another stir. So, then, is it helpful to think about radical homemaking as a way to express a desire for spirit? How are the movements of radical homemaking making the people who make them?

From the stories Hayes tells, it is clear: the movements that these people are making in their lives, as they redefine, reclaim, and rebuild, are making them into the people they want to be. The movements they are making in every case are addressing acute sensations of discomfort that these people have had. In most of the stories, there is some catalyst—a lost job, a sick child, a divorce, an illness—that breaks them open so that they are able to feel discomfort with their lives, and feel that discomfort as an indictment of corporate dominated forms of work, health care, food production, education, or government.

Further, not only were all of these persons able to feel their discomfort as an indictment of corporate culture, they were also able to find in that discomfort impulses to move differently—they were able to discern what I would call the wisdom in that (frustrated) desire. Instead of wishing the pain away, they were able to feel and receive the impulse to re-center their lives around home-making as a way to name and make real a world in which they want to live.

In this sense, these acts of homemaking are not a nostalgic escape nor a retrenchment in gender roles; they represent creative responses to untenable situations that align with the life conditions that the failure of those situations have enabled them to appreciate as having value. Here Hayes’ analysis is brilliant, for she demonstrates time and again how the move to radical homemaking is what the overwhelming success of corporate power is itself producing in many of us—its own overcoming.

What is it then, about radical homemaking that yields the “ecstasy” that Hayes’ recounts? It is not necessarily the activities of homemaking itself—even at the level of general skills. Rather, the pleasures of gardening or canning, home schooling or baking bread, nurturing relationships or redefining pleasure emerge as a result of how well those movements address the discomfort that the people who are making them have felt: the sense of alienation and isolation; the frustration with work, health, and educational options; the plastic glaze of industrialized food; the stifled creativity.

It is true: in so far as these feelings of discomfort are characteristic of contemporary society and even epidemic in proportion, then the activities of homemaking may prove radical as well to others feeling the same frustrations. Given the kind of challenges we as a society face, the tasks of home making can indeed provide us with opportunities for discovering patterns of relating to ourselves, one another, and the planet that are life-affirming.

However, the power that home has as a site of resistance—and pleasure—is rooted elsewhere: in how the acts of home making encourage people to cultivate the kind of sensory awareness that enables them to participate more and more consciously in the process of sensing and responding to their feelings of discomfort, frustration, and despair as impulses to move differently than cultural norms prescribe. It is this kind of sensory awareness that our dependence on corporate powers discourages us from cultivating.

Here lies the ecstasy Hayes identifies. When people are present in their lives, engaged in actions that require them to cultivate a keener awareness of what their bodily selves know, they will feel that sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that makes life worth living.

I pop back in to check on the cheese. The curds are cooked, wrinkled and squeaky, adrift in a growing sea of golden whey. I pour the curds into cheesecloth, wrap the ends around a wooden spoon and let them hang from the pot. The whey will go to the chickens, or the tomatoes. Then one more hour until salting and pressing, and two months at least before eating. It’s a process, for sure. It takes time.

Is this cheesemaking a radical act? I ponder its pleasures. Sure, I love the sensory dimensions of the seemingly miraculous transformation from liquid to solid. I appreciate the variations and complexities, the possibilities for error and discovery. I also appreciate how I am securing our dairy independence from forms of industrial farming that leave cows to stand all day on concrete, in their own manure, shot through with antibiotics to keep them from getting sick. Milk is a resource we have, in abundance. It makes sense to use it. I appreciate the ability to nourish myself and my children with untreated, local milk products, that come from healthy cows. Our family of seven (mostly) vegetarians saves over a hundred dollars a week by making from milk all that we do.

Then again, I know that in making this cheese I am enabling my kids to do what they want to do--milk their cows--and thus realizing a vision of family where we all work to ensure that each one of us gets what we need to become who we are. I know too, in making these moves, I am making myself into the philosopher and dancer I want to be—ever growing in my understanding how the movements we make in every moment of our lives make us who we are. It’s why we’re here.

Besides--or because--of all these reasons, the cheese is simply, incredibly delicious. Let the revolution continue.

When Social Brains Meet Screen Media

In her thoughtful and lively book, How Fantasy Becomes Reality, social psychologist Karen Dill deftly moves beyond the question of whether or not our use of screen media affects us. That debate, she confirms, is essentially over: it does.

