The Limits of Listening (to Your Body)

Leif is on the move, sideways. At three months and a day, the urge in my infant son crested and broke, releasing him to roll. Back to front, front to back, within hours he mastered the move.
He begins with a pulse, pulling in his knees, clasping his hands above them, and rounding his back into a ball. Tilting slowly to one side, he hovers just shy of the tipping point, holding, holding, until finally, the balance shifts. In one move, sturdy legs thrust out, arms jackknife up, and he unfolds from his center in a graceful, belly-landing surge.

A huge smile cracks his face. I fall in.

How did he learn to make this move? Not by watching me. Yet he knows, with precision, how to navigate the pull and push of gravity and ground. He knows the physics of levering his small self into position, and he knows the pleasure of doing so. How?
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Listen to your body. The phrase has lately acquired mantra-like status. We hear it everywhere, calling us to dial down our busy lives and tune in to what we are feeling; to relax and rejuvenate, to eat sensibly, exercise thoughtfully, and live well.

As far as it goes, the imperative offers an important corrective in a culture where we are otherwise trained to perceive our bodies as material objects which “we,” as rational minds, are responsible for making fit and fit in. Too often we are encouraged to think and feel and act as if we were minds living over and against these bodies, destined to master and control.

Even so, does the call to listen to your body go far enough?

Listening has its limits. For one, “listening” is a metaphor: it is not sound that our bodies are making but sensation. Where are our inner ears? And when we use this metaphor to describe a desirable relationship to our bodily selves, we smuggle in assumptions that limit the imperative’s radical reach.

Listening implies that there is a distance between the “I” who listens and “the body” that speaks. It implies that this “I” can choose to listen or not, and then to respond or not, given whatever criteria “I” hold dear. It implies that what “the body” or “my body” has to “say” is simply there for the hearing. All I have to do is tune in. Further, as frequently used, the metaphor implies that what “the body” has to say to “me” is simple: go or stop. All wisdom and discernment remains with my “I,” the one who knows.

The call to “listen,” in other words, reinforces the very mind over body ways of relating to ourselves that it aims to correct.

So what are we to do? Not listen?
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Leif is lying next to me. I’m on my belly. He is on his back. I’m writing. He’s wriggling. We are each, in our own way, waving our limbs—channeling energy, tracing shapes, and expressing ourselves in time and space.

I marvel at Leif. He is so present in his movement. I wish the same for my words. Every ounce of his small self is alive. Every patch of skin, inside and out, is raw radar, moving, sensing, responding. He is all ears, one great ear drum, resonating with the forces in him and around him. With fingers and toes flared, legs and arms pumping, he is collecting impressions. With every movement, he senses; to every sensation, he responds; with every response, he makes himself into the one who moved and sensed and responded. With every movement he has been making himself who he is—ready to roll.

I see now—what seemed a spontaneous move wasn’t. He has been practicing his whole life for this moment. His gyrating arms and legs pull blood and breath and nutrients into his muscles, growing tiny abs of steel. The contracting and releasing action creates a sense of center in him. As he plays with the forces working through him, on him, and around him, he discovers who he is and what he can do.

And why does he do so? Because it feels good. He is following the paths of his pleasure, the arcs of energy that open for him as he moves. Dancing, he pulls into his awareness a sensation of self, ready to roll.
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The autonomy we claim from our bodily selves in so many aspects of our lives is an illusion. It is a powerful one, and effective too, but an illusion nonetheless. For the mind that can think “I” would not exist without the beating and breathing, the firing and wiring, the sheer movement of the bodily self it claims to control.

The movement I am is making me.

We are born bodies, born to move, and because this is so, we need to do more than learn to listen to our bodies. We need to learn to be the bodily selves that we are. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of ourselves as movement—as the movement that is making us able to think and feel and act at all. And we need to practice, for if we don’t, we will unknowingly practice the mind over body ways of living that dominate our cultural moment.

As we practice, we begin to find wisdom where we have least come to expect—in the bodily sensations we are collecting and expressing, moment by moment, as we move through our lives.

We find in ourselves the sources of our creativity and our freedom, and the impulses guiding us to create the relationships that will support us in becoming who we are.
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Our culture is at a tipping point. In so many realms of life, from health and fitness to agriculture and architecture, we are poised to shift the balance towards earth-friendly values, practices, and ideals. We are on the verge, leaning towards a new way of being. We’ve been exercising the patterns of awareness that we need to make it happen. What we need now to help us along is a shift in how we think about, feel through, and experience our bodily selves.

I’m ready to roll! Are you?

What do you think—is there wisdom we have learned to ignore that is unique to our bodily selves?

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For a related article, see Gina Kolata in the New York Times, "That Little Voice Inside Your Twinge."

