Spinoza and the Steers

I spent last week reading Spinoza, rounding up steers, and reveling in the early spring.

Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) was a Dutch philosopher whose masterwork, Ethics, presents arguments for the nature of God and human using the form of geometric proofs—axioms, propositions, definitions, explanations, and all. I decided to spend some time with him after coming upon his name, yet again, in another work of environmental philosophy. Contemporary writers, like Jane Bennett and David Abram, are appealing to Spinoza for help in anchoring concepts of the natural, material world that will encourage human compassion for the earth as a whole.

Two of Spinoza’s claims in particular are in constant rotation. For one, he uses the phrase “God, or Nature,” maintaining that God and Nature share one, infinite "substance." Second, he insists that every body, human and otherwise, insofar as it exists in God/Nature, is animated by its own “striving to persevere.” Every body, animal, vegetable or mineral, at every scope and scale, acts so as to increase its power of action.

Citing these two ideas, philosophers conclude that humans ought to honor other earth bodies as having agency and intelligence, and so desist from acting as if only humans matter.

As I am pondering Spinoza’s proofs, Bright and Blaze, the two-year-old Milking Shorthorn steers that my son is training, decide that they are tired of their pen. They have plentiful hay and cool water, in a sun-filled shelter ringed by seemingly redundant ropes of barbed wire—all of which they ignore. Slipping into the barnyard, the 1500-pound, red-brown and speckled pair make their way to the front door of our house. They tip over the wooden bucket in which we crank ice cream, and begin licking the briny dregs.

Coming into the kitchen for a cup of tea, I see a huge head through the window. Then another. Rather than return to Spinoza, I pull on boots, coat, gloves, and hat, and begrudgingly blink my way into the sunshine. I approach Bright, the largest of the two, with halter in hand. He cavorts away, kicking his heels in the air like a newborn lamb. With large horns. I have to laugh. Is he the intelligent, animate, striving to persevere that Spinoza has in mind?
*
Spinoza’s Ethics is different than I imagined. Rather than the environmental treatise that its contemporary uses imply, the Ethics is an extended apology for “a life of the mind.” God and Nature, mind and body, are what they are such that humans find their greatest happiness when reading and writing, preferably in the company of like-minded friends. According to Spinoza, it is knowledge of God—not chasing steers—that yields the highest human joy. As he writes, “In life… it is especially useful to perfect, as far as we can, our intellect, or reason. In this one thing consists man’s highest happiness, or blessedness.”

Why? The argument goes like this. God is infinite substance, the cause of itself, freely operating according to the laws of its nature—which, for Spinoza, are the eternal laws of nature. God is a thinking being, whose substance also appears in the mode of extension. God’s intellect is thus the immanent cause of every finite and fleeting thing.

Given this scene, humans too exist in God as a part of nature, as one kind of body among many others, constantly affecting and being affected by other bodies. However, humans are the part of nature that is capable of understanding all bodies, including their own, as equally modes of God, that is, “under the species of the eternal.” And understanding bodies in this way, according to Spinoza, yields utmost joy.

Why? For two reasons. First, even though mind and body share in one substance (God, or Nature), Spinoza insists that the knowledge our minds receive about the world through our bodily senses is “mutilated and confused.” It is distorted by our bodily location and our sensory limits. Second, for Spinoza, all of the so-called pleasures associated with the material world are not. Sensory pleasures come and go, leaving in their wake a sadness that confuses and dulls the mind.

Reason, however, can address both sources of discomfort. Using reason, we can “purify” and “heal” our sensory knowledge by forming “adequate ideas.” Using reason, we can also cultivate an ability not to be affected by external, material, or natural causes that might distract us from such understanding. In both cases, then, using our reason answers our own striving to persevere, and thus yields the promised joy.

Not exactly what the environmentalists are after. Where is the care and compassion for the welfare of the natural world?