The more interesting question she asks is why we are so quick to deny such influence. As Dill argues, such denial renders us even more vulnerable to “media effects.” Her task is to help us understand how our media use affects us (without our realizing it), so that we can begin to participate more proactively in the evolution of its form and content, and live healthier lives.

To this end, Dill shakes our glazed gaze free, reminding us that, “The primary reason people produce media is to make money” (47), and not to entertain, educate, or inform, as we might like to believe. Using tools of social psychology, Dill examines how they do: media producers provide eye-catching images and emotion-wringing scripts that stir our primal desires for food, sex, and social belonging. They attract our attention by shocking our sensory selves. We are soon addicted to the charge.

Why are we so vulnerable?

As Dill explains, the form and content of today’s screen media—and she examines television shows, movies, rap music, music videos, video games, advertising, and political coverage—play right into our strengths as the socially-wired creatures we humans are.

Face to face with desire-grabbing images and sense-assaulting scripts, we cannot help comparing ourselves to what we see. We cannot help imitating at a neuro-chemical level the actions that we see. Nor can we help repeating stereotypes about race and gender, or absorbing the persistent, implicit message of many video games, rap songs, and popular films that violence is an acceptable and useful response to life’s conflicts.

In short it is our nature as social creatures to learn from what we see about what is real, what matters, how we should act, and where we should, or do not, fit in. We do so without thinking. Even though we know that what we are seeing is fiction, it registers in our brains as real.

Thus, where our social brains meet screen media, Dill reports, we are apt to grow both increasingly anxious and insecure about our selves (as compared to the media’s ideal forms), and addicted to the virtual and vicarious bursts of pleasure that those same images provide. In such a state we are more vulnerable than ever to promises about what products will fill the gaps that our use of media has opened. Advertisers take note.

To protect ourselves, Dill advises us to assume that we are being manipulated, and then think critically, consume wisely, unplug frequently, vary our intake, and seek out non-screen activities that engage us in a state of flow.
*
As a philosopher and scholar of religion, I warm to many aspects of this book—its wealth of information, its colorful descriptions of psychological experiments, and its illuminating anecdotes. I also appreciate how well Dill’s analysis illustrates the dynamic I describe in What a Body Knows. When it comes to media use, the movements we are making are making us.

As I discuss in WBK, our consumption of media images provides an important part of the sensory education we receive in learning to perceive and respond to our desires for food, sex, and spirit or a sense of direction and belonging. Training our attention to the information coming to us through our screens encourages us to believe that the answers to our most basic questions—what to eat, how to love, who to be—lie outside of ourselves. We come to believe that we will find the nourishment, the intimacy, and the sense of belonging we seek by using our mental powers to form our bodily selves in accord with some (media-mediated) ideal of the perfect body, the most passionate love, or the best belief. If I were only thin, rich, successful, married, or member of the right community, then I would be happy. Yet, as I document at length, as we pursue these externally-oriented, mind-over-body paths to pleasure, we are not getting what we want.

What Dill reminds me is that this capacity to tune in and attune to our environments is not the problem. It is highly adaptive. It is perhaps our greatest strength as the humans we are. It is the source of our ability to empathize with others, to create stable relationships, to act on the basis of compassion and love.

Rather, the problem is that our current quotient of screen time is exercising this social skill at the expanse of its enabling complement: the capacity to attune to our own sensory selves, and find in the movements of our pain and pleasure the guidance we need to know what will support our thriving.

In order to navigate our social worlds effectively, it is not enough to be able to coordinate our movements with what lies around us, we must also be able to register the impact of the movements we make on us. We need to cultivate the sensory awareness of how the movements we make are making us.

Doing so allows us to stay in touch with our freedom. Doing so provides us with a ground in ourselves for discernment. Doing so allows us to perceive the images mediated to us from external sources as catalysts to our creativity, learning, and greater freedom, rather than as proof of our own inadequacy.

My conclusion here aligns with Dill’s: we do need to unplug, and when we do, we need to engage in activities that exercise our attention differently than screen time does. We need to drop in to our bodily selves, and allow our mental machinations to find their roots in the health and well being of our bodily selves. (See how: Come to Your Senses)

As the bodily selves we are, we can’t stop perceiving, feeling, and understanding; we can’t help creating patterns of sensation and response as we do. We can’t stop the rhythms of our bodily becoming, even as we stare into a screen. We can only ask ourselves: what is it that we want to create?