The Meaning of Weaning

To wean: to withhold mother’s milk from; to detach from that to which one is accustomed or devoted

From Old English & Germanic roots (wen-): to desire, to strive for; to hope, expect, imagine; to win; a pleasure

From the Latin (ven-): love, as in Venus, the Goddess of Love; or in Old Norse, Venr, a god of fertility
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We have weaned the bull calves. Now nearing three months, they are old enough and able enough to chew, swallow, rechew, and swallow again the grains and grasses that will support their next increments of growth.

The weaning went smoothly. The calves didn’t seem to mind. Every feeding for several days in a row, Jordan and Jessica would give each calf his same half gallon of liquid, warm and white, while slowly lowering the milk to water ratio until no milk remained. Meanwhile, the calves were tempted round the clock with sweet molasses covered baby grain and plenty of tasty hay.

One good weaning enables another. With the calves weaned, we are once again in the milk, and nearly weaned ourselves from the dairy aisle at the grocery store. We no longer need to purchase milk, cream, ice cream, yogurt, butter, or ricotta cheese. We have our own—or at least, the raw materials with which to make what we need.

Weaning is good for us, no question.

But what about for the calves? Is weaning good for them too? Are we depriving them of what they most desire—the glorious elixir of a mother’s milk?

I am not into deprivation. I nursed three of my children to age three. Then there was a time when it was time, for both of us. I know too that mother cow when the time is ripe will turn her tail on a growing calf and nudge its nose away. But still, would it be better to delay the (pain of the) inevitable?

Researching the roots of the word “to wean” pushed my thinking along. It is easy to think of weaning as “withholding,” or as “detaching from something desired.” Whole fields of psychology have been built on the task of curing our primordial wounds, often rendered as a loss of the mother.

Yet the nub of the word itself comes from Old English, Germanic, and Latin words meaning “desire,” “hope,” “strive for,” and even “love.” Is this a contradiction?

I think again. Perhaps weaning is not about denying our desire as much as it is about enabling our desire to evolve in line with our growing selves.

There is wisdom in desire. I have been writing about it for months, OK years. Part of that wisdom, as I suggest, lies in the fluidity of desire. Desire moves—it moves us, it is itself a movement towards what we believe will grant us the pleasure we seek. At the same time, this movement is not arbitrary. There is a rhythm to it. As we move towards what we desire, we learn whether or not we were right. We create patterns of sensation and response to guide us in the future.

In other words, as we get the nourishment we need to grow, what we need to grow changes in line with the growth our nourishment has enabled.

So what does that have to do with weaning? As desire evolves, what we want changes. Desires we have had in the past fall away. No deprivation about it. No forced detachment. We simply don’t want what we once did. We wean.

Take the bulls. They don’t seem to miss the milk at all. They just started eating more grain, with its belly-filling bounty, and chewing more crunchy hay, with its long-lasting, teeth-resisting flavor. Weaning means having the opportunity to enjoy the qualities of these foods—foods that the calves need to stimulate their own capacity to transform food to energy to muscle and bone.

Here on the farm we have weaned ourselves from aspects of contemporary culture that once seemed indispensable—and not only Ben & Jerry’s. We don’t play video games or eat fast foods. We rarely visit a restaurant or a movie theater. We don’t have a television. It is not that we are trying to deprive ourselves of things to which we were attached. Rather, the desire for these things has fallen away as other activities have emerged for us as more desirable, more enabling, and simply put, possible here in a way they never were when we lived in the suburbs.

Like raising a pair of bulls as oxen! Only here has it become possible, desirable, and even easy. The kids are finding in themselves a conviction they never had to wean themselves of technologies that harm the earth, so as to make more of what they love about this place for everyone.

To wean: to find our freedom and align ourselves with the ever-evolving wisdom in our desires.

Wanting More

The day after I posted my blog last week, I went to the mailbox and found two editions of the same weekly magazine—one a week late. Why now? The late one was graced with a photo featuring “Happily Married Man” and “Not His Wife” together in bed—top billing for the article entitled: “The Affairs of Men.” The on-time magazine chronicled a firestorm of letters in response. Here it was on the page: desire bashing 101.

At first the opposite seems to be true. In the article, the happily married male author shares his yuck feelings (May 28). He wants more sex. His wife doesn’t. He is frustrated.

In response, he takes the first sidetrack I described last week: he roams the landscape of evolutionary theory, hunting for reasons why he should get what he wants. Perhaps we are not wired for monogamy—women or men. Perhaps our ideal of life long passionate love is an historical anomaly, a physiological improbability, or a psychological impossibility. If so, he argues, then why couldn’t it be OK for him to have some extra-marital sex, release the tension, dump his surplus desire, and still preserve his happy marriage?

Readers responded from the other sidetrack: making pronouncements about what we, humans, should do. Readers scolded, calling him irresponsible, childish, and worthy of divorce. The overriding messages were those well-worn in our mind-over-body culture: sex and love are at odds. In marriage, sacrifice, compromise, and competition are inevitable. Self-control is the way to maximum pleasure.