I contemplate the issue while contemplating my next move with the steers. They are truly huge. Standing beside them, I feel small and weak. I know that they would not intentionally hurt me—my son has trained them well—but there is simply no reason that they need to do what I want them to do. They could overpower me with a twist of the head. They don’t.

I watch as they tussle with one another, roam among the spare bales stacked in the barnyard, and trot away each time I approach. The steers want to be out. It is as if they smell spring. They sense something new and want to participate in it by making new moves of their own. They want to let loose the capacities for cavorting that lie dormant beneath their winter shag. I don’t blame them.

I decide to ditch the halters and try a thin stick. Gently tapping from behind, I steer the steers towards their pen. At the gate, they veer away and go back across the road to the spare hay bales. I move with them and tap them back towards the pen. Back and forth we go. I move with them some more, until finally, they move with me, back into their pen, where they circle their own waiting bale.

I return to Spinoza, and the steers pull my thoughts in a direction that is both new and familiar. Spinoza too could make another move. When confronting the selectivity of our senses and the short-lived duration of sensory pleasures, Spinoza doesn’t have to yoke his reason to an intellectual love of an eternal God.

What if, instead of seeking refuge in an idea of eternal truth, we chose to cultivate a capacity to move with the rhythms of the material world? And with the rhythms of our own desires?

As Spinoza admits, human bodies are acutely impressionable, affected at all levels in myriad ways by a vast array of human, nonhuman, and elemental others. This sensitivity, I would add, is not simply passive. As our bodies are moved by people, places, and things, we learn how to move for ourselves. We learn about the power of our own bodily movement to connect us with other bodies and forces that sustain our ongoing life. That power consists of an ability to create and become new patterns of sensing and responding that align our well being with the challenges and opportunities of the moment.

What if our distinctive humanity lies in this ability to learn from other earth bodies, from the rhythms, cycles, and seasons of bodily nature, about our own capacity for making the movements that make us who we are--able to connect, able to love?

Humans do need an idea of Nature as divine, whole, and worthy of devotion, but we need more as well. We need to submit ourselves to forces and movements larger than ourselves, to which we must respond, and so catalyze a sensory awareness of our own bodily movement and how it is making us able to think and feel and act as we do.

When we do, we will have what we need to recreate our relationship with the "more than human" world (Abram). We will have the capacity to feel the pain and sadness of the natural world as a call to move differently—to find ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that connect us in mutually-enabling ways with the body of earth and bodies of earth, including our own.

It is what a body knows.

It is what my time with Spinoza and the steers is teaching me.
*
Later in the day I walk into the kitchen, and find Blaze peering at me through the window. Again?!

This time, the steers do not let me close enough to tap. Kyra volunteers to help. She is nine, all of four feet tall and seventy pounds. She approaches Blaze gently, the halter behind her back. She scratches him under the chin, and while I blink, slips the halter over his hooked horns. She does the same with Bright. Mesmerized, I help her lead them into their pen. I follow. They follow. This time, we tie them up.

It will be best for them, I reason. They will be safe from passing cars, in easy reach of food and water. They depend on me to take care of them. Yet, my heart quails. They are tied up, against their will. I feel their pain. So moved, the thought forms. I vow to build a new fence as soon as the ground thaws—a solid wooden fence that will be strong enough to keep them in and large enough to give them room to frolic.

I need it.

Eat Less? Pass the chips!

Responses to the government’s recently-released recommendations for healthy eating, while varied, are circling around what observers see as a remarkable message. For the first time the report’s writers, withstanding the immense pressure of the food industry, actually recommend that Americans eat less. Why? The report begins with statistics chronicling the heavy toll of diet-related chronic illnesses, primarily those associated with obesity.

Is this difference remarkable? The difference can be deceiving. What might seem like a radical move is couched in a familiar philosophy. The writers assume that a human body is an input-output device, a simple machine, for which “we” as minds can and should make good, meaning “healthy,” choices.