What a Body Knows 4: Why Do We Believe?

On this first day of June, I offer a final birthday-celebration selection from What a Body Knows!

This one concerns our desire for spirit...... what is it that we really want?

"When surfing for answers to the questions of life’s meaning and purpose, the options dazzle and overwhelm. Every worldview tells a story about what is real and true. Every human tells a story about what a given religion or philosophy means and why it is right. Amidst a weave of stories, personal and communal, shapes of culture emerge, a religion, a philosophy, a way of life.

Yet the differences among the options are less significant than what they share. When we breathe to move and move to breathe, we realize that every symbol, teaching, belief, or practice, philosophy, religion, or treatment plan, itself represents a pattern of movement — multiple patterns of mind, heart, body coordination. Each one is offering us an opportunity to discover inside ourselves the capacity to make the movements it represents, whether those movements involve cultivating a mind over body sense of ourselves, engaging a daily meditation practice, or believing in a vision of the promised land.

As we stretch to consider an idea, bend into a demonstrated posture, or organize our senses around a ritual, we exercise capacities for thinking and feeling and acting in ways other than we had previously experienced. We create and become new patterns of sensing and responding that unfold our talents and gifts.

With this perspective, we arrive at a new understanding of what it means to believe. If the effort of moving with a particular belief or practice ignites a blast of pleasure or joy or healing within us, then our immediate impression is that this symbol or teaching or practice is true, and it is. It is real and true for us because it has allowed us to discover something about ourselves that strikes us as who we are and want to be. Our movements are creating the network of relationships that is actually enabling our unfolding. We believe.

When we believe, then, we are exercising our power to name and bring into being a world we love that loves us. And by exercising this capacity, we stir in ourselves the feelings of vitality, direction, and belonging that our desire for spirit seeks as the condition for our ongoing well being. It is intoxicating.

At first this observation may trouble us. Isn’t there anything to believe or trust that is once and for all true? Are our beliefs and practices mere figments of imagination that we concoct for our own pleasure? Why believe or practice at all?

Breathing to move and moving to breathe, we know why we do. It is not to guarantee ourselves a certain ground or a safe delivery from pain. When we believe and when we practice, we provide ourselves with a sensory trainingthat we cannot get anywhere else. As we learn to make the movements prescribed to us by a given religious platform or program, we wake up to the creative power of our bodily becoming. As we bear witness to the changes in us that our believing and practicing effect, we know our capacity to change. We become aware, as nowhere else, of a basic fact of human bodily life: we are always bodies becoming. We are never not engaged in this process of creating and becoming new patterns of sensation and response. We are never not creating our values, our ideals, our gods, and the relationships by which we live.

We find ourselves believing, and believing in whatever we perceive as enabling us to thrive. God is true because God lives in me enabling me to be who I am.

Once we make this shift in how we experience our will to believe, we have the best criteria available to us for navigating the dizzying array of religious and spiritual options surrounding us. For if, in making the movements we are led to make by a given authority or text or context, we find ourselves separating from the very sensory awareness that is guiding us to seek them out, then we know: the relationship is not one that will support me in giving birth to myself. This is not true for me. I can’t believe.

On the other hand, if, in making the movements, we find ourselves enlivened, unfolded, and brimming with the pleasure of it, then we are inclined to name what is enabling us to become who we are as our religion, our faith, our practice. We make a commitment to let live what is ever enabling us to be. We join the community of those who are similarly moved. We proclaim its truth to all. And as we do, we make that matrix of relationships real: it is enabling us to give birth to ourselves. It is real because it lives in us. We are different.

People with different sets of talents and gifts will find their self-creating powers exercised by different approaches. Those with a large capacity to reason will find more pleasure and truth when engaging perspectives that offer rational arguments for their program. Those with a strong emotional life will warm to dimensions of religious life that emphasize devotion and love. Those with a vibrant kinetic, sensory orientation will gravitate towards forms of belief and practice that allow and encourage them to exercise this capacity for movement as an instrument of discernment.

In any case, a path will be true for me when the movements I am making as I learn to move with it are allowing me to name and make real the relationships that support me in giving birth to myself.