Author and his readers: The two positions, seemingly so opposed, are not. They share the same attitude towards desire we have been unraveling: “it” is a physical urge that “we” must manage through some cocktail of indulgence and repression. There is no wisdom in desire.
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Shift to the perspective of bodily becoming—I am the movement that is making me. What if our desire for sex is a desire to giving and receiving a life enabling touch? What more is there to say? What kind of wisdom could the author’s yuck feelings possible contain?

To begin, he wants more. And what is that more?
He wants her. But not as object. He respects her. He loves her.
What he wants is for her to want him.
Or rather, he wants to be the person whom she wants.
Meaning: he wants to be the person who can touch her in a way that releases her into the present, into the fullness of her own desire for him, so that she can touch him as he wants and needs to be touched.
But he can’t and he isn’t. Hence his frustration.

It is this dissatisfaction that prompts him to consider outlets outside of the relationship. Yet even then, the outlier alternative he proposes is less than palatable to him. When his wife responds: “Sure, and I’ll be out Wednesday night,” suddenly the idea is not so compelling. It is obvious that the problem is not her lack of desire.

What turns him from her, then, is not his respect for her. What turns him away is fear. His fear of not being enough—not desirable enough, not good enough--his fear of not having enough.

When it gets right down to it, no amount of extramarital flinging is going to help, even though he imagines it might. For he is, in that moment, choosing to live in fear, not love. Opting out of relationship while pretending to stay in. Pitting himself against himself. Satisfaction will elude.

But is the only alternative to grin and bear it? No. It is possible to trust the wisdom in desire—the wisdom that wants more.

How? (Breathe to move, move to breathe.)

For one, it involves realizing that desire is not the problem—not his surplus, not her lack. The shapes of dissatisfaction and resistance are what the two partners are creating. The partners in this case, and most cases, are perfect mirrors of one another. Neither is content; both want more. And they both want more of the same thing—more of the touch that will enable them to release into the fullness of themselves. The fullness of their love for one another.

It is not about sex. It is about learning to give and receive a life enabling touch.

Second, it is realizing that this touch can occur on any register, within any span or our sensory potential—emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual. The touch we need in any given moment has no set source or destination. No given point of contact. Its coordinates will change from moment to moment, day to day. In one moment it could mean sharing a concern; in another, taking a walk, working together on a project of mutual interest, or helping out with the housework. It involves seeing and being seen by another human as a whole human.

This is the challenge, the adventure, the exquisite, transformational, liberating work of being in a relationship. It is not about finding the fail-safe technique to pacify, but about getting to know another human. It is not about figuring out a list of likes and dislikes, but being a part of another person’s becoming. It is not about “talking” versus “doing it,” but about realizing the potential for pleasure in every moment of our living that desire senses is possible.

The challenge, then, is to be vulnerable. It is to be honest about what we are feeling. It is to ask for what we want in the faith that the other can give. It is to hear what our partners ask of us as the information we need to succeed in learning to give to them.

I have to say it again. That we do or don’t feel like having sex is not a problem. It’s not the issue. The issue is how do two people develop the ability to connect with one another in the moment wherever they are, however they are feeling, greeting our patterns of resistance and yearning as opportunities to go deeper in knowing each other.

Desire guides us to do the work of opening to one another that pleasure in relationship demands.
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I’ve been searching for metaphors to try to animate the various view of desire.

One thought for the mind over body perception is this: desire is something like a butterfly, a flirting fluttering perpetual quest for the ultimate nectar. Lifting its wings from flower to flower, the butterfly hovers in the light, skipping over obstacles, never if ever touching the ground. It is all about its own pleasure, never satisfied, always on the move.

But when I try to come up with an image that honors the wisdom in desire, all I can think of is a bulldozer (with apologies to my two year old). Or rather, two bulldozers, facing each other. As a mutual desire draws partners close, each pushes a larger and larger pile of dirt. When they get close enough, the dirt forms a wall between them. This wall, created by desire itself, is made up of all of the possible feelings and hurts, angers and resentments, the misreadings and misconceptions of our own desiring, that hinder us from opening to one another. It is the more we want, the more we believe the relationship has to offer, the more we have to give, the more we want to heal.

However, if we rev our engines long enough, unable to fly over, around, or through the wall, we run out of gas. One or the other or both turns the motor off. Partners agree to settle into the current proximity, with whatever arm’s length connection is possible.

However, the pressure of desire can also transform that dirt into a bridge—an opportunity to cross over to one another, and allow the love we share to grow stronger than the pain and fear that separates us. In this case, desire, in its frustration, is what motivates us to deal with the dirt—to free ourselves from what holds us back in all areas of our lives. Here, the metaphor surely breaks down.

Do you have a better one?

Next week: More (and the) Cycle of Breaths