On this mind-over-body understanding of the human self, the report stages its primary recommendation: balance calories to manage weight. It bears repeating. According to this report, the goal of eating is weight management. And the means to that goal: information for the mind given by the report in pie charts, bar graphs, and tables.

In this way the report is typical of our cultural responses to the obesity epidemic: it reinforces a way of thinking about a human self that is itself a contributing factor to the problems it purports to address.

Bodies are not machines. Food is not fuel. Eating is not about energy intake. Physical exercise is not just about energy expenditure. When we act as if they are, we systematically override the cues that our own bodily selves are giving us about what and when and how to eat.

Our relation to food is a matter of desire. This desire for food arises as a movement in our bodily selves that impels us towards what we believe will grant us the pleasure we seek. And that pleasure is not a function of calories or quantity or even quality. Rather, what we move towards is the experience of being nourished, the experience of being nurtured, and as we mature, the experience of nourishing and nurturing ourselves.

Of course, as the report implies, our desire for food is a problem. It is a force that “we” must control.

Yet, what the government and many of us have learned to forget is that our desire for the pleasure of being nourished is actually the most subtle and sophisticated ally we have for determining what eating patterns will benefit our health. This desire is our very own in-built instrument of discernment, guiding our thinking selves to work with our environmental options to secure what we need to thrive.

In order to liberate this ally, however, we do have some work to do. We need to dislodge the mind-over-body habits that cause us to ignore and even malign our bodily selves, and learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for food.

In short, to make a really remarkable move, we need to ask a question that the report does not dare: how can we get more pleasure from what we are eating?

1. Move.

If we want to feel more pleasure, then we have to be willing to feel. If we want to feel, we have to breathe. In order to breathe, we need to move—move our bodily selves—not for exercise, not to expend calories, but to bring to life a sensory awareness of what it is we really want from food.

For what do we hunger?

2. Look for the signs.

When we open to feel what we are feeling, then we are bound to learn what we don’t want to admit. What we are eating is not giving us the pleasure we want.

Our food selections, while initially pleasing to the eye and even the mouth, too often produce unwanted effects in our bodily selves. Yet, we ignore the signs and keep eating. We take a pill to deal with the “side” effects. We distract our attention, or simply eat more to prove to ourselves that we can. We want so much the pleasure we know can come from eating that we override our sensations of displeasure in pursuit of it.

Yet these sensations of discomfort are allies and friends, guiding us to move in ways that will not recreate those sensations, just as the pain of touching the stove tells us to move our hand higher up the handle.

Every twinge of discomfort is a sign of a potential pleasure we have yet to discover.

3. Open to the arc.

Once we allow ourselves to feel our desires and our displeasures, then our sensory understanding of eating expands. We find that there are multiple pleasures waiting to be enjoyed in every moment of our lives, along an endless, oscillating arc of anticipation and fulfillment.

There is potential pleasure in the imagining, growing, gathering, and preparation of food. There is potential pleasure in the act of welcoming food into our bodily selves. There is immense pleasure as well in arriving at that sweet moment when you know you have had enough.

At every point along this arc, we have some sensory relearning to do, for we have so privileged the moment of sticking something in our mouths over all the other moments of our eating arc that we don’t even notice what we are missing.

Our sense of enough has been particularly hammered. The idea that we can and should manage our calorie intake or go on a diet operates by the same logic that impels us to eat more than our bodily selves are telling us we want. Ignore your own sense of enough. Distrust it. It has nothing to teach you about what is best for you.

The opposite is true.

4. Play.

It is not enough to practice mindfulness of what and how and when we eat. It is not enough either to welcome displeasures or know that our pleasure has an arc. We must also play with different food combinations. We need to try new things, learn as much as we can about what works for us, and experiment with eating patterns and habits and traditions and recipes to discover which ones allow us to feel and find that arc of our desire.