We are complicated. Our bodies are full of mystery. There are capacities for sensation and movement in us that we never even imagine possible. We may discover whole ranges of experience by accident. We may be led to explore other regions by the example of someone else’s account. We may experiment for years without uncovering that trigger that releases the desired responses within us. We may exert all of our efforts in one direction only to be swept sideways into novelty or bliss.

The patterns of movement we must make to unfold who we are are more complex than any rational account can delineate. The imagination of the Universe is far greater than ours. All along the way no one else can ever know or tell us how to awaken the unique patterns of creativity that we each are. It is our desire for spirit, our sensations of pleasure and pain, that provide us with the surest guides we have.

Discerning the wisdom of our desires is a life’s work. The work of a life. The work that a life is. The work that takes a life and more to complete. Yet at any moment along the way, if we are bending the power of our minds to the ongoing rhythms of our bodily becoming, we will find the vitality, the sense of direction, and the deep connection with life that satisfies our desire for spirit."

--What a Body Knows, chapter 23

What a Body Knows 2: The pleasures of eating

We are biologically hardwired, aren’t we, to want more food, always more? The failures of our massive efforts in dieting away the pounds or designing an effective drug are proof. Aren’t they? Look again. If anything, the human digestive system is designed to maximize our ability to move, not our ability to take in food.

Think about it. Humans stand upright. As a result of our upright posture, we have a mobility that is rare among animals. We do not hibernate. Our transformation from infant to adult does not involve a cocoon or chrysalis stage. We are constantly moving. We are not the fastest or strongest. We are not the most agile or deft. What characterizes our movement is its novelty: we are constantly learning to make new movements, new patterns of sensing and responding that guide us in thinking, feeling, and acting. As a result of this ability, we have proven ourselves capable of finding food and making ourselves at home in nearly every climate on earth.

At every point, our digestive system enables us in making these movements. Our manner of processing what we consume provides us with a steady stream of energy so that we can keep moving. We do not eat one meal a week and sleep it off like other carnivores. Nor do we spend a third of every day grazing like the large herbivores. Instead we move through recurring cycles of hunger and fullness over a 24-hour period. We stomach small, dense meals, mostly cooked, preferably several a day. These rhythms of digestion allow us time between meals to hunt, gather, and grow food, while still providing us with the steady stream of nourishment we need in order to do so. Even when we are in a position to eat more energy than we are burning, we store it all over the body, in patterns that, until we are extremely obese, maximize our ability to keep moving. We eat to keep moving so that we can eat to keep moving from environment to environment, season to season, continent to continent, meal to meal. And in order to move, we must stop eating.

Further, in making the food-finding movements that our digestive system enables and requires, we have evolved to rely on our sensory awareness as a primary guide. Unlike many of our animal siblings, we can catch and cook, chew and digest almost anything. Our food needs are not determined by instinct or climate. We have to make choices about what to eat, how to acquire it, and when and how to eat it. We have no choice but to choose. While culture and tradition and habit do constrain these choices, the surest guide we ever have is our senses. We are creatures who can and must use all of our senses — taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing — to guide us in identifying, pursuing, and securing what will nourish us and rejecting what will not. The foods we are primed to sense as pleasurable, then, are those that support us in the ongoing project of moving, sensing, and responding to food. Our survival depends upon it.

Gathering the pieces together, this picture is suggestive. The pleasure we derive from food does not come from the quantities of vitamins and minerals, or the salts or sugars present in a chemical substance. The pleasure we seek comes from participating in the process of learning how, when, what, and why to eat so that we can keep moving. The pleasure we seek comes from the experience of finding our way to a sense of enough so that we can stop eating, as we must, and keep moving.

The problem is not that our desires run rampant in the field of abundance; the problem is that we have lost touch with the desires that are and remain our best guide wherever we are. Our dissatisfaction is calling us to tune into our sensory awareness, and to find our way to a sense of enough.

Excerpted from What a Body Knows, chapter 5, "A Sense of Enough"

What a Body Knows, 1

How do you celebrate the first birthday of a book? Share it!

In this month of May, I will post excerpts from my latest book, What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire. I begin at the beginning, with a sketch from chapter 1 that describes the kind of movement-enabled "experience shift" that can open us to discern wisdom in desire.

“I am having a lovely morning. Our son Jordan, home sick from school, is not too sick, and I am enjoying my time with him. I allow him to watch a movie. Kai falls asleep. I sit down to write. Reading back over the previous day’s catch, I make corrections, clarify some rough passages, and print out the pages. I draft some new ideas. Kai wakes up. Jordan returns from screen land. I feel play in the moment, loving work, loving family, in a mutually enabling spiral.

