Friends, the last time we spoke, I gave you a heaping helping of my thoughts about thoughts. As I recall, I did a bit of enthusing about catching hold of our thoughts and reframing them so as to steer clear of swan-diving into the cesspool of stinking thinking. Well, I stand by that. And/but that was then, and this is now. Today is a new day. The day of the body.
Now, like me, you may have spent a significant portion of your life and no small effort ignoring, neglecting, or even abusing your body. To be fair to myself and those of you nodding along, a human body can be a real inconvenience, with all its incessant needs. Not to mention its unsavory, unsightly, and generally unseemly excretions, odors, and accoutrements.
And perhaps you too feel you have been blasted by the cultural firehose with images of what adult bodies should look like. For most of my so-far life, those bodies have been depicted as youthful, trim, able, binaried, and white. This strikes me as problematic for approximately 8 zillion reasons. Not least of which because it suggests the vast majority of people’s bodies to be…uh…wrong. Thank [insert deity or non-deity of choice] this ship seems to be slowly turning, and we now see other kinds of bodies on display.
But let us suspend our conditioned body shame for a moment. And, while we’re at it, empty our mental carry-ons of any limiting ideas stowed therein. Perhaps some ideas obtained from venerated historical figures. Ideas like, “the chief function of the body is to carry the brain around” (so quoth Thomas Edison). Beware also questionable logic proffered by less venerated, yet iconic figures. I found this little rascal skulking around in my carry-on, straight from the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger: “My body is like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t think about it, I just have it.” Found some of your own? Good. Set those aside so we can get down to it.
Now, let us consider the redeeming qualities of these bodies of ours. And by body, I mean primarily the nervous system, which I shall, without shame, forgo attempting to explain to you because a neuroanatomist, I am not. And because you are capable of reading about it all on your own. Oh, alright. Here’s a fun, interactive place to start. But for simplicity’s sake, and because it is spread all throughout the body, I’ll continue to talk about the nervous system as the body here.
One thing I’ve come to appreciate about the body is its remarkable reliability as a source of guidance. Unlike the thinking mind, it has a squeaky clean attendance record. It never fails to show up for any occasion, even those it would no doubt rather skip, like waiting in line at the registry of motor vehicles. Oh no, it does not. Bodies are simply incapable of abandoning us, try as we might to abandon them.
Then, there’s the fact that the body totally smokes the brain in terms of processing speed. According to Pragya Agarwal, a data and behavioral scientist who wrote Sway: Unraveling Unconscious Bias, the conscious mind processes about 40 bits of information per second, whereas the entire body processes about 11 million bits of information per second. I know who I’m putting my money on to win that race.
Perhaps most importantly though, bodies are consummate truth tellers; they seem constitutionally incapable of lying to us about our experiences and preferences. You absolutely should not put your body in charge at the poker table for this very reason.
Despite the compelling evidence in support of nominating the body as chief counsel for our decision making, most folks blatantly disregard the sagacity of their soma. The signs of this disregard abound. For instance, stroll into your neighborhood pharmacy. See the rows and rows of over-the counter medicines designed to help you disregard your body’s messages?
[Since that just squeaked out sideways, I have to say it. Listening to our bodies’ wisdom is bad for biz. All kinds of biz, not just the OTC product market. The economy, which is to say, corporations, wouldn’t like it if we were embodied, because we might notice that playing by the rules of late-stage capitalism makes us feel pretty crummy. We might even stop playing.]
Whew. back to inching along towards my point. This learned disconnection from our bodies seems to happen quite early on, or at least it did in my case. One of the constant refrains I heard in childhood (and played in my own mind well into adulthood) was “mind over matter,” which I translated roughly as “pay no attention to your body, except to bend it to your iron will.”
Armed with this and a slew of similar mantras, I became a rather apt pupil of disconnecting mind from body (some may suspect I mean dissociation, and they would be right). And clever chap that I am, I learned to scramble my body’s signals using my body to do this, all the while thinking that, as an athlete, I was in real lockstep with my body (huh???).
For quite a long time, my answer to most every message the body tried to offer, even the most basic ones, was simple: run! And by run, I mean run. Literally and figuratively. Hungry? Run. Tired? Go for a run, or at the very least, walk briskly to the kitchen and make a cup of coffee, perhaps running in place while it brews. And it worked for more nuanced messages, too. Like for getting past the queasy protestations of my gut when I was trying to make myself do things that weren’t aligned with what I wanted for myself. Big things. Things like career path choices, and marriage, and gender identity. Run, run, run. And when I couldn’t run, I slept. There is always a way for the mind to use the body against itself. Always.
[Incidentally, being able to dissociate about my experience of running while running made me a pretty decent runner (no lie, it’s a thing that runners actually try to do to get their bodies to push past limits).]
Let’s go back to what I said a moment ago about how the body is a most tenacious truth teller. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote what has become probably the best-known book for lay people about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, explains it like this: “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”
In other words, the mind can gaslight the body for a while, but not forever.
This has certainly proven to be my experience. Every time I’ve said yes to something over the protestations of my gut (for me, this feels like the bottom falling out of my gut because there is something heavy, like an anvil, being dropped from my heart), things have ended badly. Sometimes it has resulted in something relatively small, like winding up feeling like a Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade balloon after agreeing to eat something I know doesn’t agree with me. But there have been far greater acts of self-abandonment, like forcing myself to live for years as a cisgender woman when I’m actually a transgender man. A sticky web to untangle, friends. A most sticky web.
Conversely, when I’ve listened to the sensations of warmth and excitement that start in my gut and spread upward into my heart, things have gone well, even when the choice seems counter-intuitive. Again, these can be small things, like raising my introverted hand to volunteer to demo something in qi gong class, or big, leap-of-faith kinds of things, like quitting a soul-sucking job without having another source of income lined up.
Do you know where you feel your “yes” or your “no” in your body? For me, like most people, it’s a gut thing. This is likely because the gut has its own nervous system (the enteric nervous system), with over 100 million nerve endings and over 95% of the body’s serotonin, which is why it’s often called the “gut-brain” or the “2nd brain.” In fact, the gut and the brain have a direct line with each other, a bi-directional information highway that traverses the vagus nerve.
The heart is a station along that line, and it’s known to send more information to the brain than the brain sends to it. So, the heart space may be another area where many folks sense an intuitive yes/no.
There is no right or wrong place to listen in one’s body for the voice of their authentic self. Sometimes it’s whispering to you about what it’s longing to do, and sometimes it’s bellowing in desperation. But the body is the place to listen. Not the slippery and sludgy confines of the mind.
Friends, If you’re feeling woefully out of touch with your body, afraid that the lines have gone dead from lack of use, fear not. Remember, your body hasn’t gone away. It’s right where you left it, talking away to you right this very moment, waiting for you to tune in. And if you’re needing an assist, click on the button below.
Thank you for this lovely (and very needed today) invitation to take a step back from my chattering brain and down into my own body!
This made me so happy: “demo something in qi gong class…” just every bit. So embodied 💞💞 I want you to demo qi gong class for me! (lol) loved all of this so much. Also had much fun diving into your links.