It is to this end that the guidelines like those offered by the government are helpful—as fuel for our imaginations. The report offers us ideas and information that can help us experiment with a range of possibilities, and find the freedom to sense and respond to the movements of our own desiring, discerning selves.
*
While the eating patterns of Americans are not etched in stone, neither are they easily malleable at the level of rational choice.

If we are to eat less, we must want to eat less. And the only way we are going to want to eat less--as every marketer of a diet plan knows--is to know that we are getting more of the pleasure we desire from the act of eating.

Sure, there is pleasure to be gained from feeling healthy and lean, but when under pressure, pummeled by advertisements, and surrounded by colorfully-packaged delivery mechanisms for sugar and salt, we will inevitably and understandably move with our much more fundamental desire for an experience of being nourished and nurtured. It is this desire, then, that we must free from our mind-over-body control, and cultivate as the best resource we have along the path of health and well-being.

The goal of weight management will not fire our imaginations, free us from our self-destructing habits, or galvanize our desire in new directions. What we need is a vision of a greater pleasure whose side effect happens to be greater health and well being. And we need to trust in the wisdom of our bodily selves and desires as our best guides to it.

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

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.
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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.

Plugged in, Turned on, Tuned Out

Findings published from the third installment of the Kaiser Foundation’s research project on children and their use of media shocked technophobes and -philes alike. According to the report, kids ages 8-18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day plugged into an electronic device (such as an ipod, smart phone, computer, or television). This figure does not include an extra hour and a half spent texting or talking on cell phones; time devoted to homework, or an extra three and a half hours of media exposure accrued by multitasking.

As one commentator concedes: it no longer makes sense to debate whether such technological use is good or bad. We need to “accept it” as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Must we equate ipods with oxygen? Debates over the morals and merits of technology are as old as human civilization. There are questions to ask that move us beyond good and evil.

1. Are we using our tools in ways that weaken the sensory capacities they extend?

Every human invention extends a set of basic bodily capacities in a direction farther than it could otherwise go, and in effect, reduces our need for developing those skills and sensations.

Recall Socrates’ debate, for example, over the act of writing, as an extension of our capacity to remember. When we write something down in order to remember it, aren’t we giving ourselves permission to forget?

2. Who is using whom?

The tools we use organize our patterns of physical and mental movement; shape our thoughts; space and time our tasks, and map our sensory awareness. Using tools grants us a sense of ourselves, and what we can do. It structures our relationships to other people, places, and elements. Whether pencil or plow, book or boat, ipod or iphone, the tools we use use us to make them work. We learn, in using the tool, what turns us on.

The issue these questions share concerns our participation in the rhythms of our bodily becoming. The movements we make are making us. But how? As we invest ourselves in this technology, are we cultivating a range of skills and sensibilities that aligns with our ongoing health and well being?

Answers are trickling in for kids who are plugged in. Regarding the sensory education such technology use provides, evidence is emerging of a correlation (at least) between hours spent consuming media and pounds added consuming calories. However, the causal factor between childhood obesity and screen use, believe it or not, does not seem to be sitting.

While researchers point to food advertisements as encouraging excess intake, the issue may have more to do with how screen use educates our senses. While watching a screen, regardless of whether we are in a chair or on an exercise bike, we train our attention away from what our bodily selves are doing and towards what is coming to us through the monitor. Tuned in we tune out. We reinforce the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies that causes us to override the wisdom of our bodily selves in all realms of our lives--including in our ability to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough.

Moreover, in using these devices we not only train ourselves to think and feel and act as if we were minds in bodies, we train ourselves to desire this sense of ourselves as itself a primary source of pleasure, accomplishment, and even health. Our dopamine level surges when we override our bodily discomfort to check email, harvest soybeans in Farmville, or receive the latest tweet from our favorite star.

As for how our tools are using us, commentators regularly comment on the enhanced multitasking ability of the techno-savy. However, it isn’t the multi in this formula that is new. Humans have been manipulating complex maps of parallel and entinwed processes for millennia in order to survive. What is new is the sensory and kinetic range of the tasks: since media use occupies a smaller swath of bodily selves than the tasks of, for example, making all our own food and clothing, we can indeed train ourselves to tolerate more of them.