A few hours later, everything starts to feel less fun. I am no longer moved as I had been just an hour before by the intricate web of vessels visible beneath my infant’s tender skin, or by the half-smile of a child finding comfort in my embrace. My senses are withering. My ideas stop flowing. I want sugar, caffeine — something sharp. I want adult company, some spark or spur. I want some vital touch. Life weighs heavily.

I have been here before. I know what I need. To move. I need to feed my body, stir up my sensory awareness, replenish love. A walk, the easiest thing. Of course, I do not want to go for a walk. I want to stuff myself into forgetful oblivion and lose consciousness of this dragging dullness. But I must. My desires, tousled, knotted, and confused, are pointing the way.

Geoff comes home and takes over. I bundle up. My mind is complaining bitterly. It is cold and snowy. Kai will need to nurse. The kitchen is a mess. There are other things I should be doing. Carrying my screaming mind out through the door, my body propels me forward.

I walk vigorously, pumping my arms and legs, sending blood rushing through my limbs, feeling the pull of air into my lungs. My head lightens and begins to clear. I feel brightness opening. I walk hard and start to feel again. Hunger stabs. I want to turn back and eat. But then the hunger slips sideways. I know that the energy I want is not of the caloric kind. I feel a deep gnawing ache for the return of my senses, for what my body knows. This hunger is the first sign that it is beginning to return.

I trudge up the mountain. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Each step plunges through a crusty surface into powdery fluff. I follow tracks I left earlier in the week, sometimes sticking my foot into an old hole and sometimes stepping sideways, taking cues from the past and honoring my new gait. My hands start to warm up.

I begin to notice things. There are prints in the tracks I made two days ago. Deer hooves. I follow the deer, who followed me. Perhaps I saved the deer some wear and tear on its shins. A thrill passes lightly through me at the thought of our meeting this way.

I keep walking, puffing, crunching up the hill, up and around the field. Ten then twenty minutes pass, half an hour. Gold and silver sparks of snow catch my eye. The rhythmic breaking of the snow echoes in my chest. A pale sun peeps through the soft splotchy clouds. Down by the pond I find the tracks of a snow mobile. An intruder. Anger and dismay rush through. I place a branch across the tracks. Keep out. Will they even notice?

Keep walking. My body propels me along, beside the pond and up to the crest of the hill where we first stood in awe of this beautiful land. I feel an impulse to run, to empty myself into space. A surge of energy wells, lifting my arms to the horizons, breathing me deeply. I want, I want, I want… to play. I run down the hill on the other side, pulling my legs straight out of each crusty hole so as not to fall. I laugh with my awkward strides. My left leg plunges thigh-deep into a gulley and I tumble to the ground. Without hesitating, I start to get up. Time to move. Then I lie back. Wait. What can I see from here? What is it that this fall is enabling me to see?

I watch the clouds, drifting wisps of white and blue and gray. Their mottled layers pass through one another, thinning into translucent floss. I feel the icy cold of the snow seeping through my jacket and snow pants, cooling my lower back where an echo of an old back pain lingers, offering a healing touch. What do I look like splayed out here on the snow. Would someone find me if I couldn’t move?

I see the stalks of dead flowers and grasses poking up around me. I want to make something. An ornament. An angel from Hebron Hollow. A beating sound interrupts the thought. A crow. Will he see me and think I am food?A pressure squeezes my heart. Sadness seeps out. My friend. Her baby girl. It was Downs. She ended the pregnancy. The pain, a month later, is palpable. Breathing empties the sensation into the colors of the clouds, the cold of the snow, the still silence of the land. I see the beauty unfolding around me.

I sit up. My body sits up, stands, moves forward. I feel softened, revived. I breathe and plunge on.

Before me is Moon Rock. Around the shoulder and up the face I hike. I want to feel alive. An impulse to run surges again — something pressing forward and in and out and through me, a desire to touch what is. I run. Blood screams through my limbs. The horizon, the edge, opens before me. I rise to meet it, wider than before. It occurs to me: I need this place, this walk, to walk in this place. I need this land to open me to my self, my life, again and again and again. I see dry plants for my ornament. I pick them. Buttons. Milkweed. Thistles.

