Embodiment

I sometimes imagine my body speaks a different language to my mind. They aren’t at odds exactly, but communication between them doesn’t come easily. Bodies can hold onto feelings and bury them deep inside, stifling them into nothingness until the pressure becomes too strong to hide from anymore. I don’t feel tired until I’m dead on my feet. I don’t feel hungry until my stomach growls venomously. I don’t feel angry until my pulse is thrumming beneath my skin and I clench my fists tightly days after an incident.

My mind is not like this. My mind is curious and inquisitive on its best days and prone to spiralling on its worst. When something happens, it decodes it, breaking every incident and interaction down to its most fundamental blocks and rebuilding them back up. It is always in motion, it is frantic.

The mind and body are in dialogue but not directly. They seem to live, experience, and express independently, and the interactions between these effects reveal meaning. They carry different aspects of my life and my personality.

There’s a branch of philosophy that considers this phenomenon. When we discuss the self, what is it we are talking about? The mind? The body? Both?

Say you were sick, and your body was shutting down. If you were offered hypothetical advanced surgery that would transport your mind, your consciousness, into another body, would you say yes? Would you consider this body ‘still you’? In my experience, most people are happy to believe the old mind in the new body remains ‘you’ unchanged. I doubt this idea. I notice the ways my personality and experience is shaped as much by my body as my mind.

When I think about the self, I first think of my personality, my traits and characteristics, my thoughts and feelings. And then I consider circumstances, broader context, life experiences, before then alighting on the physical characteristics or the body. But this feels off; the physical and tactile are the primary ways in which we interact with and navigate the spatial world, including in our tastes, personalities, and traits. More explicit examples include getting headaches easily in brightly-lit rooms, a trait which shapes and impacts my daily lifestyle, routine, mood, and preferred places and activities. The same is true of the people in my life who need ear plugs to soften the noise at concerts. These physical traits contribute to the mental and personal ones; they dictate where we may go, what we might enjoy, how we might feel.

These physical aspects of self may not immediately come to mind in an intellectual culture where mind is privileged, but these physical characteristics shape me as much as mental ones. Something is lost when we remove this from our consideration of the self, and it is worth examining the importance of the physical. For one, our sensory and tactile pleasures are key to staying well-rounded and fulfilled. When we ignore the importance of these feelings, we lose touch with the complete idea of the self. I would argue that the tendency to dismiss the body emerges from hyperproductivity culture and constant motion, where overthinking is normalised but sitting with your body and consciously registering sensation is considered somewhat superfluous. It is a practice that requires full attention and significant work; body scan meditations can easily last for an hour, requiring deep and unwavering focus. When we place so much emphasis on constant, quantifiable ascension and achievement, letting ourselves simply exist and allowing our bodies to catch up on rest is viewed as laziness rather than necessity. As a result, this disconnect between our minds and our bodies is exacerbated, and the need to bridge them falls out of public priority.

While I struggle to know what my body needs sometimes, the process of untangling the feelings has become therapeutic. Forcing myself to actively listen to my body, to feel out and identify these sensations, is a means to healthily, direct, inward focus, and can be a powerful instance of self-care. Whilst understanding my physical needs may never come as easily as understanding my mental ones, the focus inwards has allowed me to develop a better understanding of self. In challenging the pervasive cultural ideas that undermine the importance of our bodies, I have noticed my mind begin to ease.

Author: Rosa Prior