So what difference does it make if our kids use these technologies in ways that reinforce their sense of themselves as minds over bodies, and reduce their sensory range?

I offer three points, knowing there are more.

First, Rodolfo Llinas' recent book argues that how bodies move influences how brains develop. One implication, anticipated by Nietzsche in Human All Too Human, is that when we train ourselves to still our bodily selves in order to think and read and write, we cut ourselves off from a primary realm of our creativity—our senses—and the source of materials through which we think at all. It is not an accident that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a dancer.

A related vein of inquiry concerns empathy. As the Blakeslees document, people with a greater visceral awareness—that is, a heightened awareness of their own feelings and sensations—demonstrate a greater capacity to empathize with other humans. Such empathic qualities correlate regularly with the ability to create and maintain mutually life-enabling relationships. One implication is that bodily practices that train our attention away from our sensory selves—even in the name of networking—may diminish our capacity to form strong, mutually beneficial relationships with other humans. (In what sense are fellow Facebookers friends?)

A third line of concern is one Richard Louv raises in his book, Last Child in the Woods. Louv diagnoses a nature-deficit disorder among our children, precipitated in part by an increased use in technological devices. As kids train their senses away from the natural world, they don’t learn how to be in the natural world—how to open to receive it. They think that “nature” is what they see in their wildlife videos, and get bored with the real thing.

Louv asks: where is the next generation of environmentalists and natural scientists who will be able to notice and care about the destructive impact humans are having on the very web of life that enables them to be?

Whether we are talking about the relationship to our bodily selves, to other humans, or to the natural world, then, the logic is the same. We may be losing our ability to sense and enact what we need in order to be able to create relationships that will support us in our ongoing sensing and enacting. Nietzsche called such a state decadence.

We do know that the question of how to cultivate relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world is a primary challenge we confront in the 21st century. It is also clear that electronic devices are not about to disappear.

The question that arises then is this: what kind of practices can or must we engage alongside our electronic device use, so that we can be sure to develop the sensory awareness we need to engage and use this technology in ways that enhance our ability to thrive?

Next week: what kind of movement matters?

Who’s In Charge of Me: You or Me?

“What does everyone want for lunch?” I turn to my kids one by one, making sure to ask Kai last. Kai is four. We all joke that his middle name is “I want what you’re having.”

If Jordan is having pasta, Jessica a grilled cheese, and Kyra oatmeal, Kai will want some of each. All together. Sometimes mixed. If there are five cereal boxes in the cabinet, he will want some of each, in the same bowl. If there are four cartons of ice cream in the freezer (our record is eight), he will want some of each. And if you refuse, you will regret it. It takes longer to quiet his response than to honor his obviously reasonable request.

Options on the table, I focus on Kai: “OK Kai, what will it be?”
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There is much discussion these days about social influences on human behavior. Spurred by the publication of the book Connected, we are being asked to consider whether happiness is contagious and whether our friends make us fat (as in this NYTimes Magazine article). Books on the food industry by David Kessler, Michael Pollan, and others are teaching us how food is manufactured (with high levels of salt, sugar, and saturated fats), marketed (as the ultimate pleasure), and sold (in packages with promises placed at eye level) in ways that cause us to buy and eat more than we should of foods we think we want that are not good for us.

The message reverberates: you are being deceived, manipulated, or otherwise adversely influenced by others.

We greet the words with a measure of relief. It is not just me. For too long we have been led to believe that whatever is wrong is our individual fault. If I am fat, I should eat less. If my relationships don’t last, I should commit more. If I am depressed, I should pull myself up and decide to be happy. Yet, as the record reveals, in all of these cases will power doesn’t seem to work.