I plow my way back to Moon Rock and lean into its arc. I feel its weight, and my weight on it. In the meeting of the two, I sink into myself where I am alive, becoming more body. Tremors of love vibrate through me. It is time to go. The sun, a soft yellow ball, sits atop the tree tufts. The snow glitters blue and gold. Sparkles of light beckon. Again I follow the deer who followed me. Thoughts skitter through. I will need to write about this walk. To reflect on it, remember it, press it through my thinking so that it rearranges my ideas and holds them accountable to this experience of moving, to what is, here and now.

My movements, walking, breathing, feeling, thinking, are making me. My movements are opening me to sense and respond, making me into someone who witnesses this beauty. Someone who is sensing, who can sense, who wants to sense this wakeful vitality. This is who I am.

I enter the house. My dead bouquet is large. I lay it on a newspaper. Needs press in. I am hungry and tired. I need to eat, to write, to make something, to connect with Geoff, to nurse Kai. The kids are home from school. It is dinnertime. I breathe into the sensory spaces opened by my walking. Happy and elastic, I find play in the moment. Grabbing a snack, I nurse my son, hear stories of the day, and then dump my thoughts onto the page. After dinner I help Jessica and Kyra make milkweed angels. They are beautiful. Bits of Hebron Hollow come to life. Like me.
**
A simple walk, but as I write it down, as I know I must, I find it has all the elements of the experience shift that enables us to find wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and spirit. If we can name such an experience shift, recognize it in ourselves, and cultivate it in our thinking and feeling and acting, then we can develop a powerful resource for participating consciously in becoming the people we are and want to be.”

Excerpted from chapter 1, What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire (O Books 2009).

Do What You Can--For the Earth

The air on my cheek is cool and moist. The room is silent. My opening eyes greet gray. It is 6:16 AM. My partner sleeps to one side; our infant the other. How can I move? I am sure to disturb someone.

Carefully, slowly, I wriggle out into the morning. I get dressed, go downstairs, eat a banana, lace up my shoes, and head out the door.

A rush of spring warmth hits my face and I breathe deeply. It is good to get out, be out, feel freely out. I need this walk. Why?

Is it my ecological unconscious? The ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak is convinced that we have one. Humans, he writes, have evolved with a fundamental biological need to be in nature, surrounded by nature, subject to its winding winds, its rhythms and rains. Doing so nourishes us, relaxes us, and stimulates our health. When we ignore this need, he claims, in avid pursuit of money and material goods, we make ourselves sick. We act in ways that make our earth sick. The pain of our psychological neuroses, he continues, are providing us with the impetus to move differently in relation to the natural world.

I walk along the road under a low white sky, wrapped with feelings of expectation. The earth looks silent, but I hear the birds singing of a soon-to-be springing, calling it forth. In days, every surface around me will ripple and hum with emerging shapes of life.

As I move my arms in large circles, the energy rises in me, pulling my legs into a jog. A cramp wrinkles my right hip. As I breathe down into the pain to explore its source, my right toe turns in, and the hip grip releases. How did my bodily self know what it needed?

I think back to Roszak. Our only hope, he claims, in addressing our mutually entwined psychological and ecological crises, is to learn to discern, trust, and move with our intimate, unending connection with the natural world. He writes: “What the Earth requires will have to make itself felt within us as if it were our most private desire” (47).

A flash of white by the side of the road catches my eye—a McDonald’s bag. Here, miles from any store, I find someone’s litter. If not a fast food wrapper, then cigarette boxes and butts, or beer cans or bottles. The people who put trash into their own bodies hurl their wrappers onto the earth’s body. Why are we so careless with our bodily selves? I pass by for now, vowing to pick it up on the way back.

Small trash. Big trash. I swallow a surge of righteous indignation. I pollute too. I know that the gas fueling my car spews toxic fumes; that the cheese wrappers and cereal-box bags we buy filled at the grocery store land in someone’s backyard; that at least some of the electricity fueling our lights, well-pump, water heater, and my computer is produced by processes that leach some burning byproduct into the atmosphere. Sure, I can pick up the bag, but who will remove my waste from the air, water, and soil?

Author Bill McKibben reminds us: there is no longer any place on earth where the atmosphere does not contain traces of human pollutants. For Roszak, any animal that soils its habitat as we are doing is by definition, crazy.