Now, however, given the new evidence, we can blame someone else. Perhaps more to the point, we can now turn to someone else to help us achieve the results we want. So we rely on the city council to ban soda machines from schools, or a pharmaceutical company to pop us a mood-altering pill. Someone else will take care of me.

Is it true?

No, but the answer is not to swing back to blame the individual either. For these strategies for curing a problem—whether targeting will power or external influences—are flip sides of the same coin. Both perpetuate the same way of thinking about our human selves that lies at the roots of the problems themselves.

How so? Both approaches assume that our minds—our thinking, judging, executive selves—are the strongest resource we have for getting what we want. Both assume that our minds are in charge, or at least should be. Both assume that our minds work by exercising a power over our bodies, mastering or controlling our desires for food, for sex, or for happiness. If our individual mind is not up to the task, then we can rely on a collective mind to limit our choices.

Whether we place our faith in the individual mind or the collective mind, the logic is the same: mind over body. Yet this logic itself is part of the problem. We have learned to think and feel and act as if we were minds living over and against bodies. In the process, we have learned to ignore what our bodies know. We have cut ourselves off from the sources of wisdom in our desires--wisdom capable of guiding us to make decisions that will enable our health and well being.
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Kai looks at me. He pauses, feeling my question hanging in the air. He looks around at his siblings and back at me. “I want a grilled cheese with tomato.”

“Please,” I reply.

“Please,” he repeats. I smile. No one else asked for a grilled cheese with tomato. Kai is finally making his own request. He is learning to discern for himself what he wants: he remembers having it on a day when Geoff had one too. Now the desire is his.

I start making the sandwich and decide to make half. Even though he was quite clear in his request, it is likely that he will begin to eat the sandwich and then see something around him that he wants even more. I will have to remind him that this is what he wanted; and he will reply, "But Mommy, it isn’t what I want!"
*
Kai is teaching me about our desires—about how malleable, teachable, and ultimately creative they are. For the fact that we can be and are influenced by what surrounds us—however frustrating it might be for a meal maker—is precisely what enables us as individuals to discover and become our singular selves.

We are connected, and we are singular. We are singular because we are connected. For what defines our singularity is the unique mesh of bodily relationships we are and create with the people, places, and things that are supporting us in becoming who we are.

How then are we to find our way?

It is not by blaming ourselves, nor blaming the social influences upon us for our actions. It is not by revving up our mental will to master our bodies, nor seeking external solutions.

Rather, we need, as best we can, to open up the sensory awareness that the unique matrix of relationships that we are has enabled us to develop. We need to feel what we are feeling so that we can learn over time to make decisions that align with the trajectories of our health and well being.

We need options. We need information, and we need to be willing to participate consciously in the process of finding the wisdom in our desires. It is the process of doing so that yields the greatest possible pleasure.

In following posts, I will describe how.

Living It: The Palin Pick

I have to confess, I am obsessed with Sarah Palin. (Who isn’t?)

It is also time to shake up my blog. (Anyone know of a vice-blogger I could hire—maybe one from Alaska? No experience required.)

I have written to the edge of my plan—spending two months each making the case that there is wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and then spirit in turn. All along I have hinted that our desires are entwined—that we cannot address our dissatisfaction or find the wisdom in one realm without involving the others. Now it is time to investigate.

Which happily brings us back to Sarah Palin, McCain’s VP pick. Hers is a story in which human desires for sex and spirit are enchantingly entwined. We are missing the significance of it.

Palin eloped with her high school sweetheart and gave birth to her first son eight months later; she continued her pregnancy with infant son Trig, knowing he had Downs, and her 17 year old daughter Bristol is 5 months pregnant and planning to marry the father. At every turn Palin’s attitude to sex and its fruits is guided by her Christian faith: abstinence-only sex education, no abortion (except where a mother is in danger), marriage as one man-one woman, with child/ren.

Of course, her personal life is irrelevant to her ability to lead, say Republicans and Democrats alike. What counts is her executive experience, her intelligence, her charisma, her promise. Except that they don’t. For every bend in Palin’s personal story is further proof of what matters most to the social conservatives who rally around her: namely, her belief.

Representatives of the religious right are embracing her joyously with open arms as one of them—as someone who believes. To them she is someone who values life, commitment, family, love, and God. There is no one better for the White House. Period.

How can this be?
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Democrats and some republicans are dismayed, calling McCain’s move a distraction from the major issues (e.g., economy, environment, health care and the war in Iraq); a sign of weakness (caving to the religious right), cynicism (who cares whether the VP has any experience), or desperation (the Hail Mary pass of a losing team).

Yet the fact is, McCain’s breathtaking move scored every point he wanted to make. He wrested media, web, and public attention from Obama; energized his campaign, his party, and its conservative base; refreshed his image as a maverick and change agent; undercut Obama’s case against him, and made his ticket as potentially-historic a reign as Obama-Biden’s.

Even more important, however, is what is implied in the response of social conservatives and the religious right. McCain shifted the race to a terrain where Reagan and Bush won regardless of their (lack of) international experience or positions on the issues—a terrain where what counts is what you believe. McCain made the race about whether we live in a world where life is holy, good triumphs over evil, and the progress we want is assured. It is not an easy position to oppose.
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In a thoughtful essay on the Palin choice and the political mind, George Lakoff makes the distinction between “realities” (issues named above) and “symbolism.” He argues that McCain had no hope of winning based on the former given his ties to Bush and so had to rely on the latter. With the Palin pick, Lakoff argues, McCain’s ticket is now strong in symbolism. Palin not only believes what she believes, she lives it. She is thus a symbol of integrity, of the power of belief in our lives, of what is possible when you, as an individual, believe.

Lakoff praises Obama for being strong on symbolism too—with his descriptions of a democratic America as a place where people care about one another and help one another to succeed. Nevertheless, he urges Democrats not to fall into the trap of arguing over “realities” while ignoring the symbolic dimension of what they offer. Democrats must also provide frameworks and narratives—visions of who Americans are—that enable people to affirm the solutions offered as moral and right, and not just effective. Otherwise, their arguments will fall short of what motivates people. Heart. Love. Desire.
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So too, there is even more at work here than symbolism—which is where sex and spirit come in again. In choosing Palin, the network of belief that McCain is tapping is not solely conservative or Christian. It involves patterns of sensation and response common to Americans across parties: namely, the lived sense of ourselves minds dwelling in and over bodies whose best recourse in facing any problem is to use the power of those minds to exert control over our bodies and those of others.

Palin’s story authorizes the mind over body belief system that underlies McCain’s policies. She lives it in relation to our most basic human desires for sex and spirit. She confirms for us that all we need to do is to exercise the power of our minds over our desiring bodies—or over the bodies of women, terrorists, animals, earth—in order to get the physical intimacy and love, the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging, that we most want.
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Still critics howl: none of these strategies—abstinence, war, or more petroleum fuels—works! The evidence is clear.

To those who share a mind over body sense of self, however, the fact that these strategies don’t work does not necessarily invalidate the framework, for it might be that they just haven’t worked yet. For those who believe that belief is what matters, the apparent failure is a call for more—more restraint, more war, more drilling. They want that world in which life is good, pleasurable, and meaning-full.

In response, simply arguing for abortion rights, an end to the war, or energy independence does not go far enough in addressing the underlying issues. What we need in addition is a vision of life that allows us to believe in these responses as right--not just because they fix a problem, but because they create the conditions within which we, as humans, can thrive, to the extent they do. What we need is a vision of life that allows us to welcome the failures of the noted strategies as vital information about how to move differently to do what they intend: honor and protect life.
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Moving beyond this impasse requires the kind of experience shift I have been describing, where we dislodge the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies and learn to discern the wisdom in our sensations of discomfort. It involves articulating a moral universe rooted in a sensory awareness of ourselves as the movement that is making us.

Next week: What would that look like?