What am I to do? I can recycle and reuse, but the pile of trash keeps growing.

I turn the corner onto a dirt road. It is soft beneath my feet. The snowmelt has eroded the edges. Soon the mighty town Tonkas, running on my tax dollars, will pass through to rebuild the road, moving the earth so it can and will support our transportation habits.

A blast of stinging drops bounces off my cheeks. For a second I pause, surprised, then tuck my chin and keep going. But the shock has woken me up. I shake out my fingers and hand, rotate my shoulders, wiggle my hips, happy to be alone on this deserted stretch of dirt. I can make new moves, silly moves, playful moves, and feel the pleasure of doing so. I can take in the elements, and ride them. There is no one watching. Joy swells.

What new moves can we make to ensure the health and wellbeing of the elements that not only surround us but are us?

Yesterday I read a recent and rare interview with biologist James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, now 90. He is not so sure we can learn to make new moves. As he says: “I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change.” We have too much inertia. Our patterns are too entrenched.

I know what he means—we aren’t clever enough. But it is not because the problem is too big and complex. The sign that we are not clever enough is that we keep trying to address the problem by relying on the same patterns of sensation and response that got us here in the first place. We keep approaching the problem as a mind-over-body problem, sure that if we can just find the right argument, the right data, the right technological fix, we will have what we need to reign in the forces we have unleashed that are destroying our habitat.

But world pollution is not a problem that is amenable to mind-over-body solutions. Its roots wind way down into the very substratum of nearly every individual life that participates in western civilization at all. Simply by living in this country, we are complicit in economies, politics, policies, and patterns of consumption that are depleting our earth's ability to sustain life to an unfathomable, immeasurable degree.

As Lovelock admits, only some catastrophic event has the capacity to dislodge us from our inertia. As Roszak insists, it is a matter of desire.

To change our current course, we have to shed the selves that our participation in these economies have enabled us to become, and the expectations, hopes, values, and ways of being we have developed in response. It’s not just that we have to stop throwing trash out the window. We need to stop making it, buying it, and consuming it. There is no window. We are the earth and the earth is us.

The task sounds impossible. Is it? Can we grow into people who can and will and want to tackle the issues of how we humans are impacting the planet? What would it mean to be clever enough? What would it mean to be sane?

I reach the half way mark and turn around. I will be needed at home. It’s down hill for a while now. I ride on the gravity lift; my stride lengthens. My movement reminds me.

Do what you can.

It is not an all or nothing proposition. We can only begin where we are, and move towards where we want to go. And the first step is, literally, to be where we are. The first is to cultivate the kinds of sensory awareness that will allow us to discern the desire of the earth sprouting in us—a sensory awareness of our own absolute dependence upon the natural world. It is to discern the desire of the earth taking shape in our desires for food, for intimacy, and for spiritual fulfillment. It is to learn to find the wisdom in these desires, impelling us to ask questions, demand alternatives, and one by one, create the matrix of relationships that support us in becoming who people who can and will and want to honor the earth in us and around us.

It is time to move.

I pick up the bag, a candy wrapper, and beer bottle, and make it home. The rubbish in my hands reminds me: do what you can. I turn off a few lights. Brush crumbs off some not-so-dirty plates. Fold the clothes that have only been worn once. Toss bottles and boxes and cans and white paper into the recycling bins. So little, never enough. But the actions remind me: Do what you can.

Later in the day, sitting at my computer, I follow a news trail to a People's Petition to cap greenhouse gases that is being circulated by 350.org. I remember to sign it. You can too.

Obesity Is Inevitable, Or Is It?

When it comes to obesity, our solutions are perpetuating the problem.

Take the welter of posts in response to a NYTimes article this week. The range of comments was typical. The article could have been any one of a number of articles reporting on obesity facts or findings, causes or cures.

There is always some disagreement regarding: the name (is it an epidemic?), the definition of obese (how much is too much?), and the relationship between weight and health (too thin isn’t good either). In general, however, researchers have tracked trajectories of obesity-related diseases well enough to establish cause for concern.

Beyond that, suggestions for what to do fan out along a familiar spectrum.

At one end, commentators argue over which “lifestyle” factors are the most relevant. We read stories of how, when, what, and why people should eat, exercise, and sleep; we learn what he cut out and what she added; what she lost and what he gained. One refrain repeats with a rhythmic drone: eat less, exercise more.

At the other end of the spectrum, commentators blame the biological parameters of our bodily selves, citing genes, metabolisms and, as the Times article describes, the ever wily wiggles of our energy-storage systems. For those at this end, hope for a “cure” lies in finding the right drug or surgical procedure, in public policy changes or simply in a greater social acceptance of what are now the fat facts.

Despite the apparent range of these responses, however, all points on the spectrum share a common value that both drives modern western culture and renders obesity an inevitable component of contemporary life.

What is that value?

It is one that equates goodness with mental control over material bodies of various kinds, whether earthen, animal, and human. We want bodies to fit into whatever measurements and expectations “we” set for them. Whether we aim for health or wealth, achievement or invention, work or relaxation, art, entertainment or climate optimization, “we” want bodies to do what they are told. We value anything that serves, supports, or expresses such control as good. Mind over body is who we want to be, who we practice being, and who we come to believe we are.

Given this value that our culture places on mind over body control, obesity is inevitable. Why? When we practice ignoring and overriding our bodily sensations, we are “free” to develop patterns of eating that bear little or no relation to what our bodily selves actually need to function.

We come to believe that we can eat whatever we want regardless of how it affects our bodies. We want it to be true; we act as if it were. If the food we eat makes us sick, we take drugs to hide the symptoms—drugs that lower cholesterol, adjust blood pressure, speed digestion, or tamp down indigestion (a weight-loss pill still eludes).

In short, we want to be "free" to eat whatever we want to eat and have the results of our eating conform to whatever we want our bodies to look like. We equate this mind over body freedom with pleasure to such a degree that we can’t even acknowledge our own pain or discomfort until it is too late: the problem seems beyond our control.

I am not blaming people of any size. Nor am I blaming bodies or genes or desires or cultural habits for eluding our control. There is a deeper logic at work in which we all participate that is addictive and self-sustaining. When we think that we can think our way to health and wellbeing, whether through individual will power or scientific research, we perpetuate an ignorance of our bodily selves that finds expression in a disconnect between what we eat and what will give us the pleasure of being nourished. Whether we overeat or undereat, the logic is the same.

However, once we can recognize how embedded in our ways of living the problem is, we can also find seeds of hope. For we begin to remember how hard we practice to make our mind over body beliefs seem true. We discern how the movements that we make as we eat (or not) are making us into people who think and feel and act as if they are minds over bodies. We see the contradictions:

--Diets “work” to addict us to the idea that a diet will work.
--Biological determinism calls on the power of our minds to assert the powerlessness of our minds.
--Lifestyle changes appeal by promising that our sense of ourselves need not change: we can retain the same mind over body control we want to believe we are.

In each case, we may alleviate some of the symptoms, but not address the source.

However, because we see the power of our own movement in making us, we can begin to acknowledge the sources of our strength.

We are not who we think we are. If we are really interested in addressing eating practices and attendant health problems, we need a change that is both subtle and huge. We need to practice sensing and discerning what our bodily selves know. We need to engage in movement practices that help us do so (as I have been describing in recent posts 1 and 2). In relation to food, we need to learn to give ourselves an experience of being nourished, by following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough. It is a life time practice.

This is not a question of “reconnecting” with our bodies, or being “mindful” of what we are eating, or even of “listening” to our bodies. All of these models leave intact the privilege of mind over (a now closer) body. Rather, we need movement practices that help us shift our experience of who we are and where our wisdom lies. We need to learn to find, trust, and discern the wisdom in our desires—and not just our desire for food. As I demonstrate in What a Body Knows, our desire for food is thoroughly entwined with our desires for sex and spirit.

From this shifted way of being, we will be able to create new values that express the care and attention to our bodily selves that we are practicing.
*
The obesity epidemic is a recent social phenomenon, but that does not mean that its proximate causes are new. We have arrived at a point in history where values that have guided human enterprise and invention for centuries have generated a critical mass of technologies, habits, and practices that are tipping us into an untenable situation.

Where the physical actions of a day’s labor, the lived experience of art and entertainment, and the personal contact with family and friends used to provide a counterbalance to mind over body practices, now many of us are “free” to sit in front of screens all day. We are making movements that are making us. Again, it is not just a matter of a sedentary life, it is a matter of the values that our arrival at this sedentary moment in history is expressing.

Until we are free to do what we must for our health and wellbeing, we won’